A course not dissimilar to that adopted in Virginia was followed in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee. In all of them the so-called "ten per cent" governments established under Mr. Lincoln's authority were now recognized. Governor Hahn was held to be the true executive of Louisiana,--a concession all the more readily made, because, under the revised constitution of the State, the people would be called upon in the approaching autumn to choose his successor. In Arkansas also, the Government, with Isaac Murphy at its head, was now recognized; and in Tennessee the authority of William G. Brownlow as governor was promptly accepted as constitutional and regular. This Government, as already narrated, had been brought into existence by the earnest effort of Mr. Johnson in the period which had elapsed between his election and inauguration as Vice-President. The direct committal of the President to the legality of his own work was the controlling cause which led to the recognition of the Governments of the four States under consideration. But for the impossibility of disowning or in any way discrediting the existing Government of Tennessee, it is probably that the plan by which provisional governments were established in seven of the rebellious States would have been uniformly applied to the entire eleven which formed the Confederacy. The same executives would doubtless have been selected for provisional service, but there would have been evident advantage in treating all the States in precisely the same manner.
The scope and design of the President's reconstruction policy were thus made fully apparent. The work was committed to the white men of the several States, who, outside of the excepted classes, were ready to take the oath of allegiance to the Government. They were empowered to form the Convention which should shape the organic law of the State, and in that law they were authorized to establish the basis of suffrage,--a right which the President held to belong to the State, to be, indeed, inalienable from the State. It was, therefore, evident that the white men who were allowed to regain all the rights of citizenship by a mere oath of fidelity would not, in framing an organic law for the State, exclude the classes whom the President had excepted from pardon. The excluded classes had been the leaders, the commanders, the men of position, the friends and the patrons of those who, only less guilty because less influential and powerful, were now intrusted with the initial work in the re-establishment of civil Government in their respective States.