Other events powerfully contributed to the political overthrow of the President. After the change in his policy in the summer and autumn of 1865, which has already been noted, the Southern rebels, who had at first been cast down and discouraged, saw before them the prospect of regaining complete ascendency in their respective States. As the division between the President and Congress widened, their confidence increased; and as their confidence increased, a reign of lawlessness and outrage against the rights of the defenseless was inaugurated. The negroes, who had begun to learn their freedom, were not only subjected to laws of practical re-enslavement, but to a treatment whose brutality could not have been foreseen. It was estimated that before the adjournment of Congress more than a thousand negroes and many white Unionists had been murdered in the South, without even the slightest attempt at prosecuting the murderers. Though the aggregate number of victims was so great, they were scattered over so vast a territory that it was difficult to impress the public mind of the North with the real magnitude of the slaughter. But this incredulity vanished in a moment when the nation was startled on the 30th of July, two days after the adjournment of Congress, by a massacre at New Orleans, which had not the pretense of justification or even or provocation.
The circumstances that led to it may be briefly stated. The convention which formed the free constitution of the State in 1864 was ordered to re-assemble by its president, upon authority which, he held, was conferred upon him by the convention at the time the constitution was formed. Apprehending that some measures were to be taken hostile to the re-establishment of rebel power in the State of Louisiana, it was resolved by the opponents of the Republican party that the members of the convention should not be allowed to come together and organize. Threats were insufficient to effect this end. Intimidation of every character had been tried in vain. The men who thought they had the right, as American citizens, to meet for conference refused to be bullied out of their plain privileges under the guarantees of the National Constitution. There was a dispute as to their legal right to take any action touching the constitution of the State--a dispute altogether proper for judicial inquiry. Even if they had assembled and proceeded to amend the constitution, their action could have had no binding effect until approved by the vote of the people. The question which lay at the bottom of the agitation was that of negro suffrage; but the negroes were not entitled to vote under the constitution as its stood, nor could they vote upon an amendment to the constitution conferring the right of suffrage upon them. Whatever the convention might do, therefore, would be ineffectual until approved by a majority of the white men of the State. It obviously followed that the men who violently resisted the assembling of the convention could not justify themselves by the declaration that negro suffrage was about to be imposed upon them. Their position practically was that a majority of the white population should not exercise the right of giving suffrage to the negro.