Mr. MAYNARD of Tennessee addressed the House. [His remarks will be published in the Appendix] Speech entitled Reconstruction. February 12, 1867. The House having under consideration the bill (H.R.No. 1143) to provide for the more efficient government of the insurrectionary States, Mr. Allison, being entitled to the floor, gave way to. Mr. MAYNARD, who said: Mr. SpeakER: My thanks are due to the Gentfrom Iowa [Mr. ALLIsoN] for this brief opportunity of stating to the House that, in my opinion, the time requires positive af. firmative action at our hands. In the ordinary course of affairs we might let things pass on until we could devise something better than the existing, condition.. The present time, however, will not permit us to do that. It requires us to move forward or to be thrust irrevocably and irretrievably backward. The few minutes that I have will not permit me to array proofs. I but state proven facts when I assert that throughout the region of the unreconstructed States the animating, life giving principle of the rebellion is as thoroughly in possession of the country and of all the political power there today as it ever has been since the 1st gun was fired upon Fort Sumter. Individual wrongs, enormities, and atrocities mark certain portions and make them blacker than the rest. There are still wide regions of country in which nowhere is loyalty to this Government, love to the old flag, the prevailing or even the tolerated sentiment. The rebellion is alive. It is strong—strong in the number of its votaries, strong in the wealth and culture of its leading and controlling spirits, strong in its social influences, strong in its political power, having in its ranks the leaders of political affairs in the South during the past few years, I might almost say without exception and on either side strong in the belief that the mine r ities in the northern States are in sentiment with them; strong in the belief that the existing governments in all the southern States, except in Missouri and Tennessee, are in league with them; strong in the endeavor to secure the control of the governments in these 2 States, especially the latter; strong in the belief that the executive dept of this Government is in sympathy and community of purpose with them; strong in the belief that the controlling majority of the supreme judiciary of the land is with them in legal opinion: strong in the belief that the controversy in this body between impracticable zeal and incorrigible timidity will prevent anything of importance being accomplished or any legislation matured. The vote that we gave the other day, sending a bill then under discussion to the ComReconstruction—to the tomb of the Capulets, as it was fondly believed—was an incident that gave the rebel leaders infinite hope, animating their courage, and making them more confident than ever that their cause was in the ascendent and their ultimate triumph assured. The moral effect of what we have done today in the passage of the Louisiana bill, when it comes to be known through the country, as in a few hours it will be, will I trust neutralize the effect of that vote, at least prevent it from being misunderstood. The present bill is opposed as inapplicable to the condition of restored peace. }: is not quite accurate to say that we are at peace; that there is no war. What peace is it? The peace of Vesuvius at rest, the peace of the slumbering volcano; the fires banked up, not extinguished; the strength of the combat ants exhausted, but their wrath unappeased; no longer able to continue the conflict, but awaiting a more favorable opportunity to renew it. It is the cessation of hostilities rather than peace. This condition of things surprises and disappoints many. Many are incredulous of it as an existing fact. It is frequently spoken of as indicating a spirit very much intensified in bitterness and far different from what prevailed at the close of the war, or rather at the close of active military operations. Sir, that is a great misapprehension. The spirit there now is the spirit that was there then. It is not the rebellion that has changed; it is you who have changed in your estimate of it. We all of us hoped—it was, I suppose, the universal belief—that the war having been waged until the arms of the rebellion were actually wrested from the hands that held them, when it must have been seen, when it was seen that the physical power of this Union was irresistible, it was hoped and believed by everybody that the spirit of the rebellion would subside and the result be accepted as conclusive. The country largely acted in that belief; measures were suggested and adopted by the official authorities in that belief: with what result has been too often and too vividly portrayed in this House to need repetition. I have no word of censure for any man or any community of men not personally conversant with the rebellion who failed to understand its deep, ineradicable wickedness. It was a manifestation of evil, an exemplification of depravity, which in its nature they could not have comprehended any more than an inhab itant of the tropics could comprehend the nature of snow or the solidity of ice. It was something of the like of which they had had no experience. Human nature attained here to a measure of perversity, new in kind as well as degree. When the clash of arms ceased the whole country included within the limits of the ten now unrepresented States was supposed to be ripe for the immediate restoration of civil government, held as it then was by our armies under the sole authority of military commanders assigned to the several depts. There was great haste to supplant martial law by the civil law, and give back to the people republican self government, which, according to our theory; the war had overthrown. The Government, represented by the Executive, went immediately to work for the purpose of reorganizing governments there. F. various steps taken are familiar to us, and the result is unfortunately too patent and obvious. A gen: erous confidence was extended to defeated rebels and shamefully betrayed, covering not only themselves with dishonor, but their benefactor with obloquy. The rebellion had cost one President his life; and it has cost another President, I am sorry to say, more than his life —his reputation. I say this not in reproach. I cannot believe, I will not believe, that he co templated the results that have been reached. I do not believe, the country will not believe. that the gentlemen, the statesmen whom he selected, in some instances, at least, as his agents, Governor Holden of NCarolina, Governor Johnson of Georgia, and Governor Hamilton of Texas, would ever have consented for a single moment to be used as instrument alities for the restoration in their respective States of the rebel power