THE ORGANIZATION OF CONGRESS- gitost OUR SPECIAL COIIRESPONDFNT.] New York,
December 8, 1865. CONGRESS met on Monday of this week, was organized without difficulty, and proceeded promptly and quietly to business. Little, however, has been done during the week, because Thursday being the day.of thanksgiving appointed by the President, both. Houses adjourned on Wednesday until Monday next, in order to give
members whose homes were within twenty-four hours of Washing- ton an opportunity of keeping the festival with their families-
The-same margin is also given, as I have mentioned before,- on the approach of the Christmas holidays, So insmaible Are these " Americans" to the ties of home and the: charms of household festivity, so fond are they of hotel life and of feeding gregariously in public. During the three days' session nothing, of igsportance took place except •the referring to a Committee of.fifteen, six from the Senate and nine from the House, all questions in regard to the re- lations to the Government of the States lately under rebel authority, inclaing-the right of delegates from those States to seats, and the reception of the President's Message, with the reports of the heads. of departments. I have heard the reference to the Committee deplored by an intelligent Englishman as oppressive, as indicative of an inclination to gag the late rebels and their Northern friends, and as likely to confirm an opinion which he found generally held at the South, from which he has just returned, that the Republican members and the War Democrats, now self-styled and half-named the Union party, wish to deprive the people of the late Confede- racy of their civil rights, and to that end that they would find some way of excluding Southern members from their seats in Con- gress and of keeping the Southern people under military rule. I fear my friend went through the South with his ears rather credulously open to the complaints of those wonderful Con- federates, whose prodigies of valour (as told by themselves under the severe restraints of social intercourse) are recounted by the Times' special correspondent in a recent letter from the Shenandoah Valley. But as some of my readers may take the same view that he did of this reference, I will explain that it was made without any intention whatever of oppressing or even imposing severe restrictions on the people lately in rebellion, but solely with a view to the orderly, prompt, and well considered despatch of public business, especially that great business of the session, the settlement of the terms on which the people of the States lately in rebellion are to receive back their full civil and political rights. Had this question in any of its many aspects been.
suffered to come up in open House in the first days of the session (and if not kept out it could not have been kept down), it would have thrown the House into great and prolonged confusion. The Union party are largely in the majority, it is true, and would therefore seem to have the ordering of this matter in its own hands. And were fair play and the rules of strict decorum always observed in the House of Representatives, doubtless this important business might have been despatched with reasonable promptitude as well as decently and in order, even if it had come up crudely in open House on the first day of the session. But the Democrats are virulent and untiring in their opposition, and are determined upon re-establishing, if they can, their old connection with the dominant class in the late Slave States. Had not the Union party used their majority inflexibly to organize the House upon the Clerk's roll, which was made up without the names of dele- gates from the States lately in rebellion, and to refer the question of the title of those delegates to seats to a committee, the Demo- crats, being venomous and obstinate, might, and not improbably would, have kept the House in confusion, possibly have prevented its orgaaization for many days, and perhaps for a long time, by an irregular kind of parliamentary warfare known among us by the disgraceful name filibustering. This is simply the inter- ruption of public business by means of, or rather in accordance with, those very rules which were made to facilitate it. It is moat often practised at the end of a session, the close of which on a certain day is prescribed by law. Many bills, frequently the appropriation bills, without the passage of which the wheels of Government could not move, are then awaiting final
action. Then the opposition, sometimes a small part of the opposition, and sometimes even a faction of the con- trolling party, will determine that unless some pet measure of theirs is adopted by the House they will prevent further legislation. This they do by speaking--all of them—to the purpose or from the purpose upon every point of every question that comes up. They talk Buncombe, spread-eagleism ; they quibble, they bluster, they amend, and amend amendments ; they make frivolous points of order, and manage to debate them, and even to stave off the pre- vious question ; they openly declare that they are taking extreme measures in defence of the rights of an oppressed minority, and that the vote shall not be taken upon the bill before the House until their demands are complied with, and their bill is attached to that about to be passed as a rider. True, the party which thus conducts itself often fails to carry its point, but sometimes it succeeds, the result being a bill, or even bills, of most anomalous and incongruous character ; but in any case they make great trouble and confusion, and annoy the majority, and gratify that meanest of all passions, revenge, by the use of these disgraceful parliamentary tactics, which even when used, as they have been once or