"To restore the Union on a safe foundation, and to re-establish law and promote order, to insure justice and equal rights to all, the Republican party was forced to its reconstruction policy. To hesitate in its adoption was to invite and confirm the statute of wrong and cruelty to which I have referred. The first step taken was to submit the Fourteenth Amendment, giving citizenship and civil rights to the Negro and forbidding that he be counted in the basis of representation unless he should be reckoned among the voters. The Southern States could have been readily readmitted to all their power and privileges in the Union by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, and Negro suffrage would not have been forced upon them. The gradual and conservative method of training the Negro for franchise, as suggested and approved by Governor Hampton, had many advocates among the Republicans in the North; and though in my judgment it would have proved delusive and impracticable, it was quite within the power of the South to secure its adoption or at least its trial. "But the States lately in insurrection rejected the Fourteenth Amendment with apparent scorn and defiance. In the legislatures of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida it did not receive a single vote; in South Carolina, only one vote; in Virginia, only one; in Texas, five votes; in Arkansas, two votes; in Alabama, ten; in North Carolina, eleven, and in Georgia, where Mr. Stephens boasts that they gave the Negro suffrage in advance of the Fifteenth Amendment, only two votes could be found in favor of making the Negro even a citizen. It would have been more candid in Mr. Stephens if he had stated that it was the legislature assembled under the reconstruction act that gave suffrage to the Negro in Georgia, and that the unreconstructed legislature, which has his endorsement and sympathies and which elected him to the United States Senate, not only refused suffrage to the Negro but loaded him with grievous disabilities and passed a criminal code of barbarous severity for his punishment.