The great mass of those who had resisted the National authority were restored to all their rights of citizenship by the simple taking of an oath of future loyalty, and those excepted from immediate re-instatement were promised full forgiveness on the slightest exhibition of repentance and good works.
Blaine discusses the process of restoring citizenship to those who had rebelled.
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In turn, the course of the National Administration would certainly be influenced, and its fate in large degree determined, by the conduct of the Southern men, in whom the President was placing unbounded trust.
Their convention did more to popularize the Fourteenth Amendment as a political issue than any other instrumentality of the year.
Such an opportunity would have been a menace to the public credit, and would have proved a constant source of corruption.
I believe that if it should pass it will receive the sanction of nineteen-twentieths of the loyal people of the country.
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