^LIBRARY OF (CONGRESS. # 
 
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 J UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. | 
 
SPEECH 
 
 OF PENNSYLVANIA, 
 
 THE EECONSTRUCTION OF THE UNION- 
 
 DELIVERED 
 
 IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, FEBRUARY 10, 1866. 
 
 "t^X 
 
 ^'^>^ 
 
 <£f W' 
 
 WAS[IINGTON: 
 PRINTED AT THE CONGRESSIONAL (II.ORE OFFICE, 
 

RECONSTRUCTION. 
 
 The House resumed the consideration of the Pres- 
 ident's message, as in Committee of the Whole on 
 the state of the Union. 
 
 Mr. WILLIAMS said: 
 
 Mr. Speaker: Nearly two years ago, and 
 wliile the war was flagrant, I felt it my duty 
 as a member of this body to look into the 
 question of the relations that had been pvo- 
 duced by it, the privileges that had been for- 
 feited on the one hand, and the rights and 
 powers that had been acquired on the other, 
 with a view to the readjustment of the whole ma- 
 chine by the restoration of those parts that had 
 been sundered from it by the disturbance. With 
 some — the infirm of f^ith — the inquiry was 
 thought to be premature. This, however, was 
 not the judgment of the last Congress. It passed 
 a bill which did not meet the approval of the 
 Executive, because it interfered with a plan of 
 liis own that had not proved acceptable to it, 
 and the question was adjourned without advice 
 from that bod}-, and in such a way as to leave 
 the field open for experiments with which it 
 v.as not in a condition to interfere. 
 
 'I'he people are here again in the persons of 
 their representatives, who are the law-making 
 power of the nation, not on invitation, but by 
 (_•( uistltutional mandate, to inquire what has been 
 attempted, and to decide for themselves what 
 s'.iall be done with the Territories that have been 
 (•■•inquered ])y their arms. It is agreed on all 
 hands that they shall be eventually readmitted 
 as members of the common family. It is not 
 pretended by anybody that they can resume 
 their places here of their own mere volition, and 
 without any consent of ours. It is not insisted, 
 I think, by any well-read statesman, that our 
 power to exclude depends only on our right to 
 determine upon the qualifications of our own 
 members. It is confessed that there is an or- 
 ganic lesion that forbids their return, and can 
 only l)e supplied by a new organization which 
 no act of spontaneous generation can produce. 
 It will scarcely be contended now. I suppose, 
 
 as it was by an eccentric committee of the last 
 House, that our victory was crowned only with 
 a lapse of sovereignty, or that the jurisdiction 
 to restore a lost member is anywhere but here. 
 I shall be excused, of course, for returning to 
 this subject under circumstances that not only 
 invite, Ijut compel its discussion. If it was not 
 proj^er for Congress to prescribe in advance the 
 law that was to govern this question in the last 
 resort, at all events, while other agencies, mis- 
 taking perhaps its backwardness for an abdi- 
 cation of its rightful powers, were industriously 
 employed in forestalling its own action, it is no 
 longer possible, in view of what has occurred 
 since the last adjournment, and of the forces 
 that have been mustered to overbear our delib- 
 erations here, to avoid a conflict that has been 
 so long foreshadowed. 
 
 To determine this great question, the great- 
 est by far that has ever challenged the deliber- 
 ' ations of an American Congress, it is important 
 to inquire, in the first place, what is the posture 
 of these Territories, as it has been affected by the 
 progress and results of the war, which has just 
 been determined by their enforced submission 
 to the authority of the nation? 
 
 So far, at least, as armed resistance is con- 
 cerned, it may be assumed that the war is at an 
 end. The deluded communities that have so 
 v/antonly insulted this Government and defied 
 its power, now lie conquered, and helpless, and 
 in social ruin at our feet, deprived, by their own 
 act — I will not say, in thelanguageof the proc- 
 lamations that have been addressed to them, (if 
 ' ' all civil government whatever " — but certainly 
 of all the organism that was essential to the 
 maintenance of their old relations to the LTnion. 
 To claim any more than this, would be to as- 
 sume a condition of anarchy, where there is 
 still a "supreme law" under the Constitution, 
 and where, even in the absence of such a rule, 
 the territory reclaimed must necessaril)!- pass 
 luider the jurisdiction and law of the conqueror. 
 Taking it. however, to he true, as stated, then, 
 
by necessary inference, the civil law of the 
 Union is dethroned, and its military power is 
 all that remains to hold these States in subjec- 
 tion to our authoritj\ In point of fact, we do 
 so hold them now — except so far as they have 
 been surrendered to the enemy — without other 
 law than our own sovereign will. The supreme 
 executive functionary of this nation, who, by 
 virtue of hisofiice, is the Commander-in-Chief 
 of its armies, feeling that they were not in a 
 condition to be trusted to themselves, instead 
 of sheathing the sword, convoking the repre- 
 sentatives of the people, advising them that 
 these provinces were tranquillized, and submit- 
 ting to them, as the law-making power, the 
 grave question, what is to be done with them? 
 has preferi'ed to await the usual period of our 
 assemblage, and appointed his lieutenants and 
 proconsuls to govern them in the meanwhile, 
 with the aid of armies, and the ten-ors of that 
 arbitrary code which is known by the name of 
 martial law. We are here now, however, and 
 it becones our first duty to relieve that officer 
 from this unusual and inappi'opriate task, and 
 to furnish some security to the conquered peo- 
 ple by the substitution of another and a gentler 
 rule. • 
 
 I v/ould not be understood, however, as ques- 
 tioning the exercise of a sovereignty like this, 
 so long as it was necessitated by the absence of 
 a legislative power, since that is but a logical 
 consequence of the position previously main- 
 tained by me on this floor, that these States had 
 ceased to be members of the Union, and passed 
 into the condition of Territories. If they con- 
 tinued to be States, within the meaning of the 
 Constitution, the moment the resistance ceased 
 it would have been the duty of the Executive 
 to withdraw the armies, and they would have at 
 once resumed their status quo aide,\\ith. all their 
 constitutional rights and privileges unimpaired. 
 If they were still States, all that has been done 
 since, even though the poAver of Congress had 
 been invoked to authorize it, would have been 
 the clearest of usurpations. Taking them, how- 
 ever, to have been " deprived," in the language 
 of the proclamations, "of all civil government 
 whatever," it was but a legitimate inference of 
 the Executive, that they had not onlj- forfeited 
 rheir elective franchise, and lost their property 
 in slaves, but placed i,hemselves in a condition j 
 where they were no longer entitled even to the | 
 benefit of the constitutional guaranty without a i 
 new l)irtli. The idea of any State, except that | 
 of nature, without any " ' civil governm^ent what- i 
 ever," is as incomprehcn^i]Jle to me as that of ! 
 a State being in the Union, or indeed any- 
 •vlicre, that is admitted to have no existence 
 ■vjiatever. 
 
 No more would I be inclined tociuarrel with 
 iJiose wlio, starting from these premises, are 
 still disposed to insist that tliese States were 
 never out. The difference is perhaps only the 
 result of a want of precision in j^lic use of terms, 
 or a diversity of op) nion in regard to th(;ir mean- 
 ing. Mr. Burke lias furnished u.s >vith a distinc- 
 
 tion here that meets the case precisely. " The 
 word State, "he remarks in his letter to Sir Her- 
 cules Langrishe, on the subject of the extension 
 of the elective franchise to the Irish Catholic*. 
 "is one of much ambiguity. Sometimes it is 
 used to signify the whole commonwealth, com- 
 prehending all its orders, with the several priv- 
 ileges belonging to each. Sometimes it signi- 
 fies only the higher, and ruling part of the corii- 
 monwealth, which is commonly called the gov- 
 ernment." In the former of these senses, it is 
 not to be doitbted that these communities still 
 exist"", and are in the Union, or of the Union, 
 because their territories belong to it, and their 
 people owe it allegiance. In the latter, how- 
 ever — and that is the one that connects them 
 with our political system, as the proclamations 
 concede — they are admitted by the same proc- 
 lamations to have been destroyed, and can, of 
 course, be nowhere. And this will be found \() 
 reconcile the apparent contradiction between 
 the language of the proclamations, and the ac- 
 cordant practice of the Government on the one 
 hand, and the theory of those who are sup- 
 posed to speak its opinions, and infer from 
 some unhappy phraseology of the former, as 
 well as from the more recent utterances of the 
 message, the repugnant idea that there was a 
 constitution of government left existing amirl 
 the general wreck, in a case v/here it had been 
 previously declared in terms that there was 
 " no civil government whatever." 
 
 There can be no real dispute, therefore, be- 
 tween the Executive and his northern friends 
 as to the posture of these dilapidated members. 
 Their entire treatment by him shows that they 
 have only been regarded practically as con- 
 quered provinces. I deprecate, however, the 
 encouragement that has been given to the ene- 
 mies of the Government, by the promulgation of 
 the fallacious doctrine, which has found so ready 
 a currency among the disaffected of the North. 
 and has proved so welcome to the unrepentanl 
 rebels of the South, that these disorganized 
 States have n.ever ceased to be members of the 
 Federal Union. That is the present theory ol' 
 every traitor, North or South, who has been in- 
 sisting for four 1 ong years of war on the right, a > 
 well as the /ad of secession. With strong as- 
 surances of pardon, they can well afford to risk 
 the consequences of treason, by repudiating the 
 belligerency upon which they have heretofore 
 claimed immuuit}' for their crime, if it will re- 
 store them to their original rights, and serve 
 them as an argument against the legality of the 
 proclamation that has stripped them of their 
 property in slaves. Grant them the postulati- 
 that all tlieir acts of secession were not a fad. 
 but a nullity — that the crime which they com- 
 mitted was impossible, because it was forbid- 
 den — and if they cainiot invalidate the war, and 
 the debt that was made by it. they will at leaM 
 stagger your courts with the question, by what 
 authority under the Constitution, you have pre- 
 sumed to deprive the people of a State loithrn 
 the Union, by proclamation and without judg- 
 
Tuciit of law, of any of their franchises or prop- 
 t-rty. They will admit it now as an incident of 
 the war — if there was a war, or could be, where 
 there was no secession, and therefore no belli- 
 gerent — so far as the thing was consummated by 
 an actual seizure, just as they are now ready to 
 coniess that the right of secession has been dis- 
 ]>roved by the logic of the sword — which means 
 only by their present inability to maintain it by 
 that argument — while their northern brethren 
 still assert the very heresy upon which it rests. 
 But once in, they will take you at your word, 
 and insist that all your intermediate acts were 
 nullities as well as theirs. 
 
 Agreeing, however, as we all do, that these 
 States, without any local law or governments of 
 their own, have passed under the law of the con- 
 queror — and tlie attempt to reorganize them by 
 Federal authority is an admission of it — the next 
 question, into the discussion of which we are 
 now prematurely hurried, is not how they are 
 to be governed until they shall be in a condi- 
 tion to return — because that seems to have been 
 assumed to be no business of ours — l)ut whether 
 that condition has been reached, and what are 
 to be the agencies and terms, through and upon 
 v/hich this consummation is to be effected. 
 
 If there be any one question that more than 
 another falls within the exclusive cognizance 
 of the people of the loyal States, and deserves 
 and demands the thoughtful consideration of 
 their Representatives, it is just this. Eleven of 
 the columnar supports of our political edifice 
 are now lying around us, like the giant columns 
 of Tadmor and Palmyra, with shaft, and capi- 
 tal, and architrave alike shattered by the mighty 
 convulsion that has laid them all in ruins. 
 Where is the hand that is to lift these columns 
 to their place? Who is it that shall reunite the 
 dissevered fragments, and wreathe the ivy over 
 the towers that have been rent from turret to 
 foundation? What are to be the jirocess and 
 the conditions, on which these great criminals, 
 who, "like the base Judean," have wantonly 
 tiling away ''a pearl richer than all their tribe," 
 are to be readmitted into the enjoyment of the 
 privileges they have rejected and despised, and 
 received again into the fellowship of the men 
 they hated, and the confidence and honors of 
 the Government they have only failed to de- 
 stroy, becjiuse it has proved too strong even for 
 a degree of treachery that has no parallel in 
 history? How far are these baffled parricides 
 to 1)0 trusted again, now that they are van- 
 quished, and without power of resistance, after 
 such an experience, after so bloody a lesson 
 as they have taught us— and what are the guards 
 that will be required to prevent a recurrence of 
 any of the evils from which" we have just es- 
 caped? AH these are problems which, however 
 simpilo they may have been considered in some 
 quarters, might well embarrass the profoundest 
 of our statesmen, and which all the collective 
 wisdom of the nation will nf)t be more than 
 sufficient to solve. The war itself, stupendous 
 as it has proved, was nothing in the compari- 
 
 son. There never was a reasonable dottbt as to 
 the suppression of the rebellion, provided the 
 loyal States should prove true to themselves. 
 It was a purely arithmetical problem, of v/hich 
 the elements were within the reach of every- 
 body. If all the slave States had been united, 
 eighteen millions of northern freemen, with the 
 credit, and resources, and prestige of this great 
 Government on their side, and man for man 
 the peers of their enemy, were sure to subdue 
 less than one half their number, with four mil- 
 lions of a disaffected population in their midst, 
 as soon as they were allowed to strike at the 
 heart of the rebellion, and it came to be under- 
 stood that it was to be a war a Vcmtranci'. The 
 only real danger was in the prospective and 
 inevitable process of reconstruction. It was a 
 question only whether there M'ould be wisdclm 
 enough in the councils of the nation to profit 
 by the heroism of our soldiers in the field, or 
 folly enough to throw away the fruits of the 
 many sacrifices that this long and bloody war 
 had cost us, by ignoring our past experience, 
 and rushing with headlong precipitation, and 
 immature resolve, into measures of restoration, 
 resting on no system, or- principle, and reserv- 
 ing no guarantees for the future. We have just 
 reached that point. The rebellion, so far, at 
 all events, as armed resistance is concerned, is 
 over. We still tread, however, on the ashes of 
 an unextinguished volcano — ^^supposifo cinere 
 doloso.^^ ''An earthquake's spoils are sei3ul- 
 chered below." The ground still heaves and 
 trembles; the fiery fiood still surges and pulsates 
 beneath our feet; and already, almost before 
 the thunders of our artillery have rolled into 
 the distance, and while the smoke of Ijattle is 
 still upon the plain- — ^without a moment's pause 
 to survey the wide field of ruin, and reach for- 
 ward, if possible, with telescopic vision into^Jl 
 the bearings, and all the remotest possible con- 
 sequences of the act which we are called ujoon 
 to do — a childish impatience is urging us upon 
 a path where angels might fear to tread, ami 
 expecting us to crowd the structure of an em- 
 pire — the ordinary work of centuries — into the 
 deliberations of an hour. 
 
 Uljou considerations such as these, I would 
 have preferred to wait until the two Houses, 
 acting in their legislative capacities, and in the 
 spirit of statesmen who are charged with the 
 interests of half a continent, had matured some 
 plan which would secure uniformity in our pro- 
 ceedings here, while it furnished to the whole 
 country — to the loyal people of the returning 
 States, as well as to ourselves — all the safeguards 
 which the circumstances of the case required. 
 My judgment is that you can proceed lawfully 
 in no other way. If restoration is the object ; 
 if these State governments have been destroyed 
 and must be organized anew; if the people of 
 these States must be enabled to restore them 
 to thi^ir old relations, and put them in a way to 
 entitle them to claim the benefits of the consti- 
 tutional guaranty through the agency of the 
 Federal authorities; if they must be readmitted; 
 
6 
 
 if the guaranty is to be fulfilled — all which 
 things are conceded by the proclamations — then 
 it is as clear as sunlight that nothing short of an 
 act of Congress — a law in all its constitutional 
 forms — can accomplish this work. But I am in 
 no hurry even as to this. Festina lente is the 
 motto for a statesman. States are of slow growth. 
 A century is but a day in the life of a nation. 
 A great poet has said — 
 
 "A thousand years scarce serve to form a State; 
 An hour may lay it in the dust." 
 
 To heal the wounds inflicted by a four years' 
 civil war is not the work of a day. If we would 
 do it well, we must imitate the processes of 
 nature, beginning at the bottom and working 
 slov/ly to the surface. Sound statesmanship 
 would declare in favor of this course in any case. 
 It would tolerate no other where there is so little 
 excuse for precipitancj', where there is no real 
 pressure except that which is invited by our- 
 selves, and where a mistake once made, how- 
 ever disastrous in its effects, would be absolutely 
 irremediable. That privilege is, however, denied 
 to us. Though we had declined to court this 
 issue by going out to meet it, it has come to seek 
 lis hero, and if we have not been allowed to pro- 
 vide by law, in advance of the occasion, a rule 
 which shall govern all cases, we must at least 
 meet it in the more questionable shape in which 
 it presents itself, though under disadvantages 
 not unlike those we had_to encounter with the 
 same parties at the beginning of the war. 
 
 The present Executive of the nation, acting 
 upon the prevalent idea that it is the duty of 
 the Government to take the initiative step in 
 the process of restoration, nistead of awaiting 
 any spontaneous action, or the expression of 
 any desire on the part of the people of the rebel 
 States to return to their original relations in 
 the Union — which could be only properly con- 
 veyed by an appeal to Congress — has, in the 
 recess of this body, and on the cessation of act- 
 ive hostilities in these States, concluded it to be 
 his duty to direct their organization, along with 
 the process by which it is to be effected, in order 
 to entitle them to the benefit of tlie constitu- 
 tional guaranty, and has accordingly indicated 
 his plan in a series of proclamations, which are 
 all of the like tenor, though differing in some 
 respects from the plan of his predecessor. The 
 presumption was that they v.'ould in all in- 
 stances conform to the law that he had pre- 
 scribed for them. Having so complied, they 
 would naturally expect that their immediate 
 lawgiver, although then understood to admit 
 the ultimate decision to rest with Congress 
 alone, would recommend their admission, and 
 enforce that recommendation with all the influ- 
 ence that he could lawfully exert. It becomes 
 important, therefore, to look into that process, 
 and ascertain whether it was consistent with 
 the spirit of our institutions; whether it rested 
 on any correct view of the relations with which 
 it had to deal ; and how far it was calculated to 
 secure the object for which it was professedly 
 contrived. 
 
 A careful analysis of these instruments will 
 be found to result in the development of the 
 following leading propositions : 
 
 1. They admit the continuing existence of 
 a state of war, and profess to rest on the two- 
 fold authority of the President, as Commander- 
 in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United 
 States, as well as supreme civil executive magis- 
 trate of the Union. 
 
 2. They declare the i^eople of these States to 
 have been deprived by their own acts of all 
 civil government whatever. 
 
 3. They confess the necessity of a new ox- 
 ganization, for the purpose of restoring their 
 constitutional relations with the Federal Gov- 
 ernment, and preseiiting such form of govern- 
 ment as will entitle them to the benefit of its 
 guaranties, and therein admit that they are net 
 so entitled in their present condition. 
 
 4. They concede that the new organization 
 must receive its impulse and direction from 
 without, and be assisted by the cooperative 
 action of the Federal authorities. 
 
 5. Confessing, however, that these States are 
 not now entitled to the benefit of the constitu- 
 tional guaranty, they assert, in effect, that under 
 it, the Federal Goverament is bound to place 
 them in a position which will enable thein to 
 claim it, and assume that thefuMillmentof that 
 guaranty is a purely executive function, to be 
 jjertbrmed in such a way as the judgment of 
 the President may determine. 
 
