"It is necessary to a clear apprehension of the needful facts in this discussion to remember events in the proper order of time. The Fourteenth Amendment was submitted to the States June 13, 1866. In the autumn of that year, or very early in 1867, the legislatures of all the insurrectionary States, except Tennessee, had rejected it. Thus and then the question was forced upon us, whether the Congress of the United States, composed wholly of men who had been loyal to the Government, or the legislatures of the rebel states, composed wholly of men who had been disloyal to the Government, should determine the basis on which their relation to the Union should be resumed. In such a crisis the Republican party could not hesitate; to halt, indeed, would have been an abandonment of the principles on which the war had been fought; to surrender to the rebel legislatures would have been cowardly desertion of its loyal friends and a base betrayal of the Union cause. "And thus, in March, 1867, after and because of the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment by Southern legislatures, Congress passed the reconstruction act. This was the origin of Negro suffrage. The southern whites knowingly and willfully brought it upon themselves. The reconstruction act would have never been demanded had the Southern States accepted the Fourteenth Amendment in good faith. But that amendment contained so many provisions demanded by considerations of great national policy that its adoption became an absolute necessity. Those who controlled the Federal Government would have been recreant to their plainest duty had they permitted the power of these States to be wielded by disloyal hands against the measures deemed essential to the security of the Union. To have destroyed the rebellion on the battlefield and then permit it to seize the power of eleven States and put a check on all changes in the organic law necessary to prevent future rebellion would have been a weak and wicked conclusion to the grandest contest ever waged for human rights and for constitutional liberty.