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.
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