Strip a proud nobility of their bloated estates; reduce them to a level with plain republicans; send them forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the workshops or handle a plow, and you will thus humble the proud traitors." Stevens and Sumner agreed in reducing the Southern States to a territorial status.

Sumner would then take the principles of the Declaration of Independence as a guide for Congress, while Stevens would leave Congress absolute.

Neither considered the Constitution as of any validity in this crisis.
As a rule the former abolitionists were in 1865 advocates of votes and lands for the Negro, in whose capacity for self-rule they had complete confidence.

The view of Gerrit Smith may be regarded as typical of the abolitionist position: "Let the first condition of peace with them be that no people in the rebel States shall ever lose or gain civil or political rights by reason of their race or origin.

The next condition of peace be that our black allies in the South--those saviours of our nation--shall share with their poor white neighbors in the subdivisions of the large landed estates of the South.