 6. They direct, accordingly, the assemblage 
 .of conventions at the earliest practicable day, 
 
 and define and ascertain the qualifications of 
 the voters. 
 
 7. In fixing those qualifications they adopt a 
 standard that is entirely new, by limiting the 
 franchise, not to the white men generally, but 
 to such only of the people who were invested 
 with that prerogative under the government 
 that is admitted to have been destroyed, as are 
 loyal, and will swear to'support, not the Con- 
 stitution only, but all laws and proclamations 
 during the rebellion having reference to the 
 emancipation of slaves. 
 
 8. Admitting, moreover, that tliese States 
 are without any civil government whatever, and 
 that they must necessarily organize anew, they 
 insist that it shall be done upon the partial rec- 
 ognition of a government that has been de- 
 stroyed, liy a process, not of organization at 
 all, but of amendment and alteration only, that 
 shall work simply on that part of the defunct 
 corpus which was left untouched by the ordi- 
 nances of secession, and whose continued ex- 
 istence would involve a denial of the right of 
 Federal interference, and is in direct contradic- 
 tion of the premises on which these proclama- 
 tions rest. 
 
 U. They look, moreover, to the employment 
 of the military arm in the execution and en- 
 forcement of the scheme of restoration which 
 they involve. 
 
 With all proper respect for the Executive, I 
 am constrained to say that there are evidences 
 
here, either that these procl.imations could not 
 liave been considered or digested with the care 
 which so great an occasion woiikl seem to have 
 demanded, or that the case might not unprof- 
 ital dy have been transferred from the other end 
 (if the Avenue, to its appropriate forum in the 
 great council of the nation, assembled here to 
 (lelibcrate upon its interests, and vested exclu- 
 sively with the high power of legislating in re- 
 gard to its Territories, of admitting new States, 
 and of fulfilling all constitutional guarantees. 
 M}' reasons for so thinking will, however, be 
 better understood from the remarks I have to 
 oflcr on the several propositions which I have 
 extracted from them. 
 
 It may be safely affirmed, I think, that the 
 existence of a state of war, whether that war be 
 openly aggi-essive and demonstrative in its char- 
 acter, or exhibiting itself only in sullen discon- 
 tent, or disafl'ection, or hatred of the Govern- 
 ment, such as to necessitate the presence of a mil- 
 itary force to compel obedience to the national 
 authority, or to prevent a seizure of the local 
 power, is utterly irreconcilable with the idea 
 of such an organization, as the genius of our 
 institutions, and the very texture of our Govern- 
 )nent would demand. Without the spontaneous 
 and unrestrained volition of the majority of the 
 people, I cannot conceive the idea of the exist- 
 ence, 'or constitution of a republican State. A 
 I'orm of government erected by or for a minor- 
 ity of tlie people, and depending upon armies 
 for its existence or support, would be the merest 
 mockery of a republic, and could not be rec- 
 ognized here consistently with the terms of the 
 constitutional guaranty. It is a self-evident 
 proi^osition that so long as it requires an army, 
 or a E'ederal legate — whether called by the 
 name of provisional governor, lieutenant, com- 
 mandant, proconsul, or pretorian prefect— to 
 govern it, it is not in a condition to perform 
 that task itself ; andthe very appointment, which 
 would be otherwise unlawful, is a confession of 
 it. Wliile the Executive holds the Territory 
 within his grasp a,s the Commander-in-Chief of 
 our armies, he holds it under military law — 
 which is the only law he can administer — and 
 by a power that is absolute ; and it is idle to 
 talk about the restoration of the civil authority 
 by the voluntary act of the people themselves, 
 because he is essentially supreme. The power 
 he wields is above the law, and silences the 
 law. There can be no two codes — no divided 
 imperium here. The man who so rules is es- 
 sentially a dictator ; and it makes no difference 
 in principle whether he prescribes the law for 
 a good purpose, or a bad one. It Is impossible 
 that the people should act freely under such a 
 domination. It is only when it ceases that they 
 can truly be regarded as their own masters. 
 1'he jealousy of our fathers has guarded against 
 the very ])resence of the military on the elec- 
 tion ground, even where the civil law reigned, 
 and the subordination of the military was un- 
 questioned. Where it knows no law, however, 
 except its own will, and stands by to direct and 
 
 execute that will, the acts done, which would 
 be clearly invalidated thereby in the States, are 
 its ov/n. If it assembles conventions and names 
 the voters, they are its creatures. If it elects 
 Congressmen, they represent it only. If the 
 product of its imperial rescript is a republic in 
 form, it is a republic engendered from the de- 
 composing remains of the dead sovereignty, 
 under theiierce embrace of the military power — 
 a republic hatched into life by the spirit of des- 
 potism brooding over a chaos of ruin. To say 
 that a monstrous birth like this, tearing its way 
 through the entrails of the State — a delivery by 
 the sword — assisted by the matronly offices of 
 a provisional governor, and graced b}' a m'ore 
 than royal attendance in the high functionaries 
 of State, "the military commandant of the de- 
 partment, and all officers and persons in the 
 military and naval service," who are expressly 
 summoned to be present on the august occasion 
 — is the legitimate offspring of a free people, or 
 has any of the features of a republic v/ithin the 
 ineaning of the Constitution, is to draw largely 
 on the imagination. Freedom recoils aghast 
 at such an apparition, and shrieks out "death !" 
 Nor will it be sufficient to assert that these 
 sword-bearers were not actually present in the 
 body, and that therefore no control was exer- 
 cised over these provincial councils by their 
 creator and lawgiver. \Ye know that when 
 the fiat went forth publicly to the hesitating 
 synod of North Carolina, that the debt of the 
 rebellion miist be re[)udiated, every knee went 
 down in humble suljinlsslon to the orders of 
 the Commander-in-Chief. We know, too, from 
 the very recent message of the rebel general 
 and Governorof Mississippi, (Humphreys,) who 
 was pardoned specially to qualify him for the 
 place, that it was " under the pressure of Fed- 
 eral bayonets" that the people of that State 
 "have abolished the institution of slavery ;" and 
 it is not uncharitable to infer that the members 
 of all those bodies knew precisely how much 
 would be expected of them, and were prejiared 
 to do the will of the Executive, even though 
 it had extended to suff'rage for the black man. 
 Di.sguise it as we may, these so-called consti- 
 tutions of government are but articles of ca- 
 pitulation after the fact ; treaties between that 
 officer, dealing with^these questions as an abso- 
 lute sovereign, and the chiefs of the rebellion ; 
 terms dictated by the President as a conqueror, 
 in accordance with his own individual and impe- 
 rial will ; agreements reluctantly conceded by 
 them, as the condition not only of pardon, but 
 of restoration to power, but almost invariably 
 repudiated by their followers, in the refusal to 
 ratify them by sending men here who were 
 qualified under the law of Congress to take 
 their places amongst us. That they are so con- 
 sidered, even by themselves, is shown by the 
 recent correspondence between the high con- 
 tracting powers, represented by our Minister of 
 Foreign Relations on the one hand and Gov- 
 ernor Orr of South Carolina on the other, in 
 whicli it is declared bv the latter that the State 
 
8 
 
 convention, which he admits to be a revolu- 
 tionary body, had been dissolved " after having 
 done all that the President requested to be 
 done." It is shown, too, more stronglj^, in the 
 letter of the rebel General Hampton to the 
 people of South Carolina, declining to be a 
 candidate for Governor, on the ground that it 
 might embarrass the Executive in his benevo- 
 lent designs in favor of the South. Though not 
 approving all that was conceded bj' the con- 
 vention, he recommends their acquiescence 
 in what he treats as the demands of the con- 
 queror, on the ground of necessity, and for the 
 special reason that the President "had exhibited 
 a strong disposition not only to protect the South 
 from the radicalism of the North, but to re- 
 instate them in their civil and political rights.'" 
 "It may beassumed," headds, " that when the 
 forms of government are restored, and freedom 
 of speech allowed to us, your late convention will 
 be subjected to harsh criticism, and its action 
 impugned. Should such unhappily be the case, 
 remember that you, the people of South Caro- 
 lina, accepted the convention aspart andparcel 
 of the terms of your surrender. The President 
 liad.no shadow of authority, I admit, under the 
 Constitution of the United States to order a 
 convention in this or any other State ; but as a 
 conqueror he had the right to offer, if not to 
 dictate, terms. The terms offered by him you 
 have accepted. I do not myself fully concur 
 in all the measures adopted by the convention, 
 but I shall cheerfully acquiesce in the action 
 it took to carry out faithfully the terms agreed 
 on. Entertaining these views, I think it our 
 duty to sustain the President of the United 
 States so long as he manifests a disposition to re- 
 store all our rights as a sovereign State. Above 
 all, let us stand by our State. Her record, is 
 honorable, her escutcheon untarnished. ' ' When 
 a man like Hampton speaks of '' the radicalism 
 of the North," we know that he intends the 
 Union party of the free States, who favored the 
 prosecution of the war and elected the President 
 himself, and the men whom they have sent here 
 to declare their will ; and it is on the disposition 
 of the President to protect them from his own 
 friends in the country, and in these Halls — the 
 feeling that they could make a better bargain 
 with him, and were safer in his hands than in 
 rhose of the people and their Congress — that, 
 without one word in favor of the Union, but 
 with an earnest invocation to the people to 
 stand, above all things, by their own honorable 
 and untarnished State, he urges them to sup- 
 port, not the Union, but the President, and 
 him only "so long as he manifests a disposition 
 to restore all their rights as a sovereign State," 
 including, of course, the transcendent and in- 
 alienable right of secession, xind the Execu- 
 tive responds to this presentation of the case, by 
 informing us in his late message that we have 
 nothing to do with the terms of settlement, 
 'i'.-hile the gentleman from New York, [Mr. 
 Raymond,] who is supposed to reflect his opin- 
 ions, is candid enough to put his vindication of 
 
 the special requirementsof that functionary on 
 the same grounds, and in language almost iden- 
 tical with that of the traitor Hampton. It is a 
 waste of time, however, to labor a point like this. 
 If the orders of the Commanding General, as 
 enunciated through the proclamations them- 
 selves, were in point of fact obeyed, it is suffi- 
 cient for the purposes of this argument. To 
 deny his control over the creatures of his own 
 will, because his subordinates did not stand 
 over their deliberations with a drawn sword, 
 v/ould be the merest of subterfuges. As well 
 might it be said that the Maker of all things, 
 who launched the circumambient orbs through 
 tlie immensity of space, and prescribed the law 
 of gravitation forthelr government, was exer- 
 cising no control, because He was not on sleep- 
 less watch at the center of the sysfeni, and tel- 
 egraphing his special orders to Neptune and 
 Uranus, by way of keeping them on the track 
 as they sped their unerring way through the 
 mazy labyrinth of the stellar worlds. 
 
 It will be urged, however, as it has been, that 
 this was a measure of peace; an instrumental- 
 ity essential to tlie tranquillization of those 
 States ; a part of the process for the restoration 
 of order that must precede the withdrawal of 
 the national authority, and would enable the 
 loyal people there to dispense with the farther 
 presence of its armies. The answer is, that if 
 it was intended to place the reins in the hands 
 of the loyal minority of white men, while it con- 
 fesses a condition of things where a republic is 
 impracticable, and an election would be an ab- 
 surdity, it could insure no peace and no })erma- 
 nent ascendency to that element, without con- 
 tinued protection, because it required a military 
 power to inaugurate it — ^just as is now admitted 
 by Governor Brownlow to be the case in Ten- 
 nessee ; and If it was intended merel)" to restore 
 the disloyal majority who governed before the 
 rebellion, and hurried these States Into it, then 
 it was unnecessary. The Idea is, in plain Eng- 
 lish, if not to make them our masters, at least 
 to free them from our authority in the first 
 place, in the hope that it will secure jieace and 
 submission in the future. I cannot consent to 
 any such arrangement. I do not comprehend 
 the value of that tranquillity which is only to be 
 purchased by the abdication of our power, 
 whether it be by the withdrawal of our troops, 
 the restoration to the enemy of tlie arms that 
 he was compelled to lay down on the last of his 
 battle-fields, or the invitation — I should rather 
 say command — to him to share our counsels in 
 the adjustment of the results and the responsi- 
 bilities of the war. If this be peace, it might 
 have been secured at any time, with only the 
 waiver of our right to insist that they shall sit 
 down on the judgment seat, and divide the em- 
 pire with us. It may be secured now by allow- 
 ing them to resume their power and places here, 
 upon the cheap consideration of a temporary 
 acknowledgment that the negro is no longer an 
 article of merchandise, because alUheir chances 
 of success in this rebellion now depend on a 
 
9 
 
 jhange of weapons, and the retransfer of the 
 ;heater of war to the arena where it began. I 
 ■ay in this rebellion, because I am not sanguine 
 niough to consider it at an end — as a very recent 
 jpinion of the Attorney General transmitted by 
 ,he President, admits it is not. There are those, 
 [ know, who cannot comprehend a state of war, 
 inless it comes home to their grosser senses in 
 he rude shock of battalions and the groans of 
 ;he wounded and the dying, and think, there- 
 ore, when the standard drops from the nerve- 
 ess grasp, that this is peace. It is to form a 
 .'•ery inadequate concei^tion of a kind of arbit- 
 ■ament that depends as much on skillful tactics 
 is on hard knocks. If esistance does not always 
 ;ease when its arms are stricken from its hands, 
 rhe victory is not always to the strong. It is as 
 )ften the guerdon of the wise. True, we have 
 ;onquered these people in battle, but what of 
 hat? No man was ever converted from an 
 inemy into a friend by the summary logic of 
 ihot and shell. 
 
 "Who overcomes 
 By force, hath overcome but half his foe." 
 
 Phe demoniac spirit that animated this rebel- 
 ion — the same that mutilated and starved and 
 mtehercd our martyred heroes, that inoculated 
 he veins, and roited off the strong arm of the 
 lorthern warrior with the deadly venom of the 
 azar-house, that baled the yellow fever as mer- 
 chandise for this capital, and that ended by 
 assassinating our President — still lives, unre- 
 leutaut, unsubdued, ferocious, and devilish as 
 iver. The battle still rages, as it did in these 
 Jails long before the outbreak of the rebellion, 
 hough under a new j^hase. 
 
 " What though the field be lost ? 
 All is not lost.'' 
 
 f arms have failed, there are other weapons, 
 ejected by the South in its blind and unrea- 
 oning arrogance, which have proved in other 
 imes more potent in its hands than the puny 
 word that has just been shattered like a pot- 
 herd in its collision with the iron muscle of the 
 inewy laboring man of the free States. A bloody 
 xpericnce has taught them their mistake in 
 rossing swords with the soldiers of the North 
 Qstead of fighting the battle in the Union, and 
 dying on the folly of its statesmen, and the 
 uperior address that harnessed its fierce democ- 
 acy to their triumphal car, and made them the 
 Qasters of the nation until the period of their 
 evolt. Hurled to the earth like theirgreat pro- 
 otypes in crime, how natural to find the like 
 consolation in the reflection : 
 
 'Ilcncoforth their might we know, ami kuow our 
 own ; 
 So as not either to provoke, or dread 
 New war provoked; our better part remains 
 To work in close design, by fraud or guiie. 
 What force effected not." 
 
 But this is not the peace that we have been 
 ;ndeavoring to secure. This is not victory, but 
 lefeat — just such defeat as tiiat which follows 
 ,he astounding paradox that our supposed tri- 
 imph on the Appomattox, that made every 
 leart leap with joy, has only purged the guilt 
 
 of our enemies and reinstated them here with 
 no right impaired, to "beard us in our hall," 
 and "push us from our stools." There is 
 nothing, therefore, in the argument to drive us 
 into such an inversion of the natural and logi- 
 cal order as would be involved in the imposi- 
 tion of State governments by the military arm, 
 any more' than there is to hurry us into a pre- 
 mature and ill-adjusted scheme of restoration, 
 when there is abundant leisure to arrange oui 
 plans, and a false step would be irrevocable. 
 I want a real peace before reorganization and 
 readmission here. Invert the order, and we 
 shall have no peace. It will only amount, as 
 I have before hinted, to a change of weapons, 
 and a retra,nsfer of the seat of war to these 
 Chambers, whence they went out four years 
 ago to try the bloody issue that has been deter- 
 mined against them, just as they had before gone 
 out in couples to seek the blood of some north- 
 ern Representative. 
 
 x\nd now, as to the admission that the people 
 of the seceding States have been deprived of ail 
 civil government whatever. 
 
 During the last Congress, as I have already 
 remarked, I took some pains to show that these 
 States were, by construction of law as well as 
 in point of fact, outside of the Union, because 
 it was apparent that the whole question of our 
 power to deal with them in such a way as to 
 realize the legitimate results of the war, and 
 exact the necessary securities for our future 
 peace, must depend on the relation in which 
 the war had left them. The phraseology, though 
 sufficiently precise, was not perhaps as weil 
 chosen as it might have been, to exclude the idea 
 either that they were out rightfully as States, 
 or out in point of fact territorially. The ^^rari 
 nantes,^^ tne few citizens of those States who, 
 though outlawed by the belligerent relation rec- 
 ognized by our courts, as well as by the whole 
 conduct of the war, and positively established 
 by our legislation here, still remained "faithful 
 among the faithless" would naturally protest 
 against a form of expression that seemed to shut 
 them out from the relation of citizens, and to 
 give them the character of alien enemies; and 
 it is perhaps, therefore, no great matter of sur- 
 prise that the doctrine should have found so 
 little favor in high places. I do not care to re- 
 argue that question now, because it is perhajjs 
 not material. Taking the word State as con- 
 tradistinguished from that of Government — for 
 which there is unquestionably an example and 
 a v/arrant in the language of the constitutional 
 clause of guaranty — to mean, as it has been 
 defined by so great an authority as Mr. Burke, 
 "the commonwealth at large, with all its orders, 
 and all the rights belonging to each," and not 
 "the ruling or governing power," it maybe 
 admitted without damage to the argument that 
 they are still in. In that aspect of the case it 
 must signify the territory, or the people, whether 
 black or white, loyal or disloyal, or both. It 
 cannot be the territory only, because it would 
 then continue to be a State, although deprived 
 
10 
 
 of its inhabitants as well as of its government, 
 in which case it was never pretended that it was 
 out. It cannot mean the people only, because 
 that would make them a State, though all dis- 
 claiming their allegiance, or all alien enemies, 
 and owing none except such as was qualllied, 
 and temporar}', and purely domiciliary. In this 
 sense it is a compound idea, of which one of 
 the elements is necessarily a loyal people, and 
 a perception of which is discernible in the fact, 
 that under the plan of the proclamations the 
 voters are to be confined to the loyal, or at least 
 that portion of them which has the accidental 
 advantage of having straighter hair or some- 
 what whiter skins than the residue. 
 
