Chapter XXIII, of Cassells Illustrated History of England, Volume 9 page 3

A revolution, resulting in the subversion of the Government, occurred this year in the Danubian principalities. Prince Couza, who had been elected Hospodar of Wallachia and Moldavia in 1859, under the suzerainty of the Sultan, had, in the seven years which followed, by gross mismanagement and arbitrary measures, estranged the whole Rouman population from his government. In February, 1866, the whole country rose against him; not even the army would support him; he was compelled to abdicate, and surrender himself a prisoner. Soon afterwards he was released, and allowed to depart unharmed. The Chambers, after a vain attempt to induce the Count of Flanders, brother of the King of the Belgians, to accept the post of Hospodar, offered it to Prince Charles of Hohenzollern, a cousin of the King of Prussia. The Prince appearing to be not adverse, the question of his election was submitted to the votes of the population. The result was that Prince Charles was unanimously chosen Hospodar, and the election was afterwards recognised by the Porte, and by all the European Powers.

In America the South lay prostrate and exhausted; but while the aversion to the Federal Government and to the North remained in undiminished strength, the decision of the war had been so conclusive that no one dreamed of renewing the contest. A difference of opinion arose between the President and the Congress as to the manner in which the central government should deal with the states lately in revolt. The President, who was a native of Tennessee, and therefore more disposed to feel for the humbled South than the stern, unsympathising men of New England could be, deemed that when the people of the Southern States expressed, through their legislatures, their conviction that secession was no longer an open question, when they accepted their defeat, and petitioned to be readmitted into the Union on the same terms as before, it was the duty of Congress to admit them without hesitation. But the Republican majority in the Congress viewed the matter in a very different light. They held the Southern people to have been guilty of a great crime, and were resolved that their past behaviour should not be lightly condoned. The prodigal son was not to be taken back until he had been sufficiently humiliated and punished. Having this aim in view, they framed with great skill a series of measures calculated to keep the Southern, late slave-holding, aristocracy in a condition of political feebleness for many years. The state governments of the South continued to be elected, and to manage the non-Federal affairs of their respective states, as before the war. But Congress, in spite of the urgent and impassioned remonstrances of the President, refused to admit to seats within its walls representatives from any state lately in revolt, until such state should have been formally and statutably re-admitted into the Union. So long as this exclusion lasted, the Southern States were despotically governed from Washington in regard to all those matters which the Constitution exempted from state control - such as the army and navy, representation in foreign countries, the post-office, the tariff, &c. From this state of vassalage any Southern state would naturally desire to be relieved with the least possible delay; but when it applied to Congress for re-admission into the Union, it found that re-admission would only be granted upon certain conditions. In the first place, it was required to accept the constitutional amendment passed in the previous year (1865), abolishing slavery throughout the Union. This, however, was not a provision that would cause any difficulty; the impossibility of continuing the system of slavery after the war was as clearly seen in the South as in the North. Secondly, the state must accept another constitutional amendment, the Act for which passed Congress in the session of 1866, which had the effect of altering the basis of representation in the Southern States, and reducing the number of their representatives in the Lower House of Congress, by providing that " whenever the elective franchise should be denied or abridged in any state on account of race or colour, all persons of such race or colour should be excluded from the basis of representation." While slavery existed, the slaves had been allowed to count, in reckoning the basis of representation, as 5 to 3 relatively to white men; thus, in computing the number of members that South Carolina was entitled, in respect of her population, to send to the House of Representatives, 100,000 slaves were regarded as equivalent to 60,000 white men. The effect of the adoption of this amendment was, that whereas, according to the old basis of representation, fourteen slave-holding states sent seventy-six members to Congress, they would hereafter (unless they extended the elective franchise to the negroes) send only fifty-two members.

Still the object of the Republicans was not attained; the amendment just described, to say nothing of the irresistible march of events, did indeed transfer the political centre of gravity in the Union from the states south to the states north of Washington; but the Republicans could not think the cause of the Union safe unless the centre of gravity were correspondingly disturbed in the political system of each separate state. Two measures seemed to them to be especially adapted to accomplish their purpose - the extension of the suffrage to the blacks, and an unsparing exclusion from place and power of those who had been the leaders of the Southern people in the late civil war. Whatever vindictive feeling was nourished in the breasts of Northern men against the aristocracy of the South, must have received an exquisite gratification in the framing and passing of a measure, the effect of which was to make the proud gentlemen of the Carolinas politically subject to their own quondam slaves. Such a measure was the Civil Rights Bill, vetoed by President Johnson, but passed over his veto by more than the requisite two-thirds majority in both branches of the Legislature in April, 1866. The Civil Rights Bill placed the newly-emancipated slaves on the same footing as the white population in regard to all civil rights, among which rights that of voting was, of course, included. President Johnson might well ask, in a message sent down to Congress, whether it could " reasonably be supposed that four millions of negroes who had just emerged from slavery possessed the necessary qualifications entitling them to all the privileges of citizenship, while intelligent foreigners undergo five years' probation before becoming citizens? " The Republicans knew as well as the President that the negroes were not fit to exercise the franchise, and that to give it to them was to ensure that the Southern States should be badly and corruptly governed for many years to come. But such considerations appear to have troubled them little in comparison with the two political object? which the bill was meant to secure - one, that Northern men, brought into office by the negro vote, should exclude the natural leaders of society at the South from all share in the government of their own states; the other, that military occupation of the states lately in revolt, with the heavy cost and scandal to the democratic principle therein involved, might be rendered unnecessary, the friends and creatures of the North being placed in power by the negro vote, while a show of democratic government still remained. Where the negro vote was not strong enough to produce this result, direct exclusion from power of those who had been lately "rebels" - that is, of the whole white population in most cases, with the exception of a few spies and cowards - was resorted to. Thus, when Tennessee was re-admitted into the Union, in the course of this year, it was on the following conditions. She was to maintain her existing constitution, exclude rebels from suffrage and office for a certain time, ignore the rebel debt, and make no payment for emancipated slaves.