abandonment was made not in penitence but merely in despair of success.  It was open to extremists to argue that the whole seceded area might logically, as conquered lands, be reduced to a territorial condition, to be recarved into States at such times and upon such conditions as should seem proper.  But others, in agreement with the President, insisted that if no State could lawfully secede, it followed that no State could lawfully be deprived of statehood.  These persons reinforced their legal argument with the sentimental one that lenity was the best policy.  As General Grant afterward put it:  “The people who had been in rebellion must necessarily come back into the Union, and be incorporated as an integral part of the nation.  Naturally the nearer they were placed to an equality with the people who had not rebelled, the more reconciled they would feel with their old antagonists, and the better citizens they would be from the beginning.  They surely would not make good citizens if they felt that they had a yoke around their necks.”  The question, in what proportions mercy and justice should be, or safely could be, mingled, was clearly one of discretion.  In the wide distance betwixt the holders of extreme opinions an infinite variety of schemes and theories was in time broached and held.  Very soon the gravity of the problem was greatly enhanced by its becoming complicated with proposals for giving the suffrage to negroes.  Upon this Mr. Lincoln expressed his opinion that the privilege might be wisely conferred upon “the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks,” though apparently he intended thus to describe no very large percentage.  Apparently his confidence in the civic capacity of the negro never became very much greater than it had been in the days of the joint debates with Douglas.

Congress took up the matter very promptly, and with much display of feeling.  Early in May, 1864, Henry Winter Davis, a vehement opponent of the President, introduced a bill, of which the anti-rebel preamble was truculent to the point of being amusing.  His first fierce Whereas declared that the Confederate States were waging a war so glaringly unjust “that they have no right to claim the mitigation of the extreme rights of war, which are accorded by modern usage to an enemy who has a right to consider the war a just one.”  But Congress, though hotly irritated, was not quite willing to say, in terms, that it would eschew civilization and adopt barbarism, as its system for the conduct of the war; and accordingly it rejected Mr. Davis’s fierce exordium.  The words had very probably only been used by him as a sort of safety valve to give vent to the fury of his wrath, so that he could afterward approach the serious work of the bill in a milder spirit; for in fact the actual effective legislation which he proposed was by no means unreasonable.  After military resistance should be suppressed in any rebellious State, the white male citizens were to