 It is enough for my purpose, however, that 
 theirpolitical organizations, through which only 
 they can maintain their appropriate relations to 
 our governmental system, have been — as it is 
 admitted they are — entirely destroyed; a point 
 which could not be well contested in view of the 
 common- law rules that govern in cases of pub- 
 lic or municipal, as of merely private corpora- 
 tions. The proclamations go further in affirm- 
 ing that they have been "deprived of all civil 
 government whatever," which would imply a 
 state of anarchy, and ignore alike the law of con- 
 quest, and ' ' the supreme law' " under the Consti- 
 tution, and thus extrude them from the Union 
 by a strict logical necessity. By this, however, 
 the President intends, no doubt, the local gov- 
 ernments alone. He cannot affirm a condition 
 of anarchy, as this would be, so long as he main- 
 tains that they are still in the Union and subject 
 to its laws, or in even asserting, as he does by the 
 I)roclamations themselves, the continuing juris- 
 diction and authority of the national Govern- 
 ment over them. Without any government what- 
 ever there can be no social state except that of 
 nature. It is as impossible to conceive the ex- 
 istence of a civil or political State without an 
 organism, as it would be that of an animal or 
 vegetable body in like predicament. Stripped, 
 however, of all the political organizations that 
 held them together as members of this Union, 
 they must of necessity have lapsed into a con- 
 dition where everything was lost except their 
 ■territorial relations and identit}'. In this con- 
 dition, however, of local dissolution, it is admit- 
 ted on all hands that they are without powers 
 of self-resurrection ; that without governments 
 themselves they must receive their impulse from 
 without — from their only remaining sovereign ; 
 and that these dry bones — these festering, de- 
 composing elements — must at least be breathed 
 uponin orderthat they may live ; and therefore it 
 is that the Executive Magistrate, in the exercise 
 of what he conceives to be his duty, undertakes 
 to impart the required movement by preparing 
 and adjusting the whole machinery, setting it in 
 motion with his own hand, and even prescribing 
 the law by whichjthat motion was to be governed. 
 Whether these States are in or out, is no longer 
 aquestion, when the ruptui-e of their connections, 
 dbiid their own incapacity to restore them with- 
 out the direction of the ultimate sovereign, are 
 
 adniitf ed elements in the case. All that re- 
 mains! ; to decide where this transcendent poweri 
 is lodge 1, how it is to be exercised, and who itt 
 is that i - to speak this chaos into order, and to 
 recreate iVom this admitted anarchy, the future 
 organism that is to claim its place in our system. 
 The proclamations assume that this high and 
 imperial function is a purely executive one, 
 and that on the ground of the constitutional 
 obligation on the part of the United States to 
 guaranty to every State in this Union a repub- 
 lican form of government, and the duty of the 
 President to see that the laws are faithfully 
 executed. It is only on the hypothesis either 
 that this officer is — not in the modest language 
 of Louis XIV, the State — but the United States, 
 or that this executory agreement is in the na- 
 ture of a law, which may be enforced by the 
 instrumentality of the sword, and without the 
 exercise of any discretion on the part of its 
 minister, that the case can be claimed to fall 
 within the province of the executive department. 
 The former of these views, which seems to find 
 support in the argument of the gentleman from 
 New York, I shall not trouble myself to answer. 
 If the latter were true, and the duty itself a 
 purely ministerial one, the claim would be 
 unquestionable. It is so far from being true, 
 however, that it would have' been impossible- 
 even for Congress itself to provide in advance 
 by any general enactment, for the many different 
 cases that might arise to demand its fulfillment. 
 They have not even yet decided what is to be 
 considered a republican form of government, 
 within the meaning of the clause, or how it is 
 to be erected in case of the overthrow of any 
 of the existing State governments. They have 
 endeavored, it is true, to provide for these cases, 
 but have been met by the argument that it 
 would be time enough to cook their hare when 
 it was caught, or the objection that the Execu-i 
 tive had abetter "plan" than their own, which; 
 was in itself a confession that it was a matter 
 of doubt and discretion, and anything but the 
 performance of a ministerial duty. That jjlau, 
 like the present one, involved no less a task 
 than the reconstruction of a State from its very 
 foundations, and the declaration of the law 
 that wa,s to govern in the prosecution of that 
 work. In the former case, the power was con- 
 ferred on a tithe of the voters who might takej 
 the oath of allegiance, and forswear the insti- 
 tution of slavery. In the latter, it is confined! 
 to the loyal men who had voted before, without 
 reference to their numbers, and without any 
 definition of the term, although it was clear 
 that there was scarcely a loyal man in those 
 States except those who were excluded. But 
 will anybody say that the proclamation of the 
 fundamental law of a State is an executive 
 function? If there be any higher act of sov- 
 ereignty than that which founds, or reconstructs 
 a State, and gives or denies the elective fran- 
 chise to any of its citizens, I do not know what 
 it is. The man who makes the elector makes 
 the laws and the magistrates, and is practically 
 
11 
 
 in the enjo,yment of a dictatorial power. There 
 are occasions, -in the extremity of a State, when 
 •snch a power may be necessary for its safety. 
 Nobody has questioned the right of the Execu- 
 tive to govern the conquered territories — and 
 that by the rigors of martial law — in the recess 
 of Congress, and the absence of any other rule. 
 No man has gone further than myself in the 
 support of measures which were necessitated 
 by considerations connected with the public 
 safety. I can very well recollect the time when 
 gentlemen upon the other side were startled 
 by the boldness of my claims in favor of a 
 quasi dictatorial power in the Executive, and 
 Democratic presses held me up as the cham- 
 pion of absolutism. Then, however, it was 
 claimed but as the extreme medicine of the 
 State, and not its daily bread ; not to found an 
 empire, but to save one. Thank God ! the 
 occasion for these things has passed awa)^ It 
 is no longer permissible to resort to the war 
 power for apologies for extreme measures, and 
 particularly such as are obviously unnecessary. 
 But there never was anything in that power to 
 warrant the erection of a State by executive 
 proclamation. That is an act of legislation 
 that goes far beyond any example in Briitish 
 history, even in the complying times of Henry 
 VI n, when a servile Parliament made itself 
 alike memorable and infamous by giving to 
 royal proclamations the force of law. I trust 
 we are not yet ready to emulate and even im- 
 prove upon this example. I do not relish the 
 exhumation from the repositories of the dead 
 past of such engines of arbitrary power as 
 these. I would as soon think of going to the 
 Tower of London, to borrow the material ap- 
 pliances that are still there to testify of the 
 tyranny and barbarism of the buried centuries 
 of England. There is a flavor about them that 
 is neither pleasant nor wholesome. If the 
 v,'ork done through such instrumentalities had 
 been in all respects what my own judgment 
 would have approved, I should have hesitated 
 long, on grounds of principle, even in the ab- 
 sence of any intended interference with the 
 rights of this body, before I would have given 
 my sanction to a precedent so fraught with mis- 
 chief for future times. I v/ould not even mar 
 the pedigree of the returning States by allowing 
 a bar sinister in the escutcheon of any of them, 
 and do not care to be associated in history as a 
 member of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the 
 United States along with the dishonored coun- 
 cil of the sixteenth century, that l)etrayed the 
 rights of Englishmen by abdicating its powers 
 in favor of such claims as these. Crown law- 
 yers have only defended them in high pre- 
 I'Ogative times, as an expedient made neces- 
 sary by the unfrequency of Parliaments. There 
 is no such apology in these cases. The very 
 object, as confessed by the undisguised hurry 
 to bring these new governments to our doors 
 at the opening of the session in full panoply 
 and compact array, was to anticipate the ac- 
 tion of Congress in the premises. The pres- 
 
 ent Executive, like his predecessor, has his plan 
 of organization. The proclamations disclose it. 
 He had a right, of course, to his opinions. He 
 was, however, a Southern man, and a citizen of 
 one of the offending States. He was not likely, 
 therefore, to think in the same way precisely as 
 the twenty millions of the loyal States who had 
 fought this great battle. He had never, if I mis- 
 take not, declared himself very strongly against 
 slavery, except so far as it was in antagonism 
 with the Union. His local associations and 
 prejudices of education were a priori almost 
 sure to arrest him at that point where a guar- 
 anty of the civil rights of the enfranchised class 
 should be demanded. He had been loyal and 
 faithful under great trials. That fidelity had 
 made him the choice of the Union party of the 
 North forthe second ofiice in the Republic. The 
 bloody hand of treason opened the way for his 
 succession to the first. It had become his right 
 to advise, and his opinions were entitled at all 
 events to the highest possible respect, but the 
 mode of enforcing them was pointed out in the 
 Constitution. It was only through Congress 
 that he could properly make them known, and 
 the very relation in which he stood toward the 
 loyal States seemed to make it peculiarly ap- 
 propriate that he should take no step without 
 at least conferring with their representatives. 
 He has not chosen to follow this course. He 
 has preferred to treat directly with the rebels 
 themselves, or to dictate as a conqueror, such 
 terms of restoration as were agreeable to him- 
 self I will not say that this was done because he 
 apprehended the existence of a different opin- 
 ion here, but the eti'ect is, that the opinion of 
 the Executive, hurried into act in advance of our 
 assemblage — supposing such a difference not 
 impossible — is thus staked against the will of the 
 representative body. It is the sword of Bren- 
 nus flung into the scale. It looks to me — nay, 
 in the light of the message it is — a challenge 
 to Congress and the free North, upon a ques- 
 tion of jurisdiction in a case where their exclu- 
 sive cognizance is not even open to dispute, 
 which we cannot afford to decline, and upon 
 the acceptance or refusal of which will depend 
 the determination of the point whether, in the 
 face of an executive edict, an opposing legisla- 
 tive will is possible. 
 
 If a claim of this sort was stoutly and suc- 
 cessfully resisted by our ancestors, v/hen as- 
 serted by the Tudors and' the Stuarts, how are 
 we to excuse ourselves to posterity for surrender- 
 ing it now to a mere temporary Executive of 
 our own choice, with powers so limited and so 
 accurately defined? I trust we have not become 
 so habituated to the exercise of a prerogative 
 like this, as to have forgotten that there are 
 boundaries, which in a state of peace no depart- 
 ment of the Government can safely be allowed 
 to pass. The danger throughout — the one pre- 
 figured by some of the leading spirits of the 
 Revolution ; the one foreshadowed when Pat- 
 rick Henry declared, ''Your President will 
 be a King'' — has been in this direction only. 
 
12 
 
 The vast discretion necessarily lodged in the 
 Commander-in-Chief in times like those through 
 which we have just passed, the extreme promi- 
 nence of his position, and the enormous influ- 
 ence arising from the control of an immense 
 expenditure, were almost sure to give to that 
 oificer a greatly preponderating weight, and 
 to make the world — accustomed only to royal 
 wars and royal rule — believe that it was the 
 President alone, and not the Congress or the 
 people, who had saved this nation, and whose 
 business it was to restore it in all its parts. 
 And therefore it was that the same claim of 
 power in the proclamation of December, 18G3, 
 provoked no animadversion here, while the 
 details of the Presidential plan were subjected 
 to the severest criticism ; and no special com- 
 plaint was made when the will of the law-making 
 power was disregarded and overruled. And 
 therefore it was, too, that the House bill failed 
 on a second trial. And for the same reason, it 
 is now, that the press and politicians of the 
 nation, instead of controverting the power of 
 the Executive altogether to meddle with the 
 reorganization of these States, and denouncing 
 the attempt on his part as a clear usurpation, 
 have only complained in whispers and with 
 "bated breath," that he did not extend the 
 right of suffrage to the black man, while even so 
 intelligent a personage as Robert Dale Owen, has 
 referred to this work of reconstruction as the 
 greatest of the many difficult and responsible 
 duties which the termination of the war has de- 
 ' I'lved on the new Pi'esident ; and even the fierce 
 1^'emocracy itself, which made the night of the re- 
 ; it_llion hideous with its ululations about arbitrary 
 power, is either smitten dumb with admiration, 
 or swells the peans of triumphant treason with 
 a chorus of hallelujahs, in honor of the wisdom 
 tliat surprises and anticipates its wildest hopes. 
 It seems, indeed, to have been well-nigh forgot- 
 ten throughout the country, as well as at the 
 other end of the Avenue, that we have a Con- 
 gress, which is, under the Constitution, the law- 
 making power of this nation. People inquire 
 only what does the President intend; while the 
 Associated Press ministers to their curiosity by 
 daily bulletins, reporting every phase of the 
 imperial pulse, as though it were watching by 
 tlie bedside of royalty, and kindiy informing us 
 all of the precise terms on which the President 
 has determined to readmit the traitors on this 
 rioor. The time has now come, however, to 
 rectify these errors, and to assert and maintain 
 the rightful jurisdiction and powers of this body, 
 if they are ever to be asserted again. AVith the 
 highest admiration of the constancy and hero- 
 \^i of the present Executive under the severest 
 trials, and with evei'y disposition to support his 
 Administration so far as fidelity to my own high 
 trust will allow, I cannot consent that a ques- 
 tion like this, in which the interests of so many 
 generations are involved, shall be withdrawn 
 from the people of the loyal States, who have 
 suffered and sacrificed so largely, and settled 
 hy the decision of any one or even seven men, 
 
 no lUiirter whence theji come, or what positions 
 thev ib:iy hold. No more can I allow myself to 
 be insti'icted here, that while the pov>'er of set- 
 tling thi terms of readmission is with the Presi- 
 dent, I ''ave no jurisdiction as an American 
 legislate:-, except to register the acts that he has 
 done, and then humbly inquire as a member of 
 this House only, whether the candidates who 
 present themselves for admission here have 
 complied with the mere formalities which his 
 Legislatures have prescribed. It is here only — 
 in these Halls — that American liberty can live. 
 They are her inner sanctuary — her holy of holie;< 
 — her strong tower of defense — her last refuge 
 and abiding place. Here are her altars, and 
 here her priesthood. It is only here, too, that my 
 ' own great State, whose blood has been poured 
 j out like rain, and whose canonized dead are 
 I now sleeping on every battle-field of freedom, 
 has been called into counsel during the last four 
 years. She has no voice elsewhere. On the 
 theory of the President, and the results of his ex- 
 periments, she has given out no uncertain sound. 
 She bids her sons whom she has placed on guard 
 at the Capitol in this hour of the nation's trial, 
 stand faithfull}- — as did her heroes in the bloody 
 trench — by their trusts as Representatives, and 
 resist with jealous watchfulness every attempt 
 from whatever quarter, to encroach upon the 
 just powers which she has delegated to them. If 
 the performance of this duty should involve a 
 difi'ereuce with the Executive of her own choice, 
 while she would deplore the necessity, she will 
 expect her Representatives to take counsel from 
 those who sent them here, alike unawed by the 
 frowns and unseduced by the blandishments of 
 power. I dread the conflict, which.is not a new 
 one in the world's history, but I cannot choose 
 but meet it when it comes ; and I have a trust 
 that we shall yet be able to discuss the great 
 question of the times, and to settle it, too, with- 
 out prejudice, and in utter oblivion of the fac' 
 that the Executive has any theory on the sub- 
 ject. 
 
 It has been said, however, by way of quieting 
 the public fears, that these jjlans were merely 
 experimental, and that no harm could come 
 of them, because, under the Constitution, Con- 
 gress must be the judge at last of the qualifi- 
 cations and eligibility of those who might pre- 
 sent themselves for admission to seats in that 
 body. The work accomplished, we are now 
 awakened to the fact, that the power referred to 
 here is only that of each House acting sepa- 
 rately upon the qualifications of its own mem- 
 bers. While the Executive assumes the right 
 himself of founding new governments, by a new 
 law declaring who shall vote, and settling by 
 telegraph the terms of their constitutions, he is 
 pleased to claim, in his recent message, for these 
 creatures of his own — other but still the same — 
 with their vitalities repaired at that fountain 
 only — the right to resume, of course, and with- 
 out inquiry into his work or theirs, the places 
 which, by an ingenious fiction, they are sup- 
 posed to have beforeheldin both branches of the 
 
13 
 
 national Legislature, making, as he says, "the 
 work of restoration thereby complete;" while we 
 are instructed in terms of unusual emphasis, that 
 //iCft it will be for us, '• each of us for ourselves," 
 to proceed to judge of the smaller matters of the 
 law in regard to •' the elections, returns, and 
 qualiUcations of our "own raembei's." These 
 instruct:ions arc, perhaps, somewhat unusual, 
 and possibly not that kind of information pre- 
 cisely to which the Constitution refers, but 1 do 
 not quarrel with them on grounds of etiquette, 
 even 1 hough the advice may seem gratuitous, and 
 the jealousy of a British Parliament might have 
 regarded it as a breach of privilege. They are 
 not, h is true, exactly ia accordance with the 
 tenor of the authori/.ed report of Mr. Stearns, 
 which did convey the opinion that we might 
 ••check these new governments at any stage, 
 and oblige them to confess their errors," unless 
 itVas intended to afiirm that power only as the 
 special prerogative of the Executive himself. 
 They are, however, the official utterances, and 
 the apology assumes, of course, that there is no 
 question of legislation involved. With this in- 
 terpretation of its meaning, there is nothing left 
 to Congress, bur to register the edicts and ratify 
 the work of the Excentive. Taking it, however, 
 to be otlierwise, they are still not less obnoxious 
 to objection, it may be conceded that States 
 have been admitted here without am' precedent 
 legislation though none, I think, where they 
 were organized under the direction of the mili- 
 tary pov.^er, and none, certainly, without the 
 concurrent vote of the tv.'o Houses. By those, 
 moi^eo \"er, who think that these States were never 
 out, it will be insisted, in accordance with the 
 executive idea, that ihey want no recognition, 
 and the refusal of Congress to admit their mem- 
 bers will be only regarded as a denial of right. 
 But the mere negative of either House upon the 
 question of their admission, is a power greatly 
 inferior to that which presides over their organ- 
 ization, and prescribes the law by which the 
 formative process is to be regulated — just as 
 infer'ior as the veto lodged b}' the Constitution 
 in the hands of the Executive, is to the initiative 
 of the Legislature.. 'J he builders will work ac- 
 cording to that law, and as it prescribes, so will 
 the structure be. As we sow, we must expect 
 to reap. "Men do not gather grapes from 
 thorns, or figs from thistles." Thus, if a privi- 
 leged class is to elect the delegates, their work 
 v^■iil be in accordance with the principle of their 
 origin, and will be submitted — if submitted at 
 all — for apjproval or rejection to the same par- 
 lies who in.spired it; and if the government so 
 framed is to be recogruzed because it professes 
 lo be a representative one, the right of declar- 
 ing its wholw fundaaiental law might as well be 
 recorded to the Executive, as that of declaring 
 a part of it, and assembling a convention to 
 ;dter or' amend that jiart. There was no occa- 
 -Inn, however, for experiments of this sort, 
 ■'.liose only tendency is to forestall the action 
 of the legislative power, or to bring about a mis- 
 chievous conflict between the two branches of 
 
 the Government. If this is properly a legisla- 
 tive — and.not an executive function — as nobody 
 can successfully deny — the President has his 
 veto, at all events, upon the action of Congress. 
 He cannot invert the order, and change the con- 
 stitutional relation, by initiating an act of legis- 
 lation, and leaving to Congress only a negative 
 voice thereon, particularly in a case whei-e the 
 ■ voters named by himself are expressly endowed 
 v/itli the power to restore the State to its con- 
 stitutional relations with the Federal Govern- 
 ment, and to present such form of government 
 as will entitle it to the guaranty of the United 
 States, and where, of course, it is expected that 
 their work shall be conclusive. 
 
 It^will be said, perhaps, in reply to all this, 
 that the object here was not to found a State 
 government, but to allow the legal voters of the 
 old regime the privilege of altering and amend- 
 ing their original forms of government, so as 
 to restore them to their constitutional rela- 
 tions, and elTititle them to the benefit of the 
 guaranty. 
 
