The Reconstruction Committee have reported a resolution for admitting Tennessee Members. It is, in its phraseology and conditions, in character with the dissimulating management and narrow, unpatriotic partisanship of those who control the action of Congress. Tennessee is pronounced to be in a condition to exercise all the functions of a State, therefore she shall not send Representatives until she complies with certain conditions which Congress exacts but has no authority to impose, and which the people of that State cannot comply with and preserve their independence, self-respect, and the right guaranteed to them by the Constitution. How intelligent and sensible men, not opposed to our government and the Constitution itself can commit themselves to such stuff I am unable to comprehend, but the madness of party, the weakness of men who are under the discipline of an organization which chafes, stimulates, threatens, and coaxes, is most astonishing.
In conversation with Senator Grimes, Chairman of the Naval Committee, I regret to see he still retains his rancor towards the South, though I hope somewhat modified. He is unwilling to make needful appropriations for the navy yards at Norfolk and Pensacola because they are in the Rebel States. Yet a navy yard at Pensacola is important, it may be said necessary, to the protection of the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi in time of war. A foreign power can blockade that region, the whole valley of the Mississippi be locked up; and Western Members would permit this rather than expend a small sum for necessary purposes in a navy yard at the South. But Grimes is not so intensely wrong as others living in the Mississippi Valley. He will not, however, avail of the opportunity of procuring a magnificent site at Hampton Roads for the Naval School, because it is in Virginia.
SOURCE: Gideon Welles, Diary of Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy Under Lincoln and Johnson, Vol. 2: April 1, 1864 — December 31, 1866, p. 444-5
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