state rebel officers, place their wounded on your pension lists, er indemnify slaveholders for their slaves. I pray these gentlemen to look this thing in the eye, and if they have no regard for "justice and humanity," I would say to them, I, like you, gentlemen, am no enthusiast. I am very little of a philanthropist. I am not convinced of the intellectual superiority of the negro over the white; but I know that his vote is important, and if I have not much respect for justice and humanity, I have great regard for the 5-20s; I have great respect for the integrity of the government and the possibility of carrying on its machinery. If the Constitutions do not give the mass of the negroes the right of voting on equal terms with the loyal white men (not those who can read, where it has been a penitentiary offense to teach one to read for twenty years-that is trifling with grave matters-but that mass of the negro population whom we subjected to the draft, and at whose hands we sought aid in our hour of weakness) the safety of the nation requires, republican principles require, that no such government shall be recognized as republican in form, that no representative or senator from such a State shall be admitted to either House, or even complimented with the privileges of the floor..

We need the votes of all the colored people; it is numbers, not intelligence, that count at the ballot-box; it is right intention, and not philosophic judgment, that casts the vote. More glorious still would it be for Congress to follow the great example we have just set, of abolishing slavery by an amendment of the Constitution. Let it pass by a two-thirds majority, in both houses of Congress, an amendment of the Constitution consecrating forever the mass of the people as the basis of the republican government of the United States, and submit it this very coming winter, before the Legislatures adjourn, for their ratification. And when it shall have received the assent of three fourths of those now represented in Congress, let Congress instantly proclaim it as the fundamental law of the land, valid and binding as the Constitution itself, of which they will thus have made it a part, under which they sit, of which no State caprice, no question of political parties, nothing in the future, except the triumph of slavery over free institutions, can ever shake or call in question. Then all the principles of the Declaration of Independence will be executed; this government will rest on the right of individual liberty, and

the right of every man to bear a share in the government of the country whose laws he obeys and whose bayonet in the hour of danger he bears. And the personal freedom which the dark children of the republic have won by our blood and theirs will not be a vain mockery, exposed to violation at the caprice of their masters, enthroned in the Legislature, on the bench, and in the executive chamber, but, secured by the arms they hold and the ballot they cast, will be Liberty guarded by Power.

THE NECESSITY OF UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE

IN RECONSTRUCTION.

IN October Mr. Davis again published his views in relation to the reconstruction of the States lately in rebellion, insisting on the necessity of suffrage for the colored race as an indispensable condition in re-establishing the federal relations of those States.

His letter was addressed to the editor of the (New York) Nation, and appeared in that journal in the form here following. It is the last paper on any public matter which he wrote or designed for publication.

To the Editor of The Nation :

My extreme reluctance to intrude on the public where I am not responsible for results has hitherto withheld me from offering to you the following communication.

The Connecticut vote has solved my doubts and removed my hesitations. It reveals the fact that the great body of the Republicans are true to their principles, but that there is an unreliable minority in our ranks willing to unite with the enemies of the country to prevent us from consolidating our victory and secur-. ing its fruits. These two elements will, I fear, be found to divide our friends in Congress. Our great majority there can be broken only by a great desertion. A few we may expect to be disloyal. We may trust, however, that enough will not join those who have vilified us for four years to place them in control of the houses. If they do, then Connecticut is the emblem of the fate of our cause, and the same coalition which perpetuated there the seeds of discord will prevent our rooting them out forever from the nation.

In Connecticut no practical importance attaches to the negro vote, and old prejudice was free to assert its power. But in the Southern States lately in rebellion the negro population is a controlling power, if properly organized, and endowed with arms and ballots. It is the only power on which the United States can rely there in the event of a renewed rebellion. It is the only body of people who can give the white minority of loyal men a voice in the nation, and prevent them from being overwhelmed and ostra

cized by the hostile majority. It is the only body of natural friends of the United States in all those States, for its freedom depends on the integrity of the Union. It is the only body from which a Republican vote can be expected in any of those States, for the mass of whites, loyal as well as disloyal, hate and vilify us, while the negroes know that their liberty is our gift, and that as surely as it would cease on disunion, so surely its safety and enjoyment would be jeoparded and impaired by the accession to power in the United States of the old coalition of their masters in possession of the Southern States, and the Democrats holding enough of the Northern States to elect a President or control either house of Congress.

The tone of the Southern press-now merely muttering between bayonets-is that of execration against the Republicans, while unanimous in supporting the President they elected; and to overlook this manifestation of Southern temper in dealing with their restoration to political power is to seal our own death-warrant, and secure the triumph of our opponents and of the enemies of the country for a generation. This grave question is to be settled within the next session of Congress, and probably in its earlier weeks. They who elected the President stood confounded and divided by the policy he has dictated to them for its solution. The North Carolina proclamation they tolerated as an experiment, till it has indurated into a policy executed in every State which rebelled, and supported by every Northern Democrat and every rebel pretending to loyalty. In words, the proclamations summon that "portion of the people who are loyal" to reorganize the State governments; but in reality they exclude the whole negro population, half the aggregate population, and nearly the whole of those who have always been loyal in those States. Under these proclamations, therefore, no republican form of government is possible.

The only alternatives are an oligarchy of loyal whites or an aristocracy of hostile whites. The one is loyal, but is not republican; the other is neither loyal nor republican. The former President Lincoln organized in Virginia and Louisiana; the President is organizing under his proclamations the latter. The legal effect of their recognition is to restore the State governments to those whom we have just expelled from them, to subject the emancipated negroes to the discriminating legislation of their masters, to

continue their domination over the loyal minority, to guarantee to them the right to represent, now three fifths, and at the next census the whole of the disfranchised negroes, and to admit to Congress votes enough to compel equality, at the peril of anarchy, between loyalty and disloyalty. They were our armed enemies when Lee surrendered; they are now our disarmed enemies. They are now for independence and slavery, and against union and freedom; they acquiesce in both till time or disaster gives them opportunity to realize their hopes, and till then their interest and purpose are to obliterate every distinction between those who rebelled and those who put down the rebellion. In all the South the only mass of the population interested and able to foil these designs is the negroes whom the President has disfranchised.

Whatever his purpose may be, his policy is that of our enemies. His apologists say the President is in favor of negro suffrage, but that is small comfort if his proclamations exclude it. We remember his declaration that traitors should be punished, yet none are punished; that only loyal men should control the States, yet he has delivered them to the disloyal; that the aristocracy should be pulled down, yet he has put it in power again; that its possessions. should be divided among Northern laborers of all colors, yet the negroes are still a landless, homeless class; that he was opposed to military commissions, yet they still defile the land, and others for higher victims are said to be in preparation! The President's words are, therefore, uncertain guides to his conduct. His apologists say, to the States alone belongs the question of suffrage, and the President left it to the people interested in it. But that is what the President did not do. The negroes of the States which rebelled form in some States a majority, in others a half, in all a vast, powerful, and loyal body of citizens, and to them he has not left it. On the contrary, he has left them to the will of their masters. It is true the President has no power to dictate who shall vote, but it is equally true that he has no power to dictate who shall not vote. He has as much power to admit as to exclude. His apologists assure us it was in obedience to the State Constitutions, which survive the State governments. But the President's proclamations do not say so, and his conduct says to the contrary. He did not obey the Constitution in making the oath a qualification of suffrage, nor in authorizing the provisional governor to determine the loyalty of voters, nor in appointing him to make