 It is not to be disputed that these are a part 
 of the objects stated in the proclamations. I 
 will not say that this was done by way of protest 
 against the logical conclusion from their prem- 
 ises, from the whole character of the act itself, 
 and the assumption of power which it involved, 
 that the measure was a revolutionary one — as 
 Governor Orr admits it^to have been. I shall 
 be excused, hov,'ever, for suggesting that it was 
 unfortunate that the law adviser of the Govern- 
 rnent — perhaps its political Nestor — should 
 have overlooked in tTiis a departure from his own 
 premises, that could scarcely have been excused 
 in a junior pleader in the Northern States^ He 
 had obviously forgotten the recital on which 
 these proclamations rest — the postulate that 
 "the revolutionary progress ofthe rebellion had 
 deprived these States of all civil government 
 whatever," and the declaration that the purpose 
 of these conventions waste enable the loyal peo- 
 ple of these Territories, not' ' to alter or amend ' ' 
 their constitutions, but "to organize," or con- 
 struct anew, where the original government was 
 admitted to have perished. Whenever he shall 
 be able to explain how a constitution can exist 
 in a Government that has been altogether de- 
 stroyed, or why he should have treated the pro- 
 cess of organization's a mere process of repair, 
 I shall be glad to hear from him. The man 
 who reaches this conclusion from his premises, 
 will havd "no narrow frith to cross." I hope 
 I shall not be considered uncharitable, however, 
 in suggesting that all this inconsequential logic 
 looks to me as if it was the efl'ect of an unhappy 
 struggle to escape the consequences of a doc- 
 trine, which was felt to be necessary in order to 
 raise the power in the President, and is then 
 discarded, after having served that use, in order 
 to remove the case from the jurisdiction of Con- 
 gress. It will require something more, 1 think, 
 than either the subtlety of a northern place- 
 man, or the exploded metaphysics of a Ken- 
 tucky statesman, to reconcile any one step in* 
 
14 
 
 the action of the Government, with the idea of 
 the continuing existence of the States. i 
 
 In the same spirit, however, apparently, that 
 prompted tlie softening down of an orgai]i- 
 zation into a mere question of alteration and 
 amendment, there is a studied avoidance of a 
 phraseology that has found acceptance here, 
 without even provoking criticism. We called 
 this heretofore, in our simplicity, by the harm-* 
 less name of "reconstruction." The Attorney 
 General protests, like Bardolph, "by this light 
 J know not the phrase," and straightway our 
 nomenclature falls into disrepute. Well, I am 
 ready to maintain, if necessary, in the language 
 of the same dramatic personage, that it is "a 
 very soldier-like word, and of exceeding good 
 command. ' ' It is the merest hypercriticism to 
 object its application to the adjustment of our 
 relations with the revolting States; but what- 
 ever dilFcrence there may be here, it is impossi- 
 ble that there can be any dispute among scholars 
 in regard to its precise aptitude in describing the 
 reorganization of a State. The question is too 
 big, however, to be settled in this way. If any- 
 body prefers the word " restoration." I have no 
 objection apart from its historical significance. 
 It was the phrase iised on the return of the 
 Stuarts. I hope it is not ominous. Charles II 
 came back without conditions, notwithstanding 
 Ihe eflbrts of Hale, who endeavored to secure 
 them, but was put down by the assurances of 
 General Monk. (I hope we are to have no Gen- 
 eral Monk in this case.) Bishop Burnet says 
 that this omission was the cause of all the errors 
 of liis reign, which it required the lievolution 
 » to cure. 1 know that there is a confidence here, 
 and a longing in some quarters, not unlike that 
 of the .lacobltes of England, for the return of 
 the self-exiled royal family of the South, but I 
 trust we are not about to lay the foundation for 
 another revolution by the same mistake. Apart 
 from this, I repeat that I am indifferent as to 
 the word. It is sufficient for me that it implies, 
 if not destruction, at least derangement — dis- 
 turbance — displacement. The revolting States 
 have, by a new law, deflected from their orbits, 
 gathered round a new center, and ceased to 
 compose a part of our system, or to be obedient 
 to its law. They want renewal or regeneration. 
 They require to be brought backby an interior 
 adjustment that will reinstate the law that has 
 been broken. They are in the system, and 
 compose a part of it only dejure. Nobody can 
 say that they are there in point of fixct, because 
 that would contradict not only our knowledge, 
 but our senses. Something, it is admitted on 
 all hands, must be done to reestablish their re- 
 lations with the Union. They cannot do it 
 themselves. Nobody pretends that by the mere 
 repeal of their secession ordinances they ca!i 
 resume their places here — as they might do if 
 they have not withdrawn — in virtue of their 
 original title, and with all their right.s-and priv- 
 ileges unabridged. Their Legislatures have 
 been even forbidden to assemble. The Exec- 
 utive thinks that by their act of treason the cit- 
 
 izens consenting thereto have forfeited their 
 highest political right — that of self-government 
 — and that to this extent their constitutions — 
 not as they stand now, but as they stood before 
 the rebellion — are i^ractically abrogated. He 
 thinks, too, obviously, that by their abdication 
 or dereliction — as in the ease of J'ames II — the 
 sovereignty has lapsed — l)ut not to us. A com- 
 mittee of the last House insisted that it returned 
 to the conquered people. He claims it for him- 
 self, and accordingly sets aside their Legisla- 
 tures, Governors, and judges, reconstitutes the 
 body-politic, declares who shall be its mem- 
 bers, and appoints a provisional governor to 
 keep the peace, and call the privileged parties 
 together to organize a new government. And 
 all this is called amendment, upon the ingenious 
 suggestion that they are to build on the sub- 
 stratum of their dead constitutions! No cuji- 
 ning phraseology — no arfllice of words — how- 
 ever, can changethenatureof athing. Thereen- 
 actmentof apartof an abrogated law, either with 
 or without addition, is no amendment. They 
 niight as well have taken the constitution of 
 Pennsylvania to work upon, and in either case 
 the product would have been a new constitu- 
 tion. 
 
 But why so studiously insist on the avoidance 
 of other phraseology than this ? Because, as it 
 is urged, although the people of a State may 
 destroy their' government, it still subsists in 
 gremio Ieg?'s, or, in the language of the message, 
 following that of an ingenious southern Gov- 
 nor, "in abeyance," or^as lawyers would phrase 
 it, in the clouds — on the charitable hypothesis 
 that suicide is impossible, because it is forbid- 
 den, and, therefore, by a pleasant fiction, all 
 those pregnant acts that have scarred a conti- 
 nent with fire, and covered it with ruins, are 
 simply void, and to be ignored as nullities. And 
 this we are now informed by the Executive is 
 " the true theory." It is undoubtedly the con- 
 venient one — for the traitors — because it fur- 
 nishes no solution of the great problem of the 
 times, except in the surrender of all control over 
 the rebellious States, and the restoration of their 
 people, without conditions, and with absolute 
 immunity for all their crimes. AVhy it is the 
 true one, he has not vouchsafed to show. I 
 know, of course, that the high functionary who 
 dispenses the patronage of such an empire as 
 this is not always expected to render a reason 
 when he chooses to dogmatize, and that, in the 
 view of but too many of the leaders of public 
 opinion, it is impossible for such a man to err. 
 With a practice, however, so entirely at variance 
 with this theory, and an admission, too, in the 
 same breath, that " the policy of military rule 
 over a conquered territory "--the very rule under 
 which all that region has been governed, and 
 all these States reconstructed during the recess 
 of Congress — " would have implied that, by the 
 act of their inhabitants, they had ceased to 
 exist," it would not have been unreasonable to 
 expect an explanation of the course that has been 
 actually pursued within the jurisdiction of inde- 
 
15 
 
 jiendent States, that enjoyed the rare advantage 
 — unhappily denied to our race — of being inca- 
 pable of sin, and equally unobhoxious to the 
 penalty of death. The only answer that he could 
 have made would have been that the doctrine, 
 although good as a theory, was good for nothing 
 else, because it would not work, and was utterly 
 inadmissible in practice. The State, however, 
 in the judgment of the President, still lives, with 
 only an "impaired vitality," although its gov- 
 ernment has been destroyed. It is dead, to be 
 sure, as Lazarus; in no mere trance, where the 
 vital forces are still holding the organization 
 together, but with all its elements putrescent or 
 decomposed ; but then there is a power in the 
 Executive, beyond the kingly touch that purged 
 the leprous taint from the blood of the believ- 
 ing, that can awaken it from the sleep of death, 
 lead it forth in its grave-clothes, tide it safely 
 over the frith of a four years' rebellion, and 
 bridge over the unfathomable gulf that during 
 all this time has divided it from the living ! Yes, 
 while it is admitted again and again that the 
 old State governments were lost beyond even 
 the means of self-resurrection, this modern 
 Phoenix is supposed by some mysterious con- 
 veyance, by some metempsychosis unknown to 
 the philosophers of Greece or the priesthood 
 of the Nile, and only rivaled by the imposture 
 of the Grand Lama himself, to have inherited 
 the vital breath of the defunct State govern- 
 ment, though that State government — dead to 
 us, if not dead altogether — has transmigrated 
 into the confederacy, and now lies buried among 
 its ruins. But let us examine this new reve- 
 lation. 
 
 If the acts done by these States had involved 
 only a question of excess of power, as in the 
 case of a law enacted by a State Legislature in 
 violation of the fundamental law, this view of 
 the case might have derived support from the 
 doctrine that prevails in such cases. Here, how- 
 ever, the fundamental law itself was changed by 
 the very power that enacted it. Whether right- 
 fully or not, in view of their Federal relations, 
 is notnowthe question. It is sufficient that they 
 did, in point of fact, erect new governments upon 
 the ruins of the old. And this, although it had 
 been expressly forbidden, could not, in the na- 
 ture of things, be prevented. There was nothing 
 in the Constitution of the United States that 
 could hinder the perpetration of an act either 
 of treason or suicide. They might have allovv^ed 
 tlieir governments to perish by omitting to sup- 
 jily their integral members, or they might have 
 withdrawn — as they did — from the Federal con- 
 nection by entering into other alliances, dis- 
 claiming its authority, and refusing to obey its 
 law, or take any part in the administration of 
 i;s affairs. All this they did, and more. It was 
 the act of the people themselves. There was 
 no interregnum. They carried their constitu- 
 tions into their new relations — changed, it is 
 true, in this particular, but still republican in 
 form. They might have changed them into 
 monarchies. Their new establishments are now 
 
 overthrown. But how is this to revive others 
 that are admitted to have previously perished? 
 Nobody pretends that it could. The proclama- 
 tions themselves admit that they have been left 
 without governments, and without means of re- 
 covery except at the hands of the Executive. 
 Can it be truly said, then, that any portion of 
 the original structure was rescued from the gen- 
 eral wreck? If there was. then how much, and 
 who shall declare it? True, one of the objects 
 stated is to enable them to restore themselves. 
 But does anybody insist that they can do it? 
 Is this consistent with the grounds on which the 
 proclamations rest? If they can, what is to be 
 said in apology for executive interference? If 
 they can, what is to be said of the other object de- 
 clared in these instruments, which is "to enable 
 the people of those States to present such forms 
 of government as will entitle them to the ben- 
 efit of the constitutional guaranty, by restoring 
 them to their constitutional relations, and their 
 people, therefore, to protection from invasion, 
 insurrection, and domestic violence?" What 
 does all this mean? If they were States in the 
 Union, it required no process of organization 
 or restoration, to confer on them the advantage 
 of these rights, because they were entitled to 
 them already by the very letter of the Consti- 
 tution. It is because they are not — because 
 they have been "deprived of all civil govern- 
 ment whatever" — that the President proposes 
 to make them so, and to endow them with these 
 rights anew, by reannexing and bringing them 
 again into the Federal connection — from which 
 they have been confessedly detached — upon a 
 new title, by his own act, and without any agency 
 of ours. It is a confession of outlawry, which 
 no legal acumen, no ingenuity of phrase, can 
 explain away, and it is worse than idle to quib- 
 ble upon forms of expression in the face of such 
 an admission. 
 
 But supposing these State constitutions to ha 
 still in force, as they existed antecedently to the 
 passage of the several ordinances of secession, 
 on the ground that all that has been enacted since 
 in violation of the Federal law was simply void, 
 what then was the occasion for any amendment, 
 and whence does the President derive his au- 
 thority to interfere at all, and to change the law 
 as it stood before, even on the subject of amend- 
 ments? In that case they may return, of course, 
 whenever they think proper, without any legis- 
 lation whatever. Why await the repeal of an 
 act that is absolutely void? What is to pn^- 
 vent them from coming back with their consti- 
 tutions as they are? Taking it to be a question 
 of amendment only, it-is clearly in their dis- 
 cretion to amend or not; and if they are stili 
 in the Union, there is no power here or else- 
 where to say what amendments they shall make, 
 or that they shall not resume their places here 
 without alteration of any sort. The executive 
 branch of the Government admits, however, 
 that something must be done to restore these 
 outlaws to their original status in the Union. 
 The war has resulted, as we agree in thinking, 
 
16 
 
 in the emancipation of the slave, and the de- 
 struction of the elective franchise along with 
 the government ; and these things must be in 
 some way acknowledged. They are unques- 
 tionably forfeitures ; but should they refuse to 
 recognize them, that refusal would, on his hy- 
 pothesis, constitute no sufficient reason for 
 excluding them. The question of the effect of 
 the ])roclam'ation of freedom is one that belongs 
 to the courts, and you cannot draw it within 
 the jurisdiction of Congress or the President, 
 except by assuming that these States are out 
 and must be formally readmitted. In that case 
 you may prescribe terms. Without that you 
 must open when they knock, without inquiry 
 as to their constitutions, with which you will 
 then have nothing to do. To stipulate for the 
 acknowledgment of these things, is but to treat 
 for their readmission on that basis, and amounts 
 to no more or less than a compromise with a 
 belligerent ; and they may reject the conditions, 
 because you can impose no terras of amend- 
 ment upon them. 
 
 Taking it, however, that their constitutions 
 do require to be amended for these purposes, 
 how is this work to be done ? Not by execu- 
 tive direction certainly. The President has no 
 more power to set up a new class of electors in 
 South Carolina than in Massachusetts. There 
 is but one way, and that is in accordance with 
 the law which they prescribe themselves, which 
 must have survived if any jjart of their cwnfeti- 
 tutions did. The process which ignores that 
 law, as the proclamations do, is radical and 
 revolutionary, and is no less in effect than ab- 
 solute reconstruction. The sovereign power of 
 the joeople may act in this way undoubtedly, 
 but when it does there is an end of the existing 
 government. 
 
 A v/ord now as to the answer that all this was 
 intended only to allow to the people the privi- 
 lege of doing this work themselves. 
 
 If the object had been only to keep the peace 
 for the purpose of allowing these people to 
 decide whether they would erect a new govern- 
 ment, and apply for readmission into the Union, 
 nobody would have complained, although the 
 necessity for interfering in this way was con- 
 clusive that they were not in a condition to 
 exercise these rights, and that the act was not 
 a voluntary one. But they were not asking the 
 privilege of coming back again. It was not 
 essential that they should come, until they were 
 ready for it. It was essential that when they 
 did, it should be of their own pure volition. To 
 compel it, was' as impracticable as it was unde- 
 sirable. And yet the essence of the proclama- 
 tions is a command. They are not permissive 
 but imperative. The people might not be ready, 
 hut that made no difference. If any of them 
 failed, it was a default. Th^ right to vote was 
 not a privilege, but a duty. . The white men, 
 who were loyal and would take the oath, must 
 reconstruct their governments at all events. It 
 is idle to say, therefore, that this was a mere 
 indulgence to their prayers. It went in advance 
 
 of the wishes of the people, and this is the con- 
 struction placed upon it by the highest intelli- 
 gences of the South. 
 
 And nov/ as to the way in which the power 
 claimed by the Executive has been exercised. 
 
 If the function were a purely executive one, 
 it could not go, of course, beyond the mere per- 
 mission for the assemblage of conventions, and 
 the pledge of protection to the citizen in the 
 exercise of this privilege. To favor classes — to 
 proclaim that this or that citizen should not be 
 allowed to vote — was something more than an 
 executive act. In the case of a civil dissolu- 
 tion and the absence of all government, such 
 as the proclamations admit, all were, of course, 
 remitted to that natural equality which is rec- 
 ognized in the Declaration of Independence, 
 and had only been suspended by force of the 
 civil institutions which had then ceased to ex- 
 ist. The right of the negro, whether previously 
 bond or free, was in that condition of things, as 
 perfect as that of the white man. and the latter 
 had no more right to say to the former that he 
 should not vote, than the former had to hold the 
 same language to him. All privileges of caste or 
 complexion that existed under their old con- 
 stitutions were gone along with the constitu- 
 tions themselves. And this is in accordance 
 with the doctrine everywhere received through- 
 out this nation, v/here all limitations upon this 
 right, except those which depend on condition 
 only, are the results of express enactment. It 
 was no question, therefore, of grace or favor 
 or indulgence, and it cannot, of course, be said 
 in excuse for the prohibition, that it was not 
 competent for the Executive to confer the priv- 
 ilege on this particular class. It was not his 
 to confer on anybody, either white or black. 
 If he had left the election to the citizens who 
 owed allegiance, paid taxes, and were" subject 
 to bear arms, they must have voted without 
 distinction of color. The only question was — 
 not whether he could confer it — but whether he 
 could take it away. He has taken it away from 
 others — from all who were not qualified under 
 the old constitutions, and from all who are dis- 
 loyal, or refuse the oath to support the laws 
 and proclamations in regard to slavery. The 
 old governments with their black codes, which 
 were the fruitful nurseries of treasonable sen- 
 timent, and have destroyed themselves by 
 hurrying their people into the rebellion, are 
 allowed to furnish the rule and standard of 
 electoral fitness, on the hypothesis that there 
 is something left of them that still lives, like 
 the tail of a defunct reptile after the very life 
 has been crushed out of its body, and are only 
 to undergo alteration and repair at the hands 
 of the same cunning workmen who had de- 
 stroyed their machinery altogether. It is the 
 same class precisely that is to renovate the 
 work. True, it is with the condition of loyalty, 
 and a new oath, superadded. But what are 
 these? Who are the loyal? Not certainly 
 those who committed treason against the na- 
 tion by waging war against it, or giving aid and 
 
17 
 
 counsel to its enemies ? Bat if they are ex- 
 cluded, wko are to be the voters, when the only 
 class tiuit proved true to its allegiance, is pre- 
 cisely tlie one which was excluded under the old 
 regime tliat it is now sought to restore? How 
 many (li'the original voters, beyond those who 
 ware dr'vcu into exile, have stood by the old 
 tlagin t'le hour of our trial ? Was it a majority — 
 was it iven a tithe? Can there be as many 
 such men found as would have saved Sodom 
 from dc -truction? We know that there cannot, 
 becausi- we know that they would not have 
 been tolerated on southern soil. We know it, 
 too, from the declaration of tJie Governor of 
 Virginia, that unless the law that disfranchised 
 the traitors only from January, 1864, was 
 repealeil, there would not be men enough left 
 to organize the State. And is it seriously pro- 
 posed that the power of erecting governments, 
 in order to enable these States to resume their 
 places in the Union, shall be vested in a score 
 of men out of a population counting by millions? 
 But how is the question of loyalty to be deter- 
 mined? Not by the oath, because that is merely 
 cumulative, and is not offered either as a test, 
 or by way of purgation for past offenses. If as 
 a test, the word might as well have been omit- 
 ted altogethei'. How then? Is there a virtue 
 in the amnesty which works not only oblivion 
 for the past, but converts a pardoned traitor 
 into a loyal man? Is it by judgment of law on 
 conviction of crime? Is it by attainder on 
 proclamation by the Executive ? Is it by a trial 
 in pain or by compurgators at the hustings? 
 If the old constitutions are still in force, either 
 Iiy construction of law or by virtue of the proc- 
 lamations, the exclusion even of those who 
 may be impeached of disloyalty, looks amaz- 
 ingly like tlie forefeiture of a legal franchise, 
 without judgment and without law, and is too 
 high a power to be exercised by any other than 
 the sovereign. 
 
