Terms of Southern Surrender in the War of the Rebellion--Candor of Paroled Troops--"Lee's Ragamuffins"--Generals Grant's and Sherman's Proposed Amnesty--The "Rump Congress" and Disfranchisement--What the Latter meant--Issues which the War Settled--How these were Revived by the Pending Congress--Anarchy in the South--The Loyal League.
The treaty concluded between the conquered and conquering States at the close of the late civil war, while arranging all external differences and disarming physical resistance, yet did not provide for certain contingencies arising from the ethics of the dispute, which were destined to exert a powerful influence over the destinies of the American people. Undoubtedly the Southern troops surrendered their standards, and accepted the conqueror's amnesty in good faith, and we can but believe that their allegiance to the restored Union--which had been promptly tendered--would have been crowned with this condition but for the disposition manifested by the civil power to review the pledges of its ambassadors in the field, and interpose supplementary conditions that could have no other beneficial effect than might be supposed to result, in a general way, from the humiliation of the conquered, and which would naturally tend to a revival of the _casus belli_. Having returned to their homes, and been soothed into accord with their new surroundings by those domestic Penates which had escaped the dispensation of fire and sword, through which they had mutually passed, "Lee's ragamuffins," as they had been styled by the Jenkinses of the period, set resolutely to work to restore their fallen fortunes, and, at the same time, so amend the shattered social fabric as that their personal and property rights might have that organized protection which cannot always be assured in times of civil disturbance. That they had forfeited any of those rights common to citizens of the republic under which they lived, by taking up arms in defence of a great national doctrine which, they were firmly persuaded, embodied its genius, if it did not represent its life, was a bombproof theory never seriously proposed until the glory of Appomattox had passed into history. To be denationalized, even in the sense which their severer critics ascribed as one of the conditions of their voluntary withdrawal from the national compact, carried with it discomforts of no mean significance; but to have the ill effects of their so-called treason visited upon them in the commonest concerns of social being, and to be denied a part in the administration of those State governments for whose (supposed) integrity they had imperilled their lives, was the harshest of all possible reconstruction issues, and one which candid thinkers will regard a very faint reflection of that peace policy which the measure purported to represent.