The Republicans in Congress, checked for a time by Johnson, were at length to have entire sway under Thaddeus Stevens.

Reconstruction was to be thorough and merciless.

To meet these conditions was the first requirement of the Courier-Journal, a newspaper conducted by outlawed rebels and published on the sectional border line.
The task was not an easy one.
There is never a cause so weak that it does not stir into ill-timed activity some wild, unpractical zealots who imagine it strong.

There is never a cause so just but that the malevolent and the mercenary will seek to trade upon it.

The South was helpless; the one thing needful was to get it on its feet, and though the bravest and the wisest saw this plainly enough there came to the front--particularly in Kentucky--a small but noisy body of politicians who had only worked themselves into a state of war when it was too late, and who with more or less of aggression, insisted that "the states lately in rebellion" still had rights, which they were able to maintain and which the North could be forced to respect.
I was of a different opinion.