 But there is another condition superadded, 
 by way of abridgment of the right ; and that is 
 the exaction, even from the loyal, of the oath 
 to support the proclamations and laws relat- 
 ing to slavery. No friend of the country will 
 of course object to any wholesome limitations 
 upon the privilege; but if it was not competent 
 to the President — not to confer, but only to per- 
 mit it — to the black man, what authority was 
 there to limit it in this way to the white man? 
 Neither the Constitution of the United States, 
 nor that of any of the States, has ever required 
 an oath of this sort from the voter. If he could 
 impose this, what was there to prevent him from 
 ^wearing them to the observance of all acts of 
 ( 'ongress and all ]iroclamations, or requiring 
 i.hem to swear that they had never given any aid 
 or countenance to the rebellion? If he could 
 disfranchise the unconvicted ti-aitor, what was 
 there to prevent him > from enfranchising the 
 loyal man who has become free? But what is 
 the security which it furnishes? How long is 
 'the obligation to endure? Did it bind the mem- 
 bers of the conventions? And if these bodies 
 
 have defined the qualification in a different way, 
 are the voters now free ? 
 
 The programme is in effect to regommit these 
 governments to the hands of the very men who 
 hurried them into the rebellion, upon the sole 
 condition of a new obligation of fealty, after 
 having just broken a previous one, and to aban- 
 don the field to the conquered as soon as it is 
 won ! Was ever .such a denouement to such a 
 drama? But is there anybody in the loyal 
 States, who is willing to release all the securi- 
 ties, all the rights and advantages acquired by 
 the war, and prescribe no terms to those whose 
 lips have just been dyed with perjury, and whose 
 hands are still dripping with the blood of our 
 butchered sons, except a renewal of their al- 
 ready broken vows, which they will make vol- 
 untarily, and then claim to have no binding 
 force because they have been made under a 
 sort of duress, on the ethics taught by a distin- 
 guished casuist of Maryland? Wliat kind of 
 a test is this for a statesman? Would any 
 rational Government on earth be content with 
 such a caution? Who does not know its utter 
 worthlessness? What is it but the flaxen tie 
 that bound the wrists of the Hebrew champion ? 
 What is its value, in view of the events of the 
 rebellion that have now passed into history? 
 How is our past experience ? Have these peo- 
 ple ever kept faith with us? Did it hold any of 
 the rebel leaders who filled employments either 
 civil or military under the Federal Govern- 
 ment, or under those of the revolting States? 
 Was not perjury exalted into honor of the high- 
 est chivalric type ; children taught by their own 
 Southern mothers, that they were under no obli- 
 gation to keep faith with Yankees, and that 
 they might swear and forswear themselves again 
 and again, to save their persons or their prop- 
 erty ; and the very highest species of the crimen 
 falsi canonized even by the tender and admir- 
 ing regards of Northern generals and Northern 
 statesmen? It may be safely assumed, as a 
 general proposition, that those who were roost 
 forward to abjure their sworn allegiance here, 
 will be the first to violate their new-made vows, 
 by swearing themselves back again into legis- 
 lative honors and governmental favors. But 
 will you consent to turn over the few Union 
 white men, and your thousands of faithful allies 
 among the blacks, to the tender mercies of these 
 unconverted and unrepentant rebels, and bring 
 them back again into these Halls, on pledges of 
 fidelity that amount at last to no more than nn 
 engagement not to repeatan experiment, against 
 which you will now want no other secui-ity than 
 the recollection of your power? If you are 
 wise you will not be content with any assurances 
 that are either purchased by interest, or extorted 
 by necessity. You will render it impossible 
 for them, to deceive you again, by refusing to 
 trust them, until they shall have reestablished 
 their title to your confidence. Security is more 
 important to you than punishment, ay, even 
 than the demands of justice. Others may do 
 as they please, but as for me, I must beg to 
 
18 
 
 be excused from giving my faith to these new- 
 fledged neophytes — these unbaptized rene- 
 gades — until they have stripped to the skin, 
 and bathed themselves thoroughly in the waters 
 of regeneration. 
 
 But, supposing this guarantee be a merely 
 executive function, how does the manner of 
 performance square with the object sought to 
 be attained ? The obligation is to assure a gov- 
 ernment that shall be republican. The mean- 
 ing of this is that it, shall be a government of 
 the people. The process adopted, in direct 
 contravention of the principles of the message, 
 is to lodge the power in the hands of a privi- 
 leged class — the same that held it before — dis- 
 tinguishable only by the accident of color, along 
 with a disloyalty to the Union that was almost 
 universal, and composing, in some instances, a 
 minority of the whole population. Does this 
 look like a fuliillment of the obligation, or even 
 squint in that direction? The form, it is true, 
 may be republican, because it looks to repre- 
 sentation by election. But that is not the test. 
 If it were, every constitutional monarchy in 
 Eurojse might be brought within the category. 
 It is the distinction of classes — the permanent 
 limitation of the right of suffrage to a favored 
 few — that makes the difference between the aris- 
 tocratic and republican forms, and there is none 
 other. In this case, the right is confined to the 
 lo3^al white man who will take the oath. This, 
 however, if not an oligarchy or government of 
 the few, is at least an aristocracy or government 
 of classes, and furnishes a perfect exemplifi- 
 cation of just that species of legislation, which is 
 so earnestly reprobated in those passages of the 
 message, where the President informs us that 
 "this Government springs from and was made 
 for the people ;" that ''it should, from the very 
 consideration of its origin, be strong in its power 
 of resistance against the establishment of ine- 
 qualities;" that "monopolies, perpetuities, and 
 class legislation are contrary to the genius of a 
 free Government, and ought not to be allowed ;" 
 that "here there is no room for favored classes 
 or monopolies ;" and that "we shall fulfill our 
 dutiesas legislators, by accordingequal and exact 
 justice to all men, special privileges to none." 
 If I have found occasion to commend his prac- 
 tice, atthe expense of his theory, upon the ques- 
 tion of State sinlessness and State immortality, 
 subscribing as I do most heartily to these axioms 
 of political science, I shall feel myself compelled 
 to adjust the account, by following his advice in 
 opposition to his practice here. " Class legis- 
 lation," and "special privileges" ofasovereign 
 character, are the distinguishing features of his 
 plan, and it is, therefore, by the erection of an 
 aristocracy, that the guarantee of a republic is 
 to be made good! 
 
 Whether these States be in the Union or not, 
 it is conceded by the Executive, in the effort 
 to provide them with republican governments, 
 that they are now without them ; and this, I 
 suppose, for the reason that they have no gov- 
 ernments at all. The same result, however, 
 I 
 
 would have followed from the change in the 
 condition of the slave. A Government that not 
 only denies to a majority, or even a large por- 
 tion of its free citizens, the privilege of any share 
 in its administration, but rejects their testimony 
 as witnesses, interdicts to them the acquisition 
 of knowledge, or refuses the advantages of the 
 marital relation, is not republican, and the 
 men who have made these laws, and insist on 
 maintaining them now, will never make it so. 
 Mr. Burke remarks that, taking the State to 
 mean "the whole commonwealth, with all its 
 orders, and all the rights appertaining to each, ' ' 
 "to be tmder the State, but not the State itself, 
 or anj part of it — that is, to be nothing at all 
 in the commonwealth — is a condition of civil 
 servitude by the very force of the definition. 
 Servorum non est respnblica is a very old and 
 a very true maxim. The servitude that makes 
 men subject to a State, without being citizens, 
 may be more or less tolerable from many cir- 
 cumstances, but these circumstances do not 
 alter the nature of the thing." And this he re- 
 gards as a modified form of slavery ; while "the 
 exclusion of whole classes of men from the 
 higher or ruling part of the commonwealth, as 
 in the case where a hereditary nobility possesses 
 the exclusive rule, is only held to imply a lower 
 and degraded state of citizenship. But even 
 there it is only the office, and not the franchise, 
 that is denied to the subject." 
 
 "Our constitution,". he continues, "was not 
 made for great, general, or proscriptiye exclu- 
 sions. Sooner or later it will destroy them, 
 or they will destroy the constitution. In our 
 constitution there has always been a difference 
 between a franchise and an office, and between 
 the capacity for the one and for the other. 
 Franchises are supposed to belong to the sub- 
 ject as a subject, and not as a member of the 
 governing part of the State. The policy of 
 tlje Government has considered them as things 
 very difterent ; for when Parliament excluded 
 by the test acts Protestant dissenters from 
 all civil and military emi)loyment, they never 
 touched their right of voting for members of 
 Parliament, or sitting in either House" — both 
 these being treated by him as franchises of 
 which the subject could not be deprived. In a 
 republic, however, there is no proper distinc- 
 tion between the governing part and the sub- 
 ject, and the oftice, of course, would stand on 
 the same ground as the franchise. 
 
 An American statesman of the present day 
 would say, perhaps, that the elective franchise, 
 the most important of them all, is not the prop- 
 erty of the citizen, because it is not a natural 
 i-ight, but a political one. I have heard such lan- 
 guage here, even on this side of the House, 
 again and again. I am too dull to comprehend 
 the distinction. I take it that all governmental 
 agencies, all political contrivances and privi- 
 leges, are but the machinery for the protection 
 of the great natural rights of humanity, which 
 protection is admitted by the Declaration itself 
 to be the only legitimate object of all govern- 
 
19 
 
 raent. Why are our institutions free? Because 
 they allow to you and me the privilege of gov- 
 erning ourselves. Why am I a freeman '? For 
 no other reason than because I am armed with 
 the ballot for my own protection as a citizen. 
 Strip mo of that and I am at your mercy. You 
 may deal gently with me, it is true — and so might 
 theSukan of Turkey — but that makes no differ- 
 ence. I am still the slave of your caprice, and 
 my rights and happiness may depend, like your 
 temper, oh the state of your digestion. Yon may 
 designate this franchise by what name you please, 
 but you cannot refine it away by verbal distinc- 
 tions or scholastic subtleties— by calling it po- 
 litical or giving to it any other nomenclature. 
 You might as well deny me all the rights of a 
 citizen, because they are all poKtical, as deny 
 me that one — the most important of them all — 
 which is essential'to the protection of the resi- 
 due. Nor can you pilfer it from me by the jug- 
 glery of assigning to it the distinction of a pre- 
 rogative or privilege. I know no prerogatives 
 here, and no privileges that are not, or at least 
 ought not to be common to us all. The mes- 
 sage itseif reprobates a subterfuge like this, when 
 it asserts the great republican idea of "equal 
 rights for all, special privileges to none." No : 
 you must either settle the principle that this is 
 a white man's Oirovernment |alone, or you must 
 share all your political rights with men of all 
 complexions who inhabit among you. The Dem- 
 ocrats, par excellence^ who love slavery for its 
 own sake, and do not of course favor the doc- 
 trines of either liberty or equality as to the black 
 man, accept the alternative that this is a white 
 man's Government — as does the President him- 
 self in his one-sided argument with the dusky 
 committee that waited on him a day or two ago, 
 in declining to answer as to South Carolina, as- 
 suming that they are not a portion of the people, 
 and advising them to emigrate from the coun- 
 try which he had previously declared to be their 
 own — and are therefore consistent and logical 
 in denying the suffrage to the negro, as they are 
 in favoring the policy that ignores the war, and 
 seeks to rehabilitate the aristocracy of the South. 
 I wish I could say as much for the Union party 
 as a whole, on this floor. Gentlemen of that 
 faith are without apology when they agree with 
 them in either. 
 
 The proclamation has made the negro nom- 
 inally free. He counts in the representation. 
 He pays taxes, and must bear arms if neces- 
 - sary, and he has done it. No sensible man 
 now pretends to doubtthathe is a citizen, or can 
 doubt it in view of these considerations. The 
 interference of the Executive is put expressly 
 on the ground of the obligation of the national 
 authority to secure a republican form of govern- 
 ment to each of the States. To effect this, it is 
 essential that a majority should be allowed to en- 
 joy the political right of governing, and that all 
 should share alike in its direction. To put any 
 class under ilia State, would be to deprive them 
 of the riglits of citizens, and to reduce them, in 
 the words of the authority just cited, to a state 
 
 of civil servitude. It -is essential, moreover, 
 that it should rest, in the language of the Dec- 
 laration, on "the consent of the governed." 
 An establishment that does not conform to 
 these principles is not republican, whether the 
 power be lodged with the oligoi or the aristoi. 
 No matter as to its forms. We are not to be 
 cheated by appearances or names. It was 
 something more than the mere form that the 
 Constitution intended to secure. And yet the 
 process here ignores all these things, and rests 
 either upon the dimmest perceptions of free gov- 
 ernment, or upiin the southern theory that the 
 negro is not a man, or that this Government 
 was only intended for white men. If the prop- 
 osition were to exclude all men of Celtic blood, 
 what a sensation would it net produce among 
 the Democracy ? If the difference, however, \? 
 only against the African, consistency would 
 require that he should also be excluded from 
 the enumeration hereafter. With the end of the 
 "divine institution," the three-fifths clause, 
 which stipulated for a representation — not of or 
 for hirn, who was not then a man — but for his 
 master, has ceased to operate. If the freed 
 .slave is now a citizen, he has a right to all the 
 privileges, as he is confessedly subject to all the 
 duties which that relation involves. If instead 
 of rising from the fractional value to that of an 
 integer, he is no longer a member of the State, 
 he must cease to owe any o*'her than a domi- 
 ciliary allegiance, and the idea of a represen- 
 tation founded on his existence here, must be 
 exploded forever. And from this dilemma there 
 is no escape. If he is a citizen, the elective 
 franchise is his right. If he is not, represen- 
 tation on that basis is logically inadmissible. 
 
 The effect of the oligarchic process is to 
 reinstate the governing class as it was before, 
 without any check upon it. This we cannot 
 afford to do. There is, fortunately for us, a 
 loyal element among them, that has helped us 
 to bring them back, and may be used to keep 
 the peace— not by either arming or disarming 
 it — butby the restoration of a mere right, which 
 is essential to its protection as well as our own. 
 It is a happj'' circumstance that the measure 
 of security required by the people of the loyal 
 States, is precisely that which the Constitution 
 has imposed on us as a duty. The obligation 
 is to guaranty to every State in this Union a 
 republican form of government. If ' " the whole 
 commonwealth, comprehending all its orders, 
 with the privileges belonging to each," is not 
 republican, we are bound to make it so, and are 
 endowed by the Constitution with all the powers 
 necessary for that purpose. But how are these 
 powers to be exercised ? Not by the President, 
 because he cannot prescribe the terras. Not by 
 a mere refusal on the part of Congress to admit, 
 because that would be a refusal to perform— but 
 by an act of legislation, which it will be only 
 the duty of the President to enforce. It is a 
 narrow view of this duty which gives to it a 
 merely negative character, such as to put 
 down a usurpation, or drive out a tyrannical 
 
20 
 
 majority. There is a po^sitive obligation to icaj-- 
 rantov makf:: sure to all the people, a republican 
 form of government ; and here is the power that 
 has been sought for so diligently under the law 
 of war, to deal with the conquered territories 
 in such a way as to secure to all their loyalpeo 
 pie the rights to which they would be entitled 
 under a republican form of government, and 
 to protect the Union itself from all future dis- 
 turbance. These States are without govern- 
 ments of any sort — those which existed and 
 were disloyal having been 'overthrown. It is 
 our constitutional duty to supply them with new 
 ones of a republican character, and to provide 
 that none other shall be erected. If their black 
 population — if a majority of their loyal inhabit- 
 ants — nay, if a mere minority demand the ful- 
 fillment of this guaranty, by insisting that we 
 shall provide cheiu with a government that shall 
 admit them to the rights of citizenship, and be 
 at least partly within their ov/n control, Ave 
 cannot evade the pt-rformance by the })lea of a 
 \yant of consticutionul power. The declara- 
 tion of the duty gives it to us, with all the inci- 
 dental means. That duty is not denied ; but 
 we have wielded the sword so long to enforce 
 the law, that many people have come to the con- 
 clusion that there is no other weapon for such 
 a case, when in point of fact it is clearly inade- 
 quate to this part of the work, and the power 
 of the Legislature is the only one that can suc- 
 cessfully accomplish it. It is undoubtedly in 
 accordance with our practice, as it is with the 
 .spirit of our institutions, that it should be left 
 to the people themselves, in the first place, to 
 be performed by them in that condition of free- 
 dom which our arms have given them. But 
 if they will not do this of their own accord — 
 if the class that has been accustomed to rule, 
 will insist on holding the rein and denying 
 to their fellows, even to a respectable minority 
 of them, the rightful privilege of citizens under 
 a republic — I know no possible way of meeting 
 the case, but by interposing ourselves and pre- 
 scribing a fundamental law for the occasion. 
 It will not be enough, as I have already re- 
 marked, to refuse the Congressmen who may 
 apply on terms that are inadmissible to us. 
 That would be only a denial of justice to the dis-. 
 franchised which might prove indefinite, instead 
 of the fulfillment of an admitted obligation. If 
 I here be any limitation of the right of suflrago 
 it must come from the supreme authority, which 
 is here. There is no power elsewhere, and cer- 
 tainly none in a society that is yet in a state of 
 chaos, formless and void, and with nothing but 
 darkness brooding over it. That authority, it is 
 true, might well disfranchise individuals, such as 
 the traitors themselves, for an enormous crime 
 which showed tliat they could not be safely 
 trusted with so important a function. It could 
 not, however, proscribe a whole class, com- 
 prising a majority of the loyal people, all native 
 to the soil aud impeached of no crime, merely 
 because they had black skins gr wooly hair, 
 without violating the essential principles of re- 
 
 publicanism, and laying the foundations of an 
 aristocratic government. No argument could 
 defend it, except on the judicial hypothesis that 
 the race so excluded had no righls at ail that a 
 white man v/as bound to respect ; which would 
 be fatal of course, as already shown, to the 
 whole principle of representation as applied to 
 it. But this hypothesis has no foundation in 
 our early history or practice. The founders of 
 this Government never dreamed of such a dis- 
 tinction. The great charter of our fathers had 
 before affirmed the equality uf all men. It was 
 not race or color, but condition, that created 
 the constitutional disability. The slave, of 
 course, could not, in the nature of things, be 
 admitted to the privileges of a citizen, because 
 that would have been inconsistent with his con- 
 dition. Everybody else was counted, except 
 the Indian who j^aid no taxes — an incarnation, 
 by the way, of the revolutionary Ibrmuia, stereo- 
 typed on the hearts of the colonists, that con- 
 densed the causes of their struggle into twi> 
 memorable and mighty words. The notion that 
 a taint of African Ijlood, or any diversity of com- 
 plexion, was a disqualifying feature, 4s a purelj' 
 modern invention, which is but the growth 
 of that barbarous and unnatural system that 
 has tlebauched the moral sentiment, and left 
 in many minds only the feeblest conceptions 
 of rational freedom. The free negro voted ori- 
 ginally almost everywhere. It was a conse- 
 quence only of his unquestioned citizenship. 
 To admit him, it did not require a special gr;i!n . 
 by the insertion of the word ''black ""in any 
 republican constitution. To exclude him it did 
 require the insertion of the word • ' white. ' ' Tlie 
 only color that the framers of the Constitution 
 seem to have ostracized is the red. But even 
 here, it excepted the tax-payer, and was by a 
 designation of race. They hud sense enough 
 to Ivuow that a i^rinciple of exclusion resting 
 on so uncertain a basis as color, would he 
 unfitted for any constitution. 
 
