President Johnson used his influence to have the new constitutions open the door to a qualified negro suffrage. He telegraphed to the Mississippi convention, urging that the suffrage be extended to all negroes who could read and write, or who possessed $250 worth of real estate. Well would it have been if that appeal had been heeded.
Thus far, reconstruction had moved with singular swiftness and ease. Too swift and easy was the recovery to be trusted--so thought some--where the disease had been so desperate. But the Cabinet, including the grim and jealous Stanton, held with the President. More, the autumn Republican conventions throughout the North passed resolutions cordially approving the President's course and its results--all, with the ominous exceptions of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, controlled respectively by Thaddeus Stevens and Sumner, the leader of the House and the foremost man in the Senate.
Thus was initiated and begun the first of the three successive plans of reconstruction. Before seeing its fate, it is opportune to consider the general ideal of the situation, as presented by two of the greatest men of the North, the two, we may say, who best comprehended the whole case; the one standing in the Church and the other in the State, but alike in breadth of mind and loftiness of spirit--Henry Ward Beecher and John A. Andrew.