These overtures for formal reconstruction came to communities impoverished, forlorn, and chaotic, almost beyond imagination. Property, industry, social order, had been torn up by the plowshare of war. The prolongation of resistance until defeat was complete and overwhelming had ended all power and all wish to contend with the inevitable. The people, groping back toward even a bare livelihood,--toward some settled order, some way of public and private life,--met eagerly the advances of the President. Constitutional conventions were elected and met, within the remaining months of 1865; they were chosen on the old basis of suffrage, conditioned by the exceptions to amnesty and by the oaths of allegiance; these conventions based the new constitutions largely on the old; they affirmed the ordinances of secession to be null and void; they repudiated the Confederate debt, and they declared that slavery no longer existed. Legislatures were duly elected, and proceeded to enact laws. They all ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, though Mississippi and Alabama affixed some qualifications to their assent, while Texas was still unreconstructed and could not act; and Kentucky and Delaware gave a negative. The President and Secretary of State, December 18, declared the adoption of the amendment by the vote of 31 States out of 36. Slavery was finally and forever abolished. President Johnson used his influence to have the new constitutions open the door to a qualified negro suffrage. He telegraphed to the Mississippi convention, urging that the suffrage be extended to all negroes who could read and write, or who possessed $250 worth of real estate. Well would it have been if that appeal had been heeded. Thus far, reconstruction had moved with singular swiftness and ease. Too swift and easy was the recovery to be trusted--so thought some--where the disease had been so desperate. But the Cabinet, including the grim and jealous Stanton, held with the President. More, the autumn Republican conventions throughout the North passed resolutions cordially approving the President's course and its results--all, with the ominous exceptions of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, controlled respectively by Thaddeus Stevens and Sumner, the leader of the House and the foremost man in the Senate. Thus was initiated and begun the first of the three successive plans of reconstruction. Before seeing its fate, it is opportune to consider the general ideal of the situation, as presented by two of the greatest men of the North, the two, we may say, who best comprehended the whole case; the one standing in the Church and the other in the State, but alike in breadth of mind and loftiness of spirit--Henry Ward Beecher and John A. Andrew.