In dealing with war finances, the Republicans attacked this ancient evil.  By act of Congress in 1864, they authorized a series of national banks founded on the credit of government bonds and empowered to issue notes.  The next year they stopped all bank paper sent forth under the authority of the states by means of a prohibitive tax.  In this way, by two measures Congress restored federal control over the monetary system although it did not reestablish the United States Bank so hated by Jacksonian Democracy.

=Destruction of States’ Rights by Fourteenth Amendment.=—­These acts and others not cited here were measures of centralization and consolidation at the expense of the powers and dignity of the states.  They were all of high import, but the crowning act of nationalism was the fourteenth amendment which, among other things, forbade states to “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”  The immediate occasion, though not the actual cause of this provision, was the need for protecting the rights of freedmen against hostile legislatures in the South.  The result of the amendment, as was prophesied in protests loud and long from every quarter of the Democratic party, was the subjection of every act of state, municipal, and county authorities to possible annulment by the Supreme Court at Washington.  The expected happened.

Few negroes ever brought cases under the fourteenth amendment to the attention of the courts; but thousands of state laws, municipal ordinances, and acts of local authorities were set aside as null and void under it.  Laws of states regulating railway rates, fixing hours of labor in bakeshops, and taxing corporations were in due time to be annulled as conflicting with an amendment erroneously supposed to be designed solely for the protection of negroes.  As centralized power over tariffs, railways, public lands, and other national concerns went to Congress, so centralized power over the acts of state and local authorities involving an infringement of personal and property rights was conferred on the federal judiciary, the apex of which was the Supreme Court at Washington.  Thus the old federation of “independent states,” all equal in rights and dignity, each wearing the “jewel of sovereignty” so celebrated in Southern oratory, had gone the way of all flesh under the withering blasts of Civil War.

RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH

=Theories about the Position of the Seceded States.=—­On the morning of April 9, 1865, when General Lee surrendered his army to General Grant, eleven states stood in a peculiar relation to the union now declared perpetual.  Lawyers and political philosophers were much perturbed and had been for some time as to what should be done with the members of the former Confederacy.  Radical Republicans held that they were “conquered provinces” at the mercy of Congress, to be governed under such