Construction and Reconstruction
gress in the summer of 1865 he put into effect a plan of his own devising, concerning which he had not so much as consulted Congress, and in the fall, at the opening of the session, he submitted it to Congress for its approval.
This approval it did not receive. While some of its features were commendable others were decidedly objectionable. It was felt by the great majority of Republicans in Congress and throughout the country that it did not sufficiently confirm and safeguard the results of the war, either in invalidating secession or in protecting the enfranchiseed negroes in their freedom. It did not, in brief, adequately guarantee fulfilment of Lincoln's resolution “that these dead shall not have died in vain.” In addition to that, it was the Republican contention that this was a matter for Congressional rather than Presidential determination. It was something in which the whole people were intensely interested and in which they had a right to be heard through their chosen representatives. For the President to determine it would be an exercise of one-man autocracy repugnant to the principles of a democracy. During the war, under military exigencies, the President had exercised extraordinary powers, even to the temporary and local suspension of the right to the writ of habeas corpus. All that was permissible under his war powers as Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy. But with the ending of the war and the return of peace these extraordinary powers must cease, and the affairs of the nation must be conducted according to the normal methods of the Constitution, with all laws made by Congress, interpreted by the judiciary and executed by the President. That was the policy of the Republican party as against the attempted autocracy of
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