Reconstruction was the creation of men who knew nothing of conditions surrounding the negro. Instead of adapting him to his new life the measures of reconstruction made the negro a discontented enemy of good government. The story of the trials of reconstruction is told not with a spirit of bringing reproach on the men who made them possible by unwise legislation, or by way of apology for the people of the South, but from a purely historical standpoint giving the facts minus prejudiced opinion. The debates in Congress pending the passage of reconstruction measures clearly show that the most conservative and self-contained men of the party then in power were opposed to universal manhood suffrage for the negro. That President Lincoln was opposed to manhood suffrage for the negro is now a well established fact of history. The evidence upon which that statement rests, in addition to Mr. Lincoln's own statements, is a letter written by Mr. McCulloch, who was Secretary of the Treasury in the cabinet of President Lincoln and later filled the same office for President Johnson and President Arthur. Secretary McCulloch says: "It was, I know, the opinion of Mr. Lincoln and other friends of the colored race--it certainly was mine--that some qualification, such as the ownership of taxable property, the ability to read and write or both, should have been required for the exercise of the right to vote, as an inducement for the acquisition of what is needful on the part of self-governing people." Previous to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment there was not a Northern state where the negro had the right to vote. Mr. Garfield wanted an intelligent negro suffrage. He said during the reconstruction debates on that question: "I regret that we have not found the situation of affairs in this country such, and the public virtue such, that we might come out on the plain, unanswerable proposition that every adult intelligent citizen of the United States, unconvicted of crime, should enjoy the right of suffrage." Senator Fessenden, of Maine, a very able man, one of the leaders of the Republican party and a member of the reconstruction committee, said in the Senate on the question of negro suffrage: "I think the honorable Senator from Massachusetts, himself, (Mr. Sumner) who is the great champion of universal suffrage, would hardly contend that now at this time the whole mass of the population of the recent slave states is fit to be admitted to the exercise of the right of suffrage. I presume that no man who looks dispassionately and calmly would contend that the great mass of those who were recently slaves (undoubtedly there may be exceptions) and who have been kept in ignorance all their lives, oppressed more or less, forbidden to acquire information, are fit at this day to exercise the right of suffrage or could be trusted to do it."