When at last through sheer exhaustion the Confederate Armies ceased resistance and surrendered, they did so on precisely the same terms that had been offered by the Government of the Union three months before.

The Confederates had failed in war, but their leaders had not the moral courage to accept the only practicable peace.

Their subsequent course in Congress, in the Cabinet, and in the field, exposed in very striking outline the strong points and the weak points of Southern character.

It exhibited Southern men as possessed of the utmost physical courage--often carried indeed to foolish audacity.

When the Southern leaders knew the Confederate cause to be hopeless not a single man among them displayed sufficient heroism to brave public opinion with the declaration of his honest belief.

Having taken the responsibility of freeing them, first by Proclamation of the President and then by Amendment of the Constitution, it would have been a lasting reproach to the Government not to extend protection and assistance to such of…

The white population of the South were themselves reduced almost to poverty by the long struggle; and even if they had been able they were in no mood to extend relief to negroes who, as they believed, had been wrongfully released from…

Temporary relief however was afforded; but much harm was done by creating in the minds of ignorant freedmen, just redeemed from slavery, the belief that the Government would give to each of them "forty acres of land and a mule.

The Thirteenth Amendment, about to be formally promulgated by the Executive Department of the Government, as incorporated in the Constitution, had made every negro a free man.

The Southern States had responded to this Act of National authority by enacting a series of laws which really introduced, as has already been shown, a new, offensive and most oppressive form of servitude.

Thus not only was rank injustice contemplated by the States lately in rebellion, but they conveyed also an insulting challenge to the authority of the Nation.

Trumbull's bill conferring upon the Freedmen's Bureau a degree of power which combated and restrained the Southern authorities at every point where wrong was committed or menaced.

It was designed for the purpose of extending to the freeman protection against all the wrongs of local legislation, and to make him feel that the Government which had freed him would not desert him and allow his release from slavery to be…

The war would thus have practically injured the negro, for after taking from him that form of protection which slavery afforded, it would have left him an object of still harsher oppression than slavery itself--an oppression that would be…

The public opinion of the country unmistakably sustained this legislation--the purpose to extend protection to the freedmen being deep-set and all-pervading among the men of the North who had triumphed in the war.

Who can doubt that if a man is to govern himself he should have the means to know what is best for himself, and what is injurious to himself, what agencies work against him and what for him?

Suffrage without education is an edged tool in the hands of a child,--dangerous to others and destructive to himself.

I assert that it is such as would bring disgrace upon any despotism in Christendom.

The State of Tennessee, for instance, whose authorities were engaged in rebellion, was restored to all her Constitutional relations to the Union by the patriotism and energy of her patriot people.

In my judgment most of these States, so far at least as depends upon their own acts, have already been fully restored and should be deemed as entitled to enjoy their Constitutional rights as members of the Union.

The philanthropists did not deem the question at issue to be one of dollars and cents; and those less disposed to sympathize with the humanitarian aspects of the subject had not yet learned the lesson of economy which the adversity of…

The great expansion of our currency, the ease with which money had been obtained, and the extravagance with which it had been expended in all the walks of life, produced in the minds of the people an indifference to the question of economy.

It is a condition not implying dishonesty or even recklessness, but one which follows from a positive inability in the public mind to estimate the expenditure of money by the standards which are applied in the era of peaceful industry…

It was undoubtedly a very sweeping enactment, the operation of which was not confined to the States which had been slave-holding, but bore directly upon some of the free States where the negro had always been deprived of certain rights…

The wonder excited by the raising of the vast army which saved the Union from destruction was even surpassed by the wonder excited by its prompt and peaceful dissolution.