Report of the
Committee.

Const. 179, says, The law of Congress punishes
treason, on conviction, with death, but declares
that no conviction or judgment for any capital or
other offence shall work corruption of blood, or
any forfeiture of estate. The history of other
countries abundantly proves that one of the strong
incentives to prosecute offences, as treason, has
been the chance of sharing in the plunder of the
victims. Rapacity has been thus stimulated to
exert itself in the service of the most corrupt
tyranny; and tyranny has been thus furnished
with new opportunities of indulging its malignity
and revenge, of gratifying its envy of the rich and
good, of increasing its means to reward favorites,
and secure retainers for the worst deeds. In
eighteen hundred and sixty-two they declared the
penalty of treason to be death, and freedom to the
slaves of the traitor; or imprisonment and fine,
and freedom to his slaves. But no provision has
been made whereby civil and political rights were
to be forfeited; and it is too late to attempt to do
so now, even by constitutional amendment.
The Reconstruction Committee do not pretend
to claim the forfeiture of civil and political rights
by virtue of the Constitution and Laws of the
United States. For though, rather inconsistently,
they call the people of the late Confederate States
at one time insurgents, rebels and traitors, and as
such of course answerable only to the laws of the
United States, yet at other times they call them
public enemies of the United States, conquered in
war, and under the Committee's interpretations of
the law of nations governing the results of a civil
war that not only all civil and political privileges,
but even the lives, liberty and property of all those
people, are at the absolute disposal of their con-
querors, subject only to their ideas of the require-
ments of humanity. Certainly, enlightened civil-
ization and Christianity have done little to relieve
war of the horrible barbarities of ignorant and
despotic times if any such law is now recognized
in civilized countries as applicable to a Constitu-
tional Republic!
Vattel states the law of nations thus : If a town
which made part of a republic or a limited mon-
archy, and enjoyed a right of sending deputies to