In a word, the law put the whole unreconstructed South,--all of the old Confederacy except Tennessee,--under temporary military government, subject to the President; and the commanders were at once to initiate measures for new State organizations. They were to enroll all adult males, white and black, as voters, except only such as the Fourteenth Amendment would shut out from office; these voters were then to elect delegates in each State to a convention; this body was to frame a constitution incorporating permanently the same conditions of suffrage; this constitution was then to be submitted to popular vote; and if a majority ratified it,--if Congress approved it,--if the Legislature elected under it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment,--and if and when that amendment received enough ratifications to enact it,--then, at last, each State was to be fully restored to the Union. On this plan the States were rapidly and finally reconstructed. Its central feature was the enforcement of suffrage for the negroes throughout the South. Of this tremendous measure, but small discussion appears in the debate over the bill. But it seems to have had behind it the prevailing sentiment of the North. A good witness on this point is the Springfield _Republican_. That paper had strongly advocated the adoption of the Massachusetts plan, a reading and writing qualification for suffrage--the State's only good legacy from the Know-nothing period. Of such a provision it said January 9: "It would be a most potent stimulus to education, and once made the national rule there would be such a studying of spelling books as never was seen before.... There can be no sure reliance on the votes of blacks any more than of whites who cannot read their ballots." But this plan found little popular favor. The objection to it which we now recognize,--that the Southern States might probably have forborne to educate the freedmen, and so left them disfranchised,--was not then prominent. But there had not come to be a general recognition at the North of the danger of ignorant suffrage. Of the actual drift of opinion the _Republican_ said, March 3, that equal suffrage is "the sole condition about which there is any approach to unanimity among our people."