The Cabinet was
pleasant and harmonious on the matters before it to-day, though outside rumors
make them divided. Much excitement exists in and out
of it on the subject of the veto. The dark, revolutionary, reckless intrigues
of Stevens manifest themselves. In the House, the bigoted partisans are ready
to follow him in his vindictive and passionate schemes for Radical supremacy.
Radicalism having been prevalent during the War, they think it still popular.
On the vote which
was taken to-day in the Senate, the veto was sustained and the bill defeated,
there not being the requisite two thirds in its favor. Morgan, Dixon,
Doolittle, and four or five others with the Democrats, eighteen in all against
thirty. Violent and factious speeches were made in the Senate, and also in the
House. Stevens, as I expected he would, presented his schemes to oppress the
South and exclude the States from their constitutional right of representation.
Such men would plunge the country into a more wicked rebellion, one more
destructive of our system of government, a more dangerous condition than that
from which we have emerged, could they prevail. As an exhibition of the
enlightened legislation of the House, Stevens, the Radical leader, Chairman of
the Reconstruction Committee,—the committee which shapes and directs the action
of Congress, and assumes executive as well as legislative control,—announced
that his committee, or directory it may be called, was about to report in favor
of admitting the Tennessee Members, but the President having put his veto on
the Freedmen's Bill, they would not now consent, and he introduced his
resolution declaring, virtually, that the Union is divided, that the States
which were in rebellion should not have their constitutional right of
representation.
SOURCE: Gideon
Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and
Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 435-6
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