 Apart, however, from the considerations al- 
 ready stated, there are special reasons in the 
 present case for insisting tliat the guaranty 
 shall be fulfilled in good faith ; and these are, 
 to recompense the black man ibrhis unwavcr 
 ing loyalty in the hour of trial, to afford him 
 the means of self-protection in the enjoyment 
 of the rights he has so richly earned, and if 
 these are not enough, to protect ourselves 
 against an}' future disturbance from the same 
 arrogant and presumptuous class which has just 
 been chastised into a decent respect for our- 
 selves, and a reluctant submission to our laws. 
 
 We began the war by repelling the black man 
 and returning him to his master ; by doing 
 everything, in short, to alienate liim from our- 
 selves, and prove to him that ho had nothing tf> 
 expect from us; and this was called statesman- 
 ship ! If ever a people deserved to be chastised, 
 it was ourselves, for the inefiable baseness and 
 fatuity which refused the aid of the negro, and 
 sent a hundred thousand vvhite men to die, 
 rather than wound the pride, or harm the prop- 
 
21 
 
 erty of an enemy ! We failed to drive him j 
 iVora oar support even by the unkindest usage. | 
 When wc plunged within the storm-cloud that i 
 iiverhung the South, and concealed everything I 
 tVom outside view, we were not long in discover- 
 ing that the white skin was everywhere synony- 
 mous with the traitor heart, and that wherever 
 wc could meet a black man we were sure to find 
 :i friend. He took our soldier by the hand, led 
 aim through the outposts, pointed out the se- 
 rv'it path, traveled with him by niglit, shared 
 !iis last crust with him, and baffled the blood- 
 hounds that were on his track. As the war 
 progressed, we began to find that with such an 
 auxiliary against us, success was impossible. 
 We made him free. But still we could not lift i 
 bim into the position of a soldier, which was ! 
 u privilege of caste in ancient times. People I 
 wlio foresaw that the step was an easy one from 
 the soldier to the citizen — themselves of craven ; 
 hearts and more slaves than he — insisted that j 
 he was like his detractors, loved his chains, and 
 was a coward bj' instinct, and that the white 
 soldier was a fool, who would throw down his ! 
 arms if you sent him an auxiliary whose skin [ 
 was not quite as fair as his own. You listened 
 and believed. But by and by, impelled by ne- ! 
 cessity, you allowed your brave and right-think- 
 ing Secretary of War to arm him quietly. You 
 rather winked at, than encouraged it ; and before 
 long the truth blazed upon you from the trenches 
 of Port Hudson that the black man was in your 
 ranks. He has now added to the title that God 
 Almighty gave him, a claim ujion your grati- 
 tude. How do you propose to pay it? 
 
 Nothing is clearer than that you have made 
 the privilegeof the ballot ne'Cessary for hispro- 
 V:;ction, by making liim nominally free, and using 
 liim to put down the rebellion of his master. 
 That master will not soon forget the infidelity 
 of the slave on whom he relied, or the humil- 
 iation tliat the proud chivalry has suffered at 
 the hands of its own born thralls. Even the 
 bond of interest that compelled, him to treat 
 that slave with kindness, because he was his 
 money, is now broken. Unable to wreak his 
 baffled vengeance upon you, he longs to pay 
 back the debt he owes you, by visiting his im- 
 potent malice upon the humble instrument of 
 your triumph, and proving to the world the 
 truth of what he has so often told it, that you 
 have only made his condition v^orse by ele- 
 vating him to freedom. He begs you to with- 
 draw your black troops. He wishes to be 
 relieved from your authority, by being allowed 
 to resume his place in the Union which he 
 liates. For this, he is willing to recognize the 
 results of the war in the nominal emancipation 
 of the slave, if you will leave him subject to 
 his authority, without rights of citizenship, and 
 without any security for the practical enjoy- 
 ment of the liberty you have given him. lie 
 can afford to make this offer, and others, which 
 the Executive hails as unexpected evidence of 
 pi'Ogress — because he cannot help it. The only 
 surprise to me is, that on such an invitation the 
 
 whole South did not rush incontinently into the 
 executive embrace. But will you acct'pt it? 
 If you do, what is your gift of freedom to the 
 black man? It is but ''the Dead sea fruit, 
 that tempts the eye but turns to ashes on the 
 lijis." What will you have done for "the 
 ward of the Republic," as he vras characterized 
 by our generous and noble-minded martyr Pres- 
 .ident, if he is to pass into the condition of a 
 Pariah, and to accept just such terms as his 
 humbled and exasperated master may impose 
 on him ? You will only have mocked him with 
 the mirage of liberty to make his condition ten- 
 fold worse than it was before. Is this the ful- 
 fillment of your plighted faith? Was it your 
 purpose only "to keep the word of promise to 
 the ear, and break it to the hope ?' ' It was the 
 very refinement of cruelty to have inspired such 
 hopes, only to disappoint them. Better, far 
 better, have left the miserable victim of your 
 guile to the slavery in which you found him, con- 
 tent, perhaps, with his condition, and dreaming 
 of no change, than thus to lift him from the 
 earth, only to dash him down again under the 
 feet of his oppressor. Better for yourselves, 
 too— for your present credit and your future 
 fame — if you had declined his services alto- 
 gether. The world, in that case, would only 
 have regarded us as |bols. It will now justly 
 point its finger of scorn at the Government 
 which was capable of the meanness of turning 
 its back on the benefactor to whom it appealed, 
 and appealed successfully, in the hour of its 
 sore distress. What is this but trusting the 
 laml) to the vulture ? Will the governing class, 
 to whose tender raeircies you- are expected to 
 turn him over, because they understand his 
 nature and his interests better than you do, 
 ever suffer him to rise from his degraded con- 
 dition? What is your experience already on 
 this point? What earnest, what foretaste, what 
 assurances do these men give you of future ref- 
 ormation, even now that the motives for good 
 behavior are so exigent and overwhelming? 
 The condition of the black man as a slave dis- 
 qualified him as a witness against the master 
 race, who were thus practically in the exercise of 
 a power that placed his person and his life at 
 the mercy of his paler brother. He is now fi-ee. 
 Without this privilege, he has no rights that a 
 white man can be compelled to respect. It is 
 essential to his security. No court within the 
 wide area of civilization would exclude him, or 
 any other man, from the witness stand on the 
 ground of race or color. If admitted, and un- 
 truthful, as they insist he is, his credibility is 
 still a question for a jury of white men. And 
 yet with this advantage, this badge of servitude 
 is still insisted on. and instead of closing the 
 courts of justice — if they deserve that name, 
 where evidence is excluded on system, and the 
 tribunal of a Turkish cadi would be shamed — the 
 Federal Government submits to the Immiliat- 
 ing necessity of withdrawing all controversies^ 
 wherever the rights of a negro ai*e involved — 
 ignoring those wherein his testimony might be 
 
22 
 
 required between white men — within a special 
 jurisdiction of its own, while it allows these 
 people to make constitutions, just to enable 
 them to escape its power, and do their own will 
 in such particulars as these, as though they were 
 really free of our rule, and could be safely trusted 
 with the performance of such a work ! But how 
 is it in regard to the marital relation, with all its 
 incidents? How as to education and prepara- ' 
 tion for the ballot? Have the schools been 
 thrown open to him? Is he free to work on 
 his own terms, to acquire property, to go about 
 wherever his interests or inclination may lead 
 him, and to seek employment at such wages as 
 he can fairly earn — oris he still subject to con- 
 demnation as a vagrant, and sale or apprentice- 
 ship for fines and jail foes ? What says the of- 
 ficial report of General Schurz, the result of a 
 long and extended tour, which is so mysteri- 
 ously ignored, while in the face of its authentic 
 and overwhelming testimony, the President is 
 relinquishing our blood-bought conquests to the 
 enemy, without even taking the advice of Con- 
 gress, though now sitting at the capital, and 
 proving the tranquillity of the South by the re- 
 sult of a five days' sojourn in three of its prin- 
 cipal towns, which developed the fact that black 
 troops could not be employed to advantage be- 
 cause it would be necessary to accumulate them 
 in large bodies for their own protection ? How 
 is it in Mississippi, where the local militia are 
 already stripping the negro of the arms pur- 
 chased from you as cherished heir-looms — dear 
 memorials— consecrated by the war of liberty, 
 and stained, perhaps, with their own blood, spilt 
 in your own defense, or with the blood of the 
 disc-omfited barbarians who are now so valor- 
 ously disarming them? How is it in Tonnes- 
 see? How in Virginia? It is not the over- 
 throw of the rebelhon, but of the abolitionists 
 of the North, that constitutes the inspiring and 
 exultant theme of the Speaker of its House of 
 Delegates. He thanks God that Virginia can 
 still trample on the rights of the black man, 
 bee luse, as he thinks — and as the Executive 
 thinks of all these States — she has never been 
 out of the Union. How, then, is the condition 
 of the negro improved by emancipation, under 
 a policy that cuts him off from the enjoyment 
 of all protection in person or property, and is 
 intended obviously to keep him in the bonds of 
 servitude, and to prove to the world that the 
 real victory is theirs, and that your boon of 
 freedom was only a cheat and a delusion ? What 
 is thereto prevent the relinactment of the whole 
 black code in any of these States as soon as 
 they shall have been relieved from our control 
 by readmission into the Union upon the terms 
 of the Executive? If you object — ay, even to 
 the imprisonment of a northern seaman — you 
 will be told as formerly, that these are matters 
 of State regulaxion only. Will you appeal to 
 the courts or send embassadors to Charleston 
 to negotiate an amicable submission ? They 
 ■will set your courts at defiance, and drive you 
 out with scorn and contumely, as they did be- 
 
 fore, and the Democracy of the North will clap 
 their hands and exult over your discomfiture. 
 Is the peace of the country to be secured in 
 this way? You have carried the cup of free- 
 dom to the lips of the black man and he has 
 drunk of it. If you would make of liim a 
 peaceful citizen, and an obedient member of 
 the State, you must protect him in the enjoy- 
 ment of the liberty you have given him. To 
 do this, it is only necessary to invest him 
 with the defensive armor of the ballot. That 
 will secure to him the consideration of the 
 white man. That will make it the interest of 
 the superior classes to cultivate him. That 
 will educate him into an intelligent acquaint- 
 ance with his duties. That will secure peace 
 and harmony to the land. The black man has 
 shown himself to be as docile, gentle, and hu- 
 mane, as he has approved himself loyal and 
 brave. He will make a valuable citizen if fairly 
 dealt with. But remember ! he is a man, who has 
 tasted liberty, and felt the glow of an iinaccus- 
 tomed manhood, as his pulse danced with a 
 new inspiration, when he looked up at the folds 
 of your starry banner on the perilous edge of 
 the battle. Beware how you allow these men, 
 who have never yet learned, and never will 
 learn anything, to trample on him now. The 
 policy foreshadowed in the proclamations will 
 make only a discontented people. It is the 
 slogan of battle — the herald's denouncement 
 of that war of races, which is so strangely appre- 
 hended by those who urge the very opposite 
 policy to heal up a war of sectiocs. It is the 
 preparation for these deluded people of a fu- 
 ture, before which even the savage horrors of 
 their own revolt may pale. The kindred policy 
 that ruled our councils in the same interest for 
 twolongyears — as it seems to rule them now — 
 proved fatal to the system it was intended to 
 serve, by making its preservation impossible. 
 It may be that God Almighty intends to finish 
 His great work, by giving a further rein to the 
 ipfernal spirit that precipitated these madmen 
 into the revolt that melted the chains of their 
 slaves. Let us see to it that we be not called 
 upon to repress the outbreak of nature, by 
 drawing our own swords hereafter upon our 
 faithful allies in the war of freedom. We can 
 prevent this now — and will if we are wise — by 
 a mcve act of justice that is simple and rea- 
 sonable, and will trench on no man's rights, 
 while it will extend the area of freedom by 
 popularizing these governments, and bringing 
 them at once to the republican standard of the 
 Constitution. That act is demanded by con- 
 siderations of the highest wisdom, as V'feW as 
 of the strictest justice. It were a foul shame 
 to refuse it, and a fouler still to add to that 
 refusal the future possible infamy, of turning 
 our own arms, at the call of these delinquents, 
 upon the trusty auxiliaries who have assisted 
 in subduing them, when the tyranny of their 
 oppressors, and the instinctive yearnings of 
 humanity, may drive them to resistance. I 
 should blush for my country — and weep for it 
 
23 
 
 too — if it was capable of an atrocity so unut- 
 terably base. 
 
 But thougii we were even insensible to the 
 claims of justice and the emotions of gratitude, 
 and entirely indifferent to the elevation of the 
 negro race for its own sake, we want their vote 
 ibr our own protection. Our best security is to 
 erect a breakwater against the encroachments 
 of the disaffected white man, by enlisting the 
 counteracting iniluence — the cheap support in 
 l)eace — of the loyal black man, to v/liomwehave 
 so successfully appealed in war. We need his 
 suffrage now to assist us -in keeping that peace 
 which he had so large a share in making. Take 
 away his musket, if you please, but do not dis- 
 arm him entirely. The question with me is not 
 whether you can trust him, but v>'hether you can 
 trust the man who asks you to give him the rule 
 again over his rescued bondsman. There are 
 two classes of white men in the seceding States. 
 The higher and more intelligent is essentially 
 anti-republican in habit and sentiment, while 
 the inferior and ignorant is even more abject 
 and servile than the slave himself". He may be 
 educated, however, into a just sclf-res2:)ect, and 
 a sense of his own interests. The governing 
 class never can. To make them republican, 
 you must change their whole social system and 
 their natures along with it. Until you do, and 
 they are thoroughly regenerated, they will be 
 unsafe depositaries of power in a Government 
 like this. If you will not disfranchise the man 
 who has already shown that he is unworthy of 
 trust, you must at least render him powerless 
 for mischief, by placing a sentinel over him, with 
 rue bloodless but potent weapon of the ballot, 
 to keep him in order. I do not insist that you 
 shall disfranchise the rebel who professes to 
 have repented, because without him you will 
 have no white element in the case. I have no 
 objection th3,t you should pardon his ci'ime, and 
 even restore to him his lands, if you think that 
 the interests of justice require no indemnity, 
 and no examples. My object is not vengeance. 
 1 do not thirst for his blood, even with all his 
 barbarities. Give him back everything else. 
 But for the power whicii he has shown himself 
 unworthy to hold, and which he has so justly 
 forfeited, restore not that, I adjure and beseech 
 you, by the recollection of the bloody trial 
 t hrough which yon have passed ; by the respect 
 you owe to the bereaved, the widowed, the or- 
 ])haned, the maimed who yet live ; and above 
 all, by the memory of your martyred, butch- 
 ered, starved, and mutilated dead. Insult them 
 not by the declaration that the earth has drunk 
 their blood in vain. Expose not yourselves to 
 the bitter reproach, that before their bones have 
 been gathered by pious hands from the fields 
 where they have been left to bleach unburied, 
 iheir very murderers have been hurried back 
 into your embrace like returning conquerors. 
 h' this reunioij is to be solemnized on terms 
 like these, wait at least until you have put off 
 your mourning, and stripped your public places 
 of the habiliments of woe. Bury your mur- 
 dered President out of sight. Cover up the graves 
 
 of Andersonville, with all their horrid secrets, 
 and then — then celebrate these unholy nuptials 
 — if you can. Let it not be said, at all events, to 
 your discredit, that "the funeral-baked meats 
 have coldly furnished forth the marriage table. " 
 Open no liallof Valhalla, where the returning 
 braves of the South shall quaff. their foaming 
 ale, and pledge you from the grinning skulls of 
 your own dead and forgotten heroes. 
 
 But there is another consideration that gives 
 us the right, and makes it animjierative neces- 
 sity, for our own protection, to insist that the 
 negro shall be allowed to share the rights of 
 citizenship in their highest sense, and that is 
 the fact that the conversion of the chattel into a 
 freeman will greatly enlarge the representation 
 of those States, and bring into Congress some 
 thirty votes on the basis of this peculiar popu- 
 lation, while the loyal States must suffer from 
 the increase. If they come, it must be in a rep- 
 resentative capacity of course. But whose rep- 
 resentatives will they be, if the whole class in 
 whose names they come, and for whom they 
 profess to speak, is to have no voice in their 
 election? To call them representatives of'any 
 other than the ruling class, would be a gross 
 abuse of language. The benefit of your act of 
 enaancipation then is to inure to the master who 
 has endeavored to break up your Government, 
 while the black man still holds substantially the 
 relation of a slave, and is only used to count 
 for the benefit of his oppressors ! And whom 
 will they sendtomanage the affairs of the Union 
 in the name of the slave? Yv'ill it be the man 
 whom he would select himself? Will it be an 
 advocate of his interests? Will it be those who 
 will provide for the payment of the debt of the 
 war, or the pensions pledged to the families of 
 the brave soldiers whose very bones will be 
 spurned aside with contumely by the rebel 
 plowman? What is our experience thus far? 
 Among the first men sent here from Louisiana, 
 v/as a signer of the secession ordinance, and ail 
 three gravitated at once, as by a natural law, 
 into the ranks of the party that opposed the 
 war. The first offering from Arkansas to the 
 other end of the Capitol was a graduate of the 
 same school. But will the holders of our public 
 debt — will our brave volunteers agree to this? 
 No I Ask the men here, however, who sym- 
 pathized with the rebellion througliout, and 
 denounced the war, and the debt made by it, as 
 alike unlawful, andthough professingto be Dem- 
 ocrats, they v/ill answer with one voice that this 
 representation by proxy is right and proper, 
 although they do not even admit the negro to 
 be a citizen, and hardly confess him to be a 
 man. While ho continued a slave, there v/a* 
 nothing unreasonable in-the agreement that the 
 master should speak for him, if he was to be 
 heard at all, because he could have no will of 
 his own. It was at all events the bargain, and 
 we stood by it. That slave is now, however, a 
 freeman. He has a will of his own, and the man 
 who owned him no longer represents it, but the 
 contrary. Looking to his present relations to 
 the late slave, his assumption of the right to speak 
 
24 
 
 for him, is a double outrage on the black man. 
 It is not only to deny him a i-epresentative, but 
 to give that office to his enemy. It is in effect 
 to reenslave him. 
 
