href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@35559@[email protected]#f60_60" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[60] and applied to all states alike, it committed Congress to no declaration regarding the status of the southern states.

The joint committee made its long-expected report on April 30, 1866.[61] A great number of witnesses had been examined regarding conditions in the South, whose testimony fills a large volume and purports to be the basis of the committee’s report. The committee thought that since the Johnson governments had been set up under the military authority of the President and were merely instruments through which he had exercised that power in governing conquered territory, they were not regular state governments. This belief was confirmed by the fact that the existing state constitutions had been framed by conventions acting under the constant direction of the President, and also by the fact that they had not been submitted to the people for adoption. The Johnson governments then were not state governments at all, and so could not send representatives to Congress.

The committee appealed less to this constitutional argument than to arguments of policy. It was willing to grant the “profitless abstraction” that the southern states still remained states. The people of those states had waged war on the United States. Though subdued, they were defiant, disloyal, and abusive. They showed no disposition to abate their hatred for the Union or their affection for the Confederacy. To accord to such a people entire independence, taking no measures for security from future danger; to admit their representatives to Congress; to allow conquered enemies “to participate in making laws for their conquerors;” to turn over to the custody of recent enemies the treasury, the army, the whole administration—this would be madness unexampled.

For these reasons the committee recommended a joint resolution and two bills. The resolution proposed an amendment to the Constitution forbidding any state to abridge the civil rights of citizens of the United States, or to deny to any person the equal protection of the laws, providing that a state which withheld the electoral franchise from negroes should suffer a deduction from its Congressional representation, and providing that until 1870 all adherents to the Confederacy should be excluded from voting for members of Congress and for Presidential electors. The first of the two bills was to enact “that whenever the above recited amendment [should] have become a part of the Constitution of the United States, and any state lately in insurrection [should] have ratified the same, and [should] have modified its constitution and laws in accordance therewith,” then its representatives might be admitted to Congress. The second bill was to make ineligible to office under the United States men who had been prominent in the service of the Confederacy.

A minority of the committee took issue with the majority on both its legal and its political views. The states under consideration, said the minority, had never gone out of the Union; therefore, being states of the Union, Congress could not lawfully deprive them of their rights as states. That the Johnson governments were only the machinery of military occupation, set up by the conquering general, was denied.