In all these States there are existing constitutions, framed in the accustomed way by the people.  Congress, however, declares that these constitutions are not “loyal and republican,” and requires the people to form them anew.  What, then, in the opinion of Congress, is necessary to make the constitution of a State “loyal and republican”?  The original act answers the question:  It is universal negro suffrage—­a question which the Federal Constitution leaves exclusively to the States themselves.  All this legislative machinery of martial law, military coercion, and political disfranchisement is avowedly for that purpose and none other.  The existing constitutions of the ten States conform to the acknowledged standards of loyalty and republicanism.  Indeed, if there are degrees in republican forms of government, their constitutions are more republican now than when these States, four of which were members of the original thirteen, first became members of the Union.

Congress does not now demand that a single provision of their constitutions be changed except such as confine suffrage to the white population.  It is apparent, therefore, that these provisions do not conform to the standard of republicanism which Congress seeks to establish.  That there may be no mistake, it is only necessary that reference should be made to the original act, which declares “such constitution shall provide that the elective franchise shall be enjoyed by all such persons as have the qualifications herein stated for electors of delegates.”  What class of persons is here meant clearly appears in the same section; that is to say, “the male citizens of said State 21 years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition, who have been resident in said State for one year previous to the day of such election.”

Without these provisions no constitution which can be framed in any one of the ten States will be of any avail with Congress.  This, then, is the test of what the constitution of a State of this Union must contain to make it republican.  Measured by such a standard, how few of the States now composing the Union have republican constitutions!  If in the exercise of the constitutional guaranty that Congress shall secure to every State a republican form of government universal suffrage for blacks as well as whites is a sine qua non, the work of reconstruction may as well begin in Ohio as in Virginia, in Pennsylvania as in North Carolina.

When I contemplate the millions of our fellow-citizens of the South with no alternative left but to impose upon themselves this fearful and untried experiment of complete negro enfranchisement—­and white disfranchisement, it may be, almost as complete—­or submit indefinitely to the rigor of martial law, without a single attribute of freemen, deprived of all the sacred guaranties of our Federal Constitution, and threatened with even worse wrongs, if any worse are possible, it seems to me their condition is the most deplorable to which any people can be reduced.  It is true that they have been engaged in rebellion and that their object being a separation of the States and a dissolution of the Union there was an obligation resting upon every loyal citizen to treat them as enemies and to wage war against their cause.