 If the white man of the South is of the opin- 
 ion that the negro is not fit to vote at home, he 
 decides at the .same time that he is not worthy 
 to be represented here ; and in claiming that 
 right, asks for himself a power in the Govern- 
 ment that will make one unrepentant traitor 
 the equal, in many instances, of two or three 
 loyal northern men. He admits tire injustice, 
 too, while he preserves his consistency, by re- 
 jecting the negro himself in the interior appor- 
 tionment of some of his own States. But is it 
 just to the loyal States that he should exercise 
 this power in the Federal Government? Will 
 they consent to this inequality, now that the 
 remedy is in their own hands? Are these peo- 
 ple to be rated, in their condition of subjugation, 
 at their own estim'ate before putting their armor 
 on, as having vindicated their clai'.n to l)e con- 
 sidered the master race, and so outweigh twice 
 or thrice their number of northern mudsills? 
 Speaking for myself, I do not choose to have 
 my delegated powers, as the Representative of 
 one hundred and thirty thousand northern free- 
 men, neutralized by a representative of this 
 sort, whether he come here by the cong^d'i'Ure 
 of a military commander, or is puffed in this 
 direction by the arrogant breath of a leeble but 
 aristocratic constituency. If the white men of 
 the South will insist that the negro shall have 
 no political rights in the States, while he is to 
 appeardiereto claim a recognition at our hands, 
 only to add to the power of the oligarchy in 
 this Government, then I would insist that he 
 shall appear here either in person, or by his 
 attorney, or curator, or next friend, and not by 
 a guardian or trustee under the appointment 
 of his quondam master, which would be the 
 sublimest.of farces. If they ai-e not content 
 with this, then I would say to them, wait until 
 by a constitutional amendment we can offer 
 you the fairer basis of sufirage, which will en- 
 able you to swell your numbers as soon as you 
 shall be prepared to do justice to the black 
 man. 
 
 It is insisted, however, and most especially by 
 those who profit most by the laws of natiu-ali- 
 zation. and the principle of universal suffrage, 
 of which they have therefore been the unvary- 
 ing champions, that the negro is ignorant, and 
 must be educated before he can be allowed to 
 enjoy the privileges necessary for his own pro- 
 tection as a citizen — which is to say, in efiect . that 
 ignorance disqualifies for freedom, and ought 
 to make a man a slave. It may be a question 
 whether it wei-e not well if that iiad been made 
 a condition with all men. But why demand 
 that of the indigenous black man who has been 
 reared under our institutions, and has perhaps 
 sl)0uklered his musket in their defense, which 
 is not asked of the foreigner whose vote and 
 sympathies have been against us?' Is he in- 
 ferior in these respects to the Celtic Irishman 
 who holds the destinies of your great metropolis 
 
 in his hands ? His instincts at all events — sup- 
 posing them to be his highest faculty — have 
 taught him to take the side of liberty, when the 
 savage who burned him was exerting himself in 
 the interests of the governing classes of Europe, 
 from whose oppressions ho had sought an asy- 
 lum here, to overthrow the very Government 
 which had so generously opened its arms to re- 
 ceive him, and lifted him from the dust into the 
 privileges of a citizen. I would take that in- 
 stinct, and use it as a counterpoise against the 
 crude, uninstructed element that comes to us 
 from abroad. I do not fear that it will fall under 
 the influence of the aristocratic class anymore 
 than it did during the war. The negro will be 
 sure to look with jealousy and suspicion upon 
 the task-master from whose arms he has been 
 torn, and who will still continue to regard him 
 as his rightful property. That aristocracy, more- 
 over, landless as it is soon destined to be, under 
 another and a better social system, is sure to 
 be swallowed up ere long by the upheaval of 
 the lower stratum, when labor, now become 
 respectable, shall assert its rightful suprem- 
 acy, and the strong sinews of toil shall reclaim 
 their lost inheritance by seizing upon the soil. 
 But who are they that make this objection ? 
 Only the master himself and his northern 
 friends. If they think so, however, why do 
 they object? Vv hat harm can come to the lords 
 from the maintenance of the patriarchal rela- 
 tion, by turning it into a bond of kinship and 
 good offices that will rival the constitution of 
 the Highland clan? But they do not think so. 
 They affirmed with equal confidence that the 
 negro would cleave to his master, and fight for 
 him, if he would fight at all : but it turned out 
 to be a mistake, as every man of common sense 
 knew very well it would. If the power of the 
 master had been equal to that of the northern 
 demagogue, he might possibly have taken sides 
 against the Government with the same una- 
 nimity as the imported Caucasian who was led 
 as an Ox to the shambles, and made, like a blind 
 Samson, to lay his hands upon the pillars of 
 our Constitution, in that dark hour when all the 
 powers of earth and hell seemed leagued together 
 for its destruction. The negro has already solved 
 that question in a way that shames even the poor 
 white man of the South, who is indeed obnox- 
 ious to this imputation, and from whose exam- 
 ple it might have been plausibly inferred, but 
 for the experience of this war, that he would 
 have yielded to the same influences. But what 
 authority is there for the assertion that the 
 black man is more ignorant than the poor 
 whites' of the South who delight in shooting, 
 or the imported patriots of the North who 
 gratify their equally savage tastes by burning 
 him? Look at the revelations of the census 
 and see what they declare. ' I venture to say 
 that, considering the difference of condition and 
 opportunity, the black man is jtio way the in- 
 ferior. It is sufficient, howevgr, that he has 
 proved intelligent enough to be loyal, when his 
 highly educated master was not saved from trea- 
 son by his superior instruction. But who shall 
 
25 
 
 say that this loyalty was the fruit of ignorance ? 
 Not those, certainly, who prize the republican 
 State, and think that knowledge is essential to 
 its preservation. Its chief advantage is, per- 
 haps, its felicitous adaptation to the gener&l 
 standard of humanity, in its extreme simplicity 
 of form, and the fact that it requires so little of 
 the learning of the schools to govern it. It 
 v>'ould have perished in the recent trial, if it had 
 been left to the wisdom of its statesmen. It 
 was the uneducated common sense — the reason- 
 ing instinct only — of its own people, that saved 
 it. God defend us from the statesmen and diplo- 
 matist whom this revolution has evolved ! 
 
 But if the negro is ignorant, whose fault is 
 it, and what is the remedy? Has he not been 
 studiously denied the privilege which his white 
 and jealous Democratic rival has so largely neg- 
 lected, of learning even to read? And is the 
 slave-owner, who is responsible for this, to meet 
 us with the confession that he has purposely 
 kept this man in darkness, because he feared 
 that a spark might fall upon his intellect that 
 v.'ould kindle into flame and melt his chains, 
 and then convert his own inexpiable wrong into 
 an argument against his freedom, and ask us to 
 wait upon the education of the man who has 
 just shown that he is better fitted for its enjoy- 
 ment than himself? Thank Heaven ! it does 
 not require an education in the schools to make 
 a man love liberty. The wliole infernal system 
 i)f black laws is founded on the dread of human 
 instinct, and the fear that the natural struggles 
 of humanity, if aided even by such feeble lights 
 as might be accessible to him in his condition 
 of servitude, would result in making him a free- 
 man. They are themselves a i:)regnant confes- 
 sion that the slave is gifted with powers and 
 susceptibilities that might be awakened into 
 mischievous activity, and cultivated for the 
 highest duties of citizenship in a free State. 
 Whether the ignorance of the inferior class, 
 either imported from abroad or thus diligently 
 cultivated at home, ought to constitute a dis- 
 qualification, it is perhaps too late to inquire. 
 since the policy of the country, shaped and 
 fashioned by the Democratic party, has settled 
 it as a principle, that the right of self-govern- 
 ment cannot be justly made to depend upon 
 the education or intelligence of the voter. It 
 may be right, for the twofold reason that the 
 love of liberty is heaven-born, and the right to 
 vote the best educator of the freeman. If gen- 
 tlemen on the other side have come now to 
 think differently, I have no objection to go back 
 and trust the suffrage only to those who can read 
 and write, and liave been long enough among 
 us to understand our institutions — to shake 
 themselves loose from all foreign domination — 
 to unlearn the Old World ideas in which they 
 have Ijeen reared — and to appreciate the free- 
 dom which we enjoy. I caiuiot consent, how- 
 ever, that one rule shall be applied to the 
 imported Celt, and another to the home-bred 
 African. _ The right to freedom is not a ques- 
 tion of either race or color, but the common 
 inheritance of humanity. There are no aris- 
 
 tocracies in God's providence but that of under- 
 standing, which is not transmissible by descent, 
 and is the appanage of no particular race or 
 class of men. I do not mean to say — for I 
 am no fanatic — that the negro race is, upon the 
 whole, the equal of the white' one in this par- 
 ticular, any more than I would afhrm that any 
 one white race is equal to any other, or that all 
 the white races are equally fitted for the task of 
 self-government. That is a proposition which 
 no man can confidently allirm, in view of the 
 past history and present condition of the world, 
 but yet it involves no question as to the nat- 
 ural aspirations — which are only inspirations — 
 of man for freedom, or his right to its enjoyment. 
 If I am to choose, however, between these two 
 elements, I would take the black man, upon 
 the evidence of the last few years, and reject 
 the equally ignorant white, who is so debauched 
 as even to love slavery — who allows his very 
 instincts to be smothered — and who submits his 
 conscience and his understanding to a direction 
 whose dominion rests upon the same profound 
 and sagacious policy that has locked up the 
 treasures of knowledge from the black man. 
 Everybody must have been struck with the 
 marvelous unanimity with which both these ele- 
 ments arranged themselves, though on opposite 
 sides, in the late contest. When men begin to 
 reason for themselves they are almost sure to 
 differ. "Instinct," says Mr. Burke, "when 
 under the guidance of reason is always right." 
 If it was instinct, however, that led the black 
 manin the one direction, it was something other 
 than reason that herded his jealous rivals into 
 one solid mass in the other. 
 
 But it has been objected in some quarters., 
 that if the negro is endowed with the power of 
 the ballot, he will, under the guidance of the 
 same instinct, combine with his fellows to seize 
 the governments of the rebel States into his 
 own hands. This argument is the very oppo- 
 site of the one which I have just examined, and 
 while the other has only been invented as an 
 apology for refusing the ballot by those who 
 had no fears of the master's influence, has not 
 perhaps been without its weight upon both the 
 northern and the southern mind. Nobody can 
 doubt that in this latitude at least, there is a 
 morbid apprehension of what Is called negro 
 equality, but really means negro superiority ; 
 and It is perhaps not unnatural, that now that 
 the negro has shown that he will fight, the men 
 who flinched from that ordeal in the hour of our 
 danger, or even those wlio have been driven 
 like cattle into the armies of the oligarchy, 
 should dread the comparison, and feel that 
 there was nothing now but the denial of the 
 Imllot to prevent the black man from asserting 
 his natural superiority over them&'elves. Th^s 
 apprehension supposes, however, a power of 
 combination and forecast, without even the 
 stimulus of oppression on his [lart. which is 
 anything but consistent with the idea so studi- 
 ously inculcated of his incorrigible Inferiority, 
 and surrenders all that has been affirmed by 
 philosophers and divines in regard to his nor- 
 
\ 
 
 2Q 
 
 mal condition, while it admits that even the 
 higher culture of the white man would give him 
 no advantage in the contest. But in the few 
 cases where the blacks are in a majority the 
 difference in numbers is small. If ^t cannot 
 be overcome by the superior training of the 
 white man, then the ability of the negro and 
 his consequent title to command, are established 
 by the highest possible test. But in a quai'rel 
 ot" races what is to l)ecome of the mulatto? 
 If the least perceptible infusion of negro blood, 
 the very faintest suspicion of a twist in the hair, 
 is sufhcient to authorize us to deprive our un- 
 fortunate hybrid cousin of all participation in 
 the Govei'iiraent, what assurance is there that 
 the Caucasian Hush will not prove equally fatal 
 on the other side? History teaches us that this 
 distinction is as likely to prevail as the other. 
 But surely the chivalry, which has held in sub- 
 ordination by its superior address the turbulent 
 but submissive Democracy of the North, would 
 not shrink from the encounter in the same field 
 with the despised and degraded African. But 
 the idea of such a combination, as the result 
 only of the most generous treatment, is the most 
 extraordinary of paradoxes, if it does not de- 
 serve to be characterized as the wildest of chi- 
 meras. The people of the South will divide, 
 as before, upon the policy of the Government, 
 and struggle, as before, for the possession of its 
 offices. Both sides, of course, will seek to pro- 
 pitiate the black man, because he has become a 
 power in the State, and that one which will secure 
 his confidence, and go farthest in its professions 
 of regard for his interests, will be sure to secure 
 the majority of his votes. If he be a child — as 
 he perhaps in some sense truly is — he will be 
 won by kindness, and ask nothing more than 
 freedom of locomotion, protection to his per- 
 son, and the means of enjoying, without mo- 
 lestation, the rewards of his own labor.* ^lake 
 it the interest of his late master to cultivate 
 him. Give him a vote, and the "poor white 
 trash" who despised him because he was a 
 slave, will respect him because he is a sover- 
 eign. If it is necessary to educate him, because 
 he is ignorant, give him an interest in the Gov- 
 ernment. It is the only school for the adult, 
 and perhaps the best for all ages. The ripest 
 thinkers of the times are agreed that it is a nur- 
 sery of instruction that develops the man with 
 wonderful rapidity, and it is this compensatory 
 power that has perhaps served more than any- 
 thing else to neutralize the evils of the prevail- 
 ing system. To insist on a preliminary educa- 
 tion is to begin at the wrong end. Leave him 
 for instruction in the hands of his old master, 
 and you ofT'er a premium for the continuance of 
 the old system, which kept him in ignorance of 
 his rights and of his ])ower. Knowledge will 
 make him more formidable than ever. So long 
 as he is kept under the State, and feels that he 
 is no part of it, he is sure never to rise by this 
 process. The men who control the Govern- 
 ment will have the same interest in keeping him 
 down as heretofore, reenforced as it will be by 
 phantoms of terror that will haunt their pil- 
 
 lows, along with the new feeling of resentment 
 and jealousy, which his compulsory enfi'an- 
 chisement has engendered. Cherish not the 
 delusion that any good behavior on his part 
 w'ill ever secure for him an admission to the 
 rights of citizenship. It is now or never. There 
 is no case, I think, in history. where a privileged 
 class has ever surrendered its prerogatives to 
 those that were beneath it. Indulge not the 
 hope that you will ever make of him a contented 
 subject. It is as impossible, with a people so 
 numerous, to maintain an intermediate grade 
 between the slave and citizen, as it is to estab- 
 lish an intermediate variety in nature, or an 
 intermediate condition here between the State 
 and Territory. The black man knows that he 
 is free. If he asserts his right to meet his fel- 
 lows in council for purposes which touch the 
 interests of his race, either in this world or the 
 next, the rumors of insurrecti6n will load the 
 atmosphere. The white man will restrain his 
 liberty by biting statutes and relentless ci'uelty. 
 The black man will rebel, and the result will be 
 a chronic war, which will repel the emigrant, 
 and end in the extermination of the -weaker 
 race. The groundless panic that pervaded the 
 South so recently foreshadows the evil that is to 
 come. Has the kindred policy of the British 
 Government toward the Cebic Irishman suc- 
 ceeded in conciliating his affection for the Eng- 
 lish race or nation? If those who favor it here 
 had taken the trouble to look into the causes of 
 that e.xodus that is unpeopling his ancient home, 
 and flooding our shores with its living tides, they 
 would have discovered that there was some- 
 thing more than a war of races to explain the 
 undying hatred with which the Irish exile looks 
 upon the Saxon Englishman, and they would 
 have found its solution in the very policy which 
 it is now pi;oposed to inaugurate in order to pre- 
 vent a war of races in the South. It is unneces- 
 sary, however, to go so far. The recent jjloody 
 disturbances in the island of Jamaica are but a 
 type of the social horrors which a mistaken 
 deference to its prejudices is preparing for that 
 deluded people. 
 
 But it is objected by the President that this 
 is a question for the States under the Consti- 
 tution, and that the concession of the elective 
 franchise by himself to the freedmen of the 
 South, must have been extended to all colored 
 men wherever found, and so must have estab- 
 lished a change of suffrage in the North as well 
 as in the South, and would have been an as- 
 sumption of power which nothing in the Con- 
 sfitution or laws of the United States M'ould 
 have warranted. 
 
 This argument assumes, in the first place, that 
 the delhulting States are already in the Union, 
 free from the penalties of crime, and with all 
 their rights and privileges as intact as those of 
 their loyal sisters. If this be true, it is not to 
 be questioned that the right of fixing the quali- 
 fications of their own voters has been left, sub 
 modo, with themselves. But how then, it will be 
 naturally asked, did the President himself ac- 
 quire the power of defining the qualifications 
 
27 
 
 of the voters in the first instance ? If he could 
 do this — if he could either abridge or enlarge the 
 privilege — and he could as well do one as the 
 other — so, d multo fortiori, could the law-mak- 
 ing power of this Government, in which the 
 sovereignty resides. If he could do either, he 
 might as well have conferred* the privilege on 
 the black man as on anybody else. But then 
 he objects that this must have extended it to all 
 the loyal States, as well as those that have re- 
 belled, which is an assertion that his jurisdiction 
 has attached, by virtue of the rebellion of the 
 delinquents, to the States that are without sin. 
 I am constrained to say that this is an argument 
 which I have not been able to comprehend. 
 Taking it, however, to be true, as claimed, it 
 must have equally followed from his summary 
 disfranchisement of the voters, whether loyal 
 or disloyal, who might decline to take the oath 
 to support all proclamations and laws having 
 reference to the emancipation of the slave, that 
 we of the loyal States were all disfranchised, 
 too, unless we submitted to the same conditions. 
 
 Taking it, however, only in the milder sense 
 of a suggestion, not uncommon in the South, 
 that the loyal States which now deny the suf- 
 I'rage to the black man, would be either expected 
 — to save their own consistency — or might be 
 compelled by Congress to conform to the same 
 rule, there is a word more to be said in the way 
 of answer. 
 
 Whether these States could be regarded as 
 strictly republican, with such a limitation of the 
 elective franchise, if the necessities of the coun- 
 try or the protection of a numerous class of 
 citizens required the presentation of the ques- 
 tion to the consideration of Congress, is more 
 than doubtful. The paucity of the blacks, how- 
 ever, in the northern States, where there is no 
 disposition to oppress them, and their uniform 
 enjoyment, without molestation, of every social 
 and civil right, without the protection of the 
 political privilege of the ballot, has made it a 
 question of no practical imjiortance to the coun- 
 try, and led to no formal complaint, although 
 the overshadowing influence of the slave power 
 has robbed them, in many of the States, of that 
 privilege which the overthrow of slavery will 
 sooner or later restore to them. Whether their 
 inherent right as citizens to vote could be en- 
 forced by an appeal to the judicial tribunals of 
 the country, upon the footing of the constitu- 
 tional guaranty, is a question which I am not 
 prepared to answer, and do not care to discuss. 
 'j'here is no issue now as to the loyal States, to 
 demand the consideration of Congress. There 
 is none pending as to their admission here. It 
 is only the criminals that are at 3'our bar — not 
 asking pardon, but demanding to be restored 
 to poAVer. They went out to found a slave em- 
 pire. They still think that God and nature in- 
 tended the negro only for that condition. lie 
 counts by millions in the rebel States. He is 
 a freeman now. His master is his enemy. He 
 obviously intends to reenslave him if he can. 
 He wants .power to enable him to do it. The 
 negro wants protection, and has earned the right 
 
 to it, if it was not his before. We want peace 
 and security, if not indemnity for the past, and 
 we are sure that they can be only secured by 
 making these governments republican. They 
 have placed themselves by their own act in a 
 condition in which, by the confession of the 
 President himself, it becomes our duty to exe- 
 cute the guaranties of the Constitution. When 
 we shall have done this work, it will be time 
 enough to enter upon another that v^Ill be purely 
 voluntary; and if the reconstructed States shall 
 Insist, when they are in a condition to do so, 
 that we shall deal with the negro, ourselves, as 
 we have compelled them to deal with him, I 
 doubt not that the justice of the North, with its 
 vision purged by the rising beams of universal 
 liberty, will anticipate any action here, by un- 
 doing what nothing but a base servility to the 
 perished feudalism of the South could ever have 
 accomplished. 
 
