June 10, 1865---"A very ill-disguised sympathy with the insurrection."

JUNE 10, 1865:         

Harper’s Weekly editorializes about President Johnson’s plans for Reconstruction. The Editors are clearly unhappy with the carte blanche being extended to former Confederates, particularly at the expense of the Freedmen: 

President Johnson has issued his proclamation defining the terms upon which the Government of the State of North Carolina is to be reorganized. He has appointed M. W. W. Holden Provisional Governor, and he has prescribed the qualifications of electors to the reorganizing convention. Those qualifications are loyalty and complexion. The voters under the old State Constitution who take the oath provided are, politically speaking, to be considered the people of the State.   

                   

This act of the National Government very properly and completely recognizes the fact that there is at present no political authority in the State of North Carolina but that which the Government by prescribing qualifications chooses to acknowledge. The loyal white citizens of the State are admitted to vote not because the State authorizes them, but because the United States permits them. The United States intervenes and requires a condition unknown to the State. And the same power had the same right to require any other condition. The question was how far the Government should intervene, what conditions it should demand.        

The President evidently wishes to act in the spirit of our system, which has allowed States to settle the questions of suffrage. It is perfectly true that the Constitution of the United States suffers the people of the various States to determine who shall be voters? But it seems to us that the President hardly remembers that he is now deciding the vital point, namely, who are to be considered the people of the State? He expressly excepts some who are so considered by the late State Constitution. He has the same right to include others. And he would certainly not have violated the spirit of the National or the late State Constitution, if he had remembered that the whole number of freemen was the true basis of representation, and had therefore ordered an enrollment of all the adult male population as the constitutional "people" of the State.          

        

The precedent of the proclamation will doubtless be followed in Georgia and other States. The question will then reappear in Congress when the representatives and senators elected by a State so reorganized shall claim their seats. Whether Congress will recognize as republican in the sense of the Constitution a government founded upon a small minority of the adult male population, we may be permitted to doubt. We confess that we should be better pleased with the plan by which North Carolina is to be reorganized, if it did not receive such unqualified commendation from those who have most savagely denounced President Johnson, and who have had a very ill-disguised sympathy with the insurrection of State Sovereignty against the Union.