It provided, further, that "any freedman, free negro, or mulatto committing riots, affrays, trespasses, malicious mischief and cruel treatment to animals, seditious speeches, insulting gestures, language or acts, or assaults on any person, disturbance of the peace, or exercising the functions of a minister of the gospel without a license from some regularly organized church, or selling spirituous or intoxicating liquors, or committing any other misdemeanor," should be fined or imprisoned, and, upon failure to pay the fine in five days' time after conviction, should be publicly hired out to the person who would pay the fine and costs for the shortest term of labor from the convict. And it provided, finally, that "all the penal and criminal laws now in force in this State, defining offences, and prescribing the mode of punishment for crimes and misdemeanors committed by slaves, free negroes or mulattoes, be and the same are hereby re-enacted, and declared to be in full force and effect, against {52} freedmen, free negroes and mulattoes, except so far as the mode and manner of trial and punishment have been changed or altered by law." [Sidenote: The Mississippi legislation a fair sample of the subsequent legislation in other "States."] This is a fair sample of the legislation subsequently passed by all the "States" reconstructed under President Johnson's plan. In fact, in the legislatures of several of them, bills containing substantially these provisions were under consideration when Congress met, and it was fair to suppose that they would be enacted. Congress had thus in the first week of December, 1865, substantially before it what the reconstructed "States" proposed to do in reference to the status and rights of the former slaves, and in reference to the relations between the negro and the white man in the future. As yet, we must remember, the Thirteenth Amendment had not been proclaimed as adopted, in fact had not been adopted, on the basis of the calculations of Mr. Seward, the Secretary of State, the officer who alone could proclaim adoption; and the abolition of slavery rested upon the military power of the President, and on the acts of the "States" themselves, the first of which is temporary as to its effects, and the second of which might be reversed by the "States" at pleasure. [Sidenote: The view taken of this legislation by the Republicans.] [Sidenote: This legislation from the point of view of natural justice.]