 But why hurry the return of these States? 
 Why undertake the hopeless and preposterous 
 task of resorting not only to temptation, Imt com- 
 pulsion, for the purpose of bringing about a re- 
 union which can only subsist where it is spon- 
 taneous, and can rest securely on no other foun- 
 dation than mutual respect and good will ? It is 
 a great problem, and a difficult one. Is tbereany 
 immediate overshadowing necessity for their 
 reappearance here ? Is there any adequate in- 
 ducement to indemnify us for the admitted risks 
 we must incur from immature and ill-considered 
 action? What would be thought of the sanity 
 of the man in private life, who would insist on 
 hurrying back to his embrace, and coniidence 
 the unfaithful partner who had violated a sworn 
 engagement of fidelity, purloinedhis goods, fired 
 his dwelling, and murdered a part of its de- 
 fenders ; who instead of yielding had only been 
 surrendered by his slaves, or overtaken and dis- 
 armed by the officers of justice, and liad never 
 even admitted his crime, or given one token of 
 repentance ? Is there not danger enough already 
 in the rapid process of disbandment and sur- 
 render, that has been going on under our own 
 eyes, to the terror of our only loyal friends, both 
 white and black, in the South, ivithout reference 
 to the wishes or opinions of the people or their 
 Representatives here, and in defiance of ofS- 
 cial information collected by the Government 
 itself that the spirit which inaugurated and di- 
 rected this hellish revolt was as rife as ever in 
 the land, that we should insist on strewing palm- 
 branches in their way, and inviting them to the 
 honorsof a triumph at the Capitol? The Presi- 
 dent admits that his policy " is attended with 
 some risk," but excuses it by the suggestion that 
 " it is a risk that must he taken. ' ' This, I humbly 
 think, is a 11011 scquitur. It was not necessary 
 that he should have apollcy, and a perilous one, 
 or that we should take the risks that are admitted 
 to be incidental to it. However it may be with 
 the soldier, it is not out of "the nettle danger" 
 that the statesman would "pluck the flower 
 safety." He will take no risks if he can help 
 it, and with only a rational treatment of this 
 question, I think they are unnecessary here. 
 
28 
 
 The people of the loyal States, who fought this 
 battle, are now in the possession of the Govern- 
 ment. They may— and if they are wise they 
 will — take their own time to determine how they 
 ■ will readjust its machinery, and heal over the 
 wounds that the war has made. It is in their 
 power now to exact every possible security for 
 the future. 
 
 Why, then, this inexplicable eagerness to sur- 
 render all the advantage of our victory without 
 any security at all ? Why insist that the over- 
 throw of these rebels in the bloody arbitrament 
 to which they have appealed, is to be only the 
 signal for their restoration to their ibrmer es- 
 tate? Is it necessary that we should constrain 
 the reluctant condescension of these haughty 
 masters, who so lately spurned us as slaves, to 
 the renewal of the domination which they had 
 come to loathe from a very feeling of satiety? 
 Has the attempt improved or mollified them? 
 General Schurz is the witness, that the policy 
 of not only pardoning, but inviting the traitors 
 themselves to reconstruct their States, has ".ad 
 the worst possible effect upon them. And it 
 was but natural that it should. If they do not 
 despise us for our weakness and our voluntary 
 self-abasement, they will be at least prepared to 
 conclude that they are more necessary to us than 
 we are to them. They were not long out tliem- 
 selves, before they began to yearn for the scion 
 of some royal house beyond the seas. Shall 
 we furnish them reason to think that we are 
 pining for the return of our natural lords, along 
 with our Democratic brethren, who have been 
 wandering like sheep without a shepherd, and 
 lamenting the desolation of the Capitol with 
 more than the tenderness of the Moor, who 
 wept the exile of the last of the Abencerrages 
 under the deserted towers of the Alhambra? 
 What reason, beyond their mere repugnance to 
 the association with the northern mudsills, will 
 they have to lament their failure in the battle- 
 field, wlien they are once mOre reinstated in their 
 original dominion here? Are these the means 
 by which a statesman expects to improve the 
 lessons of the war? If kindness and submission 
 could have won'their hearts, they never would 
 have left us. Is anybody weak enough now to 
 think that they are so chastened and humbled 
 by defeat, that a restoration to power, instead of 
 intoxicating, would only disarm them? That 
 would not be in accordance with human nature 
 or historical example. Did the catastrophe of 
 Charles I result in any improvement of the 
 family ? Their restoration was but the prelude 
 to another revolution that drove them from the 
 throne. It is the same blind confidence in the 
 reformation of these men that is now menacing 
 this Government with ruin. 
 
 But is there any evidence that thoy are 
 changed, or that they are yet in a proper frame 
 of mind to come back, and perform faithfully 
 their duties here? We all know better. The 
 special commissioner of the Executive says not, 
 and his testimony is supported by all the pre- 
 sumptions in the case. It would be unreason- 
 able to look for anything else. They are but 
 
 men, like ourselves. Alienated in affection by 
 
 a systematic education of thirty years, they went 
 out with the determination never to return. 
 The Southern heart went with them. Inflated 
 ■.'ith pride and vainglory, they threw down the 
 gage of battle, and defied us in the presence of 
 a world that sympathized v/ith them. We took 
 it up, and they are at our feet, deeply wounded 
 in their most sensitive point, smarting under 
 the humiliation of a defeat at the hands of their 
 own slaves, and realizing more than the bitter- 
 ness of death in the depth of their fall, and the 
 painful recollections that it suggests. How- 
 unreasonable to expect that hatred, the deep- 
 est and most undying — dOubly intensified by 
 such humiliations — could be converted into love 
 by such a process, and the lessons "^f a genera- 
 tion unlearned in the twinkling of an eye ! But 
 they do not even aflect it ; and I am rather in- 
 clined to respect the pride that, under the great- 
 estoftemptations, has prevented them from con- 
 descending to the meanness of the hypocrite. 
 They confess that they are subdued, but only, as 
 they tell us, by the power of numbers— the mere 
 brute superiority of the North. They do not 
 profess contrition for their great crime. They 
 do not even admit that they have sinned. Nay. 
 they glory in the act, treat fidelity to their 
 infamous confederacj' as the most heroic of 
 virtues, award public honors under the very 
 Government that has crushed them — and which 
 that Government ratifies, in recompense for 
 treason against it. and visit the social ban, if 
 not the bullet or the knife, upon such of their 
 people as have fought valiantly in its defense. 
 It is but reasonable, I say, that, coming as they 
 do, out of the fires of the rebellion, they should 
 feel thus. But that they should act thus under 
 our own eye, is evidence either that they do not 
 wish to return, or that the dejection that fol- 
 lowed their defeat, has given place to the assur- 
 ance, that they are not only to be pardoned their 
 offense, but to return as conquerors. Their 
 leaders certainly do desire to get back again, 
 because they are overthrown in battle, and 
 it is but to exchange the place of a subject 
 for that of a ruler, or at least an equal. To 
 accomplish this, they would have been glad 
 to ransom their lives and property for the 
 cheap consideration of negro suffrage. They 
 expected probably no terms more favorable. 
 The lenity of the Government has assured them 
 that treason is no crime, and that there is to be 
 no atonement for the past. The tone of the 
 proclamations and the tenor of the diplomatic 
 negotiations have taught them that nothing 
 was expected or desired by the President but 
 the recognition of the freedom of the slave, and 
 the repudiation of the debt incurred in carrying 
 on the war, and that there was to be no other 
 security for the future. The outgivings of pub- 
 lic functionaries Inive instructed them that they 
 were wrong in claiming the rights of belliger- 
 ents, and that they have a right to resume theii- 
 places here upon such conditions as they can 
 make with the Executive. They care nothing 
 about you or your laws. They look only to the 
 
29 
 
 Chief Magistrate, while they defy the opinions 
 of your constituents, and regard you only as 
 the mere executors of his will. There is a 
 Providence in these manifestations that warns 
 us of our danger, if we would give heed to it. 
 Ignoring them, we shall not have even the poor 
 .■ipology of saying that we were deceived in a 
 case where even the largest professions — if 
 they had vouchsafed to make them, as they 
 have not — ought not to have been allowed to 
 put us off our guard. I know that confidence 
 is a generous plant, and that there are natures 
 so unsophisticated as to be above suspicion or 
 distrust. There are men certainly whose bound- 
 less charity would nqt only forgive offenses, 
 however frequently repeated, but even per- 
 suade them to give their faith anew to those 
 who have dealt treacherously with them— as 
 these men have with ns — while they would re- 
 ject the counsels of the wise and prudent, on 
 the grouml that their suspicions were ungener- 
 ous, and the results apjirehendcd by them im- 
 probable. These men may be good Christians, 
 but they are poor statesmen, and they miscon- 
 strue the spirit of the Christian maxim which 
 teaches forgiveness, if they suppose that it in- 
 culcates trust. The thing that has once hap- 
 pened may happen again. It is not sufficient 
 that it is improbable. It is the business of the 
 statesman to see that it is made impossible. No 
 blind confidence — no false sense of security on 
 his own part — will excuse him for hazarding the 
 peace and welfare of a nation, by giving his 
 trust a second time where it has once been dis- 
 astrously betrayed. He has no right to sport 
 in this way with the life of a people. He can- 
 not afford to be thus generous with other peo- 
 ple's goods. It is not enough to tell us that the 
 jiresent Executive of this nation — with a strong 
 feeling, of course, for the desolation of the South 
 — is magnanimous enough to forgive, and gener- 
 ous enough to confide in the honor and loyalty of 
 his old neighbors and associates in council, al- 
 though they have so cruelly persecuted him — as 
 they will do again as soon as the opportunity oc- 
 curs. Tlie twenty millions of the loyal States 
 who have seen so little good come out of that Naz- 
 areth, must have something surer to rest upon 
 than his oblivious charity. I think otherwise, 
 and so do my constituents. I have great re- 
 pcct for his opinions, but the facts and the pre- 
 sumptions are all against him, and I must be 
 governed by them. If we are wrong, the error 
 may be corrected hereafter. If he is wrong, 
 it is irremediable. True wisdom demands that 
 v:o should "make assurance doubly sure, and 
 1:1 ke a i)0!Kl of fate," while there is yet time to 
 (1:) it. by providing against all possible contin- 
 ;;ciic!es, v.'here the interests involved are so vast 
 and iuanpreciable. If the terms seem harsh, 
 that is the fault of those who are precipitating 
 the solution. A reasonable probation wOuld 
 enable us to make them easier. I would rather, 
 for my ov/n part, trust to the mellowing influ- 
 ences of time. If you desire a reunion that will 
 he permanent and real, you must wait till their 
 hearts are changed — wait until the bitterness of 
 
 defeat is past, and until they are prepared to 
 confess their errors, and ask forgiveness, and 
 restoration, in the spirit of the returning prodi- 
 gal. Without repentance forgiveness is idle, 
 and restoration worse. Philosophy and religion 
 alike approve the soundness of this doctrine. 
 You cannotaccomplish a task of this sort by any 
 fovcing process. No wise Government would 
 think of it. No sound or judicious statesman 
 would advise it. If they cannot come back now 
 in the right spirit, and will not come with such 
 securities as we have a right to demand, it were 
 better they should not come at all. 1 would 
 hold them as they are — and with black troops 
 too — until their territories are peopled by men 
 who will recognize the value of the Union — 
 ay, hold them forever, if necessary, as subject 
 provinces. But it will not be necessary. They 
 will be glad to return in a very few years, on 
 just such conditions as yoti may impose, and 
 will be grateful for the privilege. Admit them 
 now, and withdraw your armies, and you leave 
 your few white friends, and your multitudinous 
 black ones, to an ostracism as merciless as the 
 bloody proscription upon which they can no 
 longer venture with safety. They tell you so 
 themselves. While the President informs you 
 that these States, or some of them, are ready to 
 return— in the face of the admitted fact that their 
 people, in almost every instance, have refused 
 to ratify even the advantageous bargain made 
 with him by their leaders, by sending loyal men 
 to represent them here — every breeze from the 
 South is laden with the earnest remonstrances 
 of the loyal people of those States, telling you 
 that the withdrawal of your power will be the 
 signal for their flight and exile from their homes, 
 and altars, from thegravesof their kindred, and 
 their household gods, and beseeching you, in 
 piteous accents of despair and agony, not to 
 abandon them to their remorseless enemies. 
 
 But before they do come in — whether by the 
 door or window — there are duties to be per- 
 formed to others, dangers against which we 
 must provide, arising out of the obligations of 
 the war that thesa men have forced upon u.s. 
 We have incurred an enormous debt that is 
 mainly owing to our own people. We must 
 provide for the payment of its interest, as 
 well as the redemption of all the pledges we 
 have made to the disabled soldier, and to the 
 widows and orphans of those who have per- 
 ished in the field. Is it expected that these 
 men will assist us in redeeming these obliga- 
 tions, that some persons ai'e so anxious to asso- 
 ciate them with us in the performance of this 
 work of justice and mercy? Do you propose 
 to summon these great criminals here, and trans- 
 late them from the dock to the bench, as joint 
 assessors with yourselves, and those who have 
 poured out theii,' money or their blood in ocean 
 streams in bringing them to justice, in the re- 
 settlement of the nation, in perfecting its secu- 
 rities, and in fulfilling the obligations you havt 
 incurred to the iiublic creditor, and to the fara 
 ilies of those brave men who have gone down 
 to death upon so many southern battle-fields? 
 
30 
 
 Will 3'ou insist that tliej'^ shall come into coun- 
 cil with you on such a question as this? The 
 ordeal would be too severe. They have de- 
 nounced the war as not only unrighteous, but 
 unlawful ; and they are not alone in this par- 
 ticular. It is not the rebels militant only — the 
 men who so cheerfully staked their lives on their 
 opinions — who think so. Their old associates in 
 the North, who wantthem back on the terms ofthe 
 President, have taught their followers here upon 
 the same argument, that the public securities 
 were worthless, and would be repudiated. Is 
 there no risic of a new coalition on this basis? 
 I venture to predict that the next phase ofthe 
 reunited Democracy of the North and South, 
 (for it Avill be a reunion ofthe party and not of 
 the States,) will l)e opposition to the payment 
 of this debt. It may not discover itself at once 
 in the shape of absolute repudiation in the 
 North, but this new alliance will find other 
 means, not less effective, to accomplish its 
 work. The South, with all its prejudices and 
 pride, would rather consent even to negro suf- 
 frage, than allow itself to be taxed for such a 
 purpose, and you cannot compel it, without the 
 aid ofthe black man. The North will insist, 
 at least, on scaling your securities down by the 
 actual money value in tlie world's market of the 
 paper that was invested in them. It will damage 
 your credit by quarreling with your schemes 
 of revenue. Knowing that taxation is always 
 unpopular, and particularly among a people so 
 unused to It as ourselves, it will at least flat- 
 ter and delude the multitude with illusory prom- 
 ises of relief, and with the aid of a united 
 South, v/ill, at the next turn of the cards, win 
 its way back to power, and enter once more 
 upon the possession of the Government. 
 
 But the mischief will not end here. There 
 is another debt that numbers cannot compute, 
 incurred in the baffled attempt to overthrow 
 this Union, and diffused throughout the entire 
 South. There is, besides, a claim yet dormant 
 for the value of the slaves made free by the 
 proclamation. It may seem to some extrava- 
 gant to talk of these, but it is no more extrava- 
 gant than many other things that we have wit- 
 nessed, and among them the assertion of a 
 right to return to these Halls as though they 
 had not sinned, and the presumptuous arro- 
 gance that has already taken our Constitution 
 in charge, and undertaken to arraign our acts of 
 self-defense against their treason, as violations 
 of that instrument. Admit these men — ignore 
 their crimes by your votes here — give them your 
 confidence and the eventual mastery— as before, 
 and your public credit will deservedly receive 
 a shock that will tumble it into ruins. Re- 
 admit them here, and every prudent man will 
 endeavor to get rid of your securities. No 
 sharp-sighted money-lender will trust a Gov- 
 ernment so administered. It will be in vain 
 for you to profess in joint resolutions, that you 
 do not intend to pay any of the debt ofthe dead 
 confederacy, or of the claims of the living slave- 
 holder. The world will not believe it. It will 
 say you mock it, when the makers of that debt, 
 
 and the disloyal slaveholder himself, shall be 
 exalted by your votes into legislators, to cooper- 
 ate with the party here that has decried your 
 obligations, and declared them to be worth- 
 less. The assumption by you of the one, and 
 the payment of the other, would be but a logical 
 sequence. If the makers of that debt are de- 
 cided to be worthy of honor and trust in this 
 Government, it will be an estoppel against the 
 assertion that there was anything essentially 
 immoral in hiring assassins to take our lives, 
 or anything in reason to prevent the payment 
 of the wages of their iniquity. It will be taken 
 for granted that when you make a legislator of 
 the criminal, you intend to pay his debts of 
 honor at home. You may protest that you do 
 not, but it will point 3'ou to these acts, andscoff — 
 ay, it will scotT— at your empty protestations, 
 as no more than sounding brais and tinkling 
 cymbals. 
 
 But before I have done, allow me to come 
 back once more to the great conflict of power — 
 the gigantic and overshadowing issue — which 
 has been forced on us and on the country, by 
 the process of restoration which it has pleased 
 the Pi-esident in the exercise of his ov, n judg- 
 ment to adopt. There are other considerations 
 that demand our care beyond the mere rehabil- 
 itation ofthe conquered States. It is for us to see 
 that, in the execuflon of the guaranty, the Fed- 
 eral Republic itself shall receive no detriment, 
 and undergo no change. There are symptoms, 
 unquestionabh' of an alarming nature — devel- 
 oped, of course, by the high stimulus under 
 which it has just been working — that forebode a 
 serious disturbance of its balances— a revolu 
 tlon equivalent to a change in its organic struc- 
 ture, If not watched narrowly before it is too late. 
 The time has now come to check those tenden- 
 cies, which a condition so unnatural iias so 
 largely encouraged. With a Union newly and 
 doubly Imi^eriled by a policy that, ignoring the 
 sentiment of the loyal States, has thrust us an 
 immeasurable distance back from the position 
 which we occupied when the camp-fires of our 
 legions were blazing along the heights of the 
 Appomattox, by not only leaving treason and 
 murder to go unpunished, but warming the 
 former into life and hope and strength, by wltli- 
 drawing our troops, and endowing it with the 
 power of reorganizing its broken columns for 
 a fresh assault, and with the great problