{84} CHAPTER VI THE CONGRESSIONAL PLAN (_Continued_) The Reports of the Committee on Reconstruction--The Idea of a New Electorate as the Basis and Condition of Reconstruction--The Freedmen's Bureau Act of July 16th, 1866--The Disaffection in the Cabinet--The New Orleans Riot--The Issue of Reconstruction in the Campaign of 1866--The Congressional Election of 1866--The President's Final Proclamation Declaring the Civil War Ended--The October Elections--The President's Message of December 3d, 1866--Rejection of the Proposed Fourteenth Amendment by the Legislatures of the Reconstructed "States." [Sidenote: The reports of the Committee on Reconstruction.] Two days after the transmission of the Fourteenth Amendment to the "State" legislatures, the Joint Committee of Congress on Reconstruction made its final report, or rather reports, since there were two of them, one being signed by all the Republican members of the Committee, and the other by all the Democratic members. [Sidenote: The majority report.] The majority report was an able defence of the view, that by rebellion and attempted secession the eleven "States" in which these things happened had lost their "Statehood" and had become disorganized communities, but that while they could and had destroyed "State" government, and placed themselves outside of the Union so far as exercising the powers and privileges of "State" local government was concerned, they could not, and had not, escaped the obligations of the Constitution and the authority of the {85} central Government. The exact language of the report on this point was: "The Constitution, it will be observed, does not act upon States, as such, but upon the people; while, therefore, the people cannot escape its authority, the States may, through the act of their people, cease to exist in an organized form, and thus dissolve their political relations with the United States." The doctrine is here more clearly expressed than in other places, but even here there is a confusing modification contained in the words "in an organized form." It would have been much clearer if they had been entirely omitted. The framers of the report were evidently haunted by that spectre of an abstract, unorganized "State," which has played such havoc with good sense in some of the subsequent decisions of the Supreme Court, and which is nothing more than a Platonic idea. Based upon this doctrine, the majority report naturally vindicated the exclusive right of Congress in the work of Reconstruction, which work was virtually the admission of new "States" into the Union. It, furthermore, demonstrated that the situation in these disorganized sections was one largely of exhausted disloyalty only, and that all that the inhabitants of them had done under the President's Reconstruction policy was directed toward putting the same men in power who had led in the rebellion and toward denying civil, to say nothing of political, rights to the freedmen.