“The evidence of an intense hostility to the Federal Union, and an equally intense love of the late Confederacy, nurtured by the war is decisive.  While it appears that nearly all are willing to submit, at least for the time being, to the Federal authority, it is equally clear that the ruling motive is a desire to obtain the advantages which will be derived from a representation in Congress.  Officers of the Union army on duty, and Northern men who go south to engage in business, are generally detested and proscribed.  Southern men who adhered to the Union are bitterly hated and relentlessly persecuted.  In some localities prosecutions have been instituted in State courts against Union officers for acts done in the line of official duty, and similar prosecutions are threatened elsewhere as soon as the United States troops are removed.  All such demonstrations show a state of feeling against which it is unmistakably necessary to guard.

“The testimony is conclusive that after the collapse of the Confederacy the feeling of the people of the rebellious States was that of abject submission.  Having appealed to the tribunal of arms, they had no hope except that by the magnanimity of their conquerors, their lives, and possibly their property, might be preserved.  Unfortunately the general issue of pardons to persons who had been prominent in the rebellion, and the feeling of kindliness and conciliation manifested by the Executive, and very generally indicated through the Northern press, had the effect to render whole communities forgetful of the crime they had committed, defiant towards the Federal Government, and regardless of their duties as citizens.  The conciliatory measures of the Government do not seem to have been met even half-way.  The bitterness and defiance exhibited towards the United States under such circumstances is without a parallel in the history of the world.  In return for our leniency we receive only an insulting denial of our authority.  In return for our kind desire for the resumption of fraternal relations we receive only an insolent assumption of rights and privileges long since forfeited.  The crime we have punished is paraded as a virtue, and the principles of republican government which we have vindicated at so terrible a cost are denounced as unjust and oppressive.

“If we add to this evidence the fact that, although peace has been declared by the President, he has not, to this day, deemed it safe to restore the writ of habeas corpus, to relieve the insurrectionary States of martial law, nor to withdraw the troops from many localities, and that the commanding general deems an increase of the army indispensable to the preservation of order and the protection of loyal and well-disposed people in the South, the proof of a condition of feeling hostile to the Union and dangerous to the Government throughout the insurrectionary States would seem to be overwhelming.”