in its present hideous shape, defying the national authority, setting at naught the laws, and contemning the rights of all men but its own votaries. All that has been done by them under the Executive authority was done with far different wishes and purposes. So far certainly as they are concerned, and I am content to accord the same liberal judgment to their principal, their whole provisional administration was a simple mistake and neces. sarily a failure. It was an attempt to provide civil government for a people not in a fit condition for civil government. They should have been kept under military rule until the passions excited by the war had time to subside and give place to a quiet submission to the national authority. How far this is from being the case now we can see by the official acts of their judiciary and Legislatures, by the language of their public men, especially by the tone of their press, (some passages from which, by permission of the House, I will append,) and negatively by the absence of every expression of fealty or true allegiance to the U.S. We should address ourselves, then, seriously, earnestly, and without delay to the existing condition of things there. You proposed at the last session an amendment to our national Constitution as the basis upon which their governments should be reorganized and they should be restored to their previous relations with the Federal Government. But that has been unanimously, ostentationsly, contemptuously spurned and spit upon by them; rejected in every way by which a people without a recognized government could reject an offer of conciliation; rejected by them in private and in their public assemblages, representative and primary; in speech and by writing; by individual oaths of profanity and by solemn resolutions of congregated bodies. You have, therefore, no hope from that quarter. something you are bound to do, bound by every consideration that can bind public men. Power undoubted and plenary is in your hands, I do not say against States as bodies politic; I will not say against the South, whatever that may be; but power against the personal, individual, men, women, ay, and children if you will, who attempted the life of this nation and waged war to overthrow it; power that extends to the taking, if need be, of every life and every particle of their property; power constitutional, legal, just, possibly not unconnected with a duty; power as absolute and complete as the power to pass an ordinary appropriation bill for the payment of the salaries of the President or the supreme judges. When you declare war, you may do to your enemy all the things permissible by the bloody code of war. They who boastfully, defiantly, and with long prearrangement provoked the nation to a conflict of arms, empowered you to do your pleasure. them and theirs to the extent of your physical force, restrained only by the precepts of Christian civilization. Conquered, there is no law for them, but the will of the conqueror. Vae victis, is the severe and compendious law of the sword. I will not argue this proposition to show from what source the power, in my opinion, is derived; a proposition which has been studied carefully and long, and which I am willing, limited as is my ability, to maintain at all F. times against all comers. But in the few minutes now allotted to me of course I can. not do more than to state propositions of this kind, reserving their discussion for another. time, possibly for another forum. Away. with the cobwebs by which the schoolmen of the law, who lurk spider wise among the husks of the letter without penetrating to the invig. orating and germinating kernel; away with. the film and gossamer by which sentimental; ism, humanitarianism, and optimism would bind the giant arms and the stalwart limbs of this vigorous young nation. To understand the Constitution and our form of government we must read it in the light of those high principles which inspired the men who framed it — the giants of an earlier and altogether heroic age—Hamilton and Sherman and King and the Pinckneys and Madison and Franklin and Robert Morris, with Washington presiding over their grave deliberation, all of whose forms on cairn vass should like his be placed in parnels, these and their statues of marble in the niches of these galleries, that by their symbolic presence they might remind us of those lofty Sento maents of personal liberty and national gran delar by which they were inspired. While I hold that we have the power, full, rraple, unlimited, as I have already stated it, would not use a particle of it beyond what TNN as necessary to maintain the life of the nation = and to put down and extinguish all hostility to g it. I would do nothing in vengeance; noth ting in hatred. My motto would be “Malice o: toward none, charity for all.” But that is not a charity which sheds tears over the fate of the a guilty and leaves the innocent to suffer. That, is not malice which restrains the enemies of the cIne untry, and by denying them the power re oves from them the temptation to renew their hostilities. The safety of the nation and the protection of its friends I would make the measure of our action. Iing would attempt noth more, I would rest satisfied with nothing less. While hitherto we have kept steadily before us the national safety, there has been manifested quite as much anxiety not to disturb our enemies as to protect from disturbance our friends. The bill before us and now under considera.tion is simple in its character. Its simplicity consists in this: that it is merely retrograding a period of 20 months, turning back the finger upon the dial plate to that extent and no more; placing that part of the country in the position it was in at the close of hostilities, disregarding the civil governments which they kave attempted to set up, and placing them once more under military control, preliminary to reorganizing civil governments upon another o o and a o different basis. Gentleman say, and with a great deal of force, that a military government is not desir able or agreeable, hardly tolerable. Why, sir, we who have lived under military rule for years understand that perfectly well. But bad as it is, military government or any government that I can conceive of is better for loyal of men, Union men, white or black, than rebel rule. Besides, we have allegations against our to military commanders that they are liable to be to seduced by rebel blandishments. That also is very true. The policy of the rebels during the war, and I suppose it will be the same again, seems to have been borrowed from the habits of the feline species, purring and rubbing gently and pleasantly while that would avail, and when that failed the sharp claws from behind the velvet. [Here the hammer fell.] Mr. ALLISON resumed the floor.