I would not put considerations of money in competition with justice and right; but the expenses incident to “reconstruction” under the system adopted by Congress aggravate what I regard as the intrinsic wrong of the measure itself.  It has cost uncounted millions already, and if persisted in will add largely to the weight of taxation, already too oppressive to be borne without just complaint, and may finally reduce the Treasury of the nation to a condition of bankruptcy.  We must not delude ourselves.  It will require a strong standing army and probably more than $200,000,000 per annum to maintain the supremacy of Negro governments after they are established.  The sum thus thrown away would, if properly used, form a sinking fund large enough to pay the whole national debt in less than fifteen years.  It is vain to hope that Negroes will maintain their ascendency themselves.  Without military power they are wholly incapable of holding in subjection the white people of the South.

I submit to the judgment of Congress whether the public credit may not be injuriously affected by a system of measures like this.  With our debt and the vast private interests which are complicated with it, we can not be too cautious of a policy which might by possibility impair the confidence of the world in our Government.  That confidence can only be retained by carefully inculcating the principles of justice and honor on the popular mind and by the most scrupulous fidelity to all our engagements of every sort.  Any serious breach of the organic law, persisted in for a considerable time, can not but create fears for the stability of our institutions.  Habitual violation of prescribed rules, which we bind ourselves to observe, must demoralize the people.  Our only standard of civil duty being set at naught, the sheet anchor of our political morality is lost, the public conscience swings from its moorings and yields to every impulse of passion and interest.  If we repudiate the Constitution, we will not be expected to care much for mere pecuniary obligations.  The violation of such a pledge as we made on the 22d day of July, 1861, will assuredly diminish the market value of our other promises.  Besides, if we acknowledge that the national debt was created, not to hold the States in the Union, as the taxpayers were led to suppose, but to expel them from it and hand them over to be governed by Negroes, the moral duty to pay it may seem much less clear.  I say it may seem so, for I do not admit that this or any other argument in favor of repudiation can be entertained as sound; but its influence on some classes of minds may well be apprehended.  The financial honor of a great commercial nation, largely indebted and with a republican form of government administered by agents of the popular choice, is a thing of such delicate texture and the destruction of it would be followed by such unspeakable calamity that every true patriot must desire to avoid whatever might expose it to the slightest danger.