This view of the matter grew rapidly in popular appreciation as the results of reconstruction on the Johnson plan became more and more unsatisfactory. It gained very much in strength when it appeared that the tremendous rebuke administered to the President's policy by the Congressional elections of 1866 had not produced any effect upon Mr. Johnson's mind, but that, as his annual message delivered on December 3rd showed, he was doggedly bent upon following his course. It was still more strengthened when all the Southern legislatures set up under the President's plan, save that of Tennessee, rejected the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution,--some unanimously, or nearly so,--and even with demonstrations of contemptuous defiance. Then the question was asked at the North with great pertinency: Are we to understand that the white people of the States lately in rebellion will not agree that all persons born or naturalized in the United States shall be constitutionally recognized as citizens entitled in their civil rights to the equal protection of the laws? That those States insist, not only that the colored people shall not have the right of suffrage, but that those people so excluded from the franchise shall even serve to increase the basis of representation in favor of the whites--or in other words, that the white people of the South shall come out of the rebellion politically stronger than they were when they went into it? That all those who engaged in the rebellion and fought to destroy the Union shall be entitled to participate on even more favorable terms than ourselves in the government of the same Union which but yesterday they sought to destroy? That they refuse to safeguard the public debt incurred for saving the Union and wish to keep open the possibility of an assumption of the debts incurred by the rebel States for destroying the Union? The fact was not overlooked that the great mass of the Southern negroes were grossly ignorant and in other respects ill-fitted for the exercise of political privileges. Many who then favored negro suffrage would have greatly preferred its gradual introduction, first limiting it, as Mr. Lincoln suggested to Governor Hahn of Louisiana, to those who had served as soldiers in the Union army and those who were best fitted for it by intelligence and education. But this would have reduced the negro vote to so small a figure as to render it insufficient to counteract or neutralize the power of the reactionary element. To that end the whole vote was required; and for that reason it was demanded, in spite of the imperfections it was known to possess and of the troubles it threatened--which, however, at that period were much underestimated, as is apt to be the case under similar circumstances. _Reconstruction Under Military Control_