twice, in the service of truth and right, are the reproach of our legislative bodies. In the House of Commons I suppose the Speaker, supported by the more influential members, would at once frown clown such proceedings, supposing that such could be commenced there. But it is one of the defects of our society in all its phases that mean men, offensive men, bores, wrong-doers within the limit of the law, in fact all sorts of human nuisances, cannot be frowned down. So long as they commit no crime or legal misdemeanour they are " as good as you," they stand on their rights, and face it out. The men here who by mere authority and weight of character can preserve them- selves and others from this kind of annoyance and of wrong are very few indeed. I hardly know of any except the judges of the Supreme Court on circuit, and they, I fear, nowhere but in court. This of course refers only to public affairs and public or, strictly speaking, political assemblies. In private, character has its weight, and so has the general sentiment of the best men. It is only when we are before the world that we are indecent. An opportunity for this kind of practice, and for what was even more likely to happen, a long, wearisome, windy, vague debate; com- ing no whither, tending no whither, like so much of our Con- gressional talk, in which every man claims and has the oppor- tunity of declaring his " sentiments," or giving his views upon the state of the Union and things in general, and this going on fOr weeks, and all for naught, the vote at the end—it cannot properly be called the conclusion—of the pow-Wow being exactly what it would have been at the beginning—all opportimity for this was taken away by the decision in caucus to organize the House upon the roll of the last Congress; and to proceed at once inflexibly to the election of Speaker and Clerk, and'the reference of the question of seats to the Committee of fifteen. This Com- mittee is authorized to report by bill, or otherwise, and the alter- native is one of very wide scope. The-whole question, in fact all the questions arising from the rebellion, will be canvassed in this Committee, while the senate and the House are going on with the routine business of the session, and the subject, after it has been prepared and digested, will be taken up in an orderly and systematic manner, and after both parties have discovered what they can do, what the President will approve (for his power is now limited to a veto, which can be set aside by a two-thirds vote), and what will satisfy the delegates from the States lately under Confederate authority. There is no reasonable doubt, I think, that delegates will be at once admitted to seats from all the States which have declared the ordinance of secession null and void, ratified the constitutional amendment prohibiting slavery, secured the civil rights of the late slaves, and repudiated the rebel debt. To those which have failed on any one of these vital points, the discipline of exclusion will probably be applied, and in that case it is difficult to see how they can do otherwise than yield. There will of course be a strong effort, headed by Mr. Sumner and Mr. Wilson in the Senate, and Mr. Thaddeus Stevens in the House, to exclude delegates from all the States in question until they grant the negroes full political as well as civil rights, but it can hardly be successful. How could it be so in the face of the recent votes in Connecticut, and Minnesota,—and even Wisconsin,—the last of which States gave more than 20,000 majority (at Mr. Lincoln's election in 1860) for the exclusion of slavery from the Territories, which gave its voice for him by a majority almost as large after he had issued the proclamation of emancipation (some thousands of its voters having meantime died upon the field), which sent 42,500 men into the army in the first three years of the war, and which promptly ratified the constitutional amendment, having decided by a majority of 10,000 not to bestow the elective franchise on negroes? When the Free States (though now all are Free), in which the negroes are few and comparatively civilized and in- structed, refuse to admit them to suffrage, is it probable that compliance with a demand that they shall be admitted in States where they are in great numbers, and have yet barely emerged from chattel-slavery, can be enforced? Have the people with motes in their eyes come to the point of yielding with such docility to the remonstrances of those who have beams in theirs? These are questions, among many others, which the negro-suffrage party must answer satisfactorily before they can prevail upon Congress to adopt their policy. Upon this point, however, I have come to the conclusion that Congress and politicians generally are in advance of the people of the North. A few of them take their position in favour of negro suffrage honestly and upon principle, but mostly they look upon this question, as upon all others, with a single eye to party and personal success ; and those who think that the negro vote may be counted upon for their side are ready to secure it by seeming ready to give it, when if they thought that it would be thrown against them, or if they acted upon their own preferences or views, they would withhold the vote for ever. I am not here attributing motives unwarrantably, or even upon mere inference. The New York Times, which is managed bytwo of the astutest politicians of the Republican party, said plainly, when this question first came up, that when the op- portunity presented itself all parties would hasten to be first to admit negroes to the elective franchise, in order to reap the ad- vantage that would ensue from such ready generosity, or justice.
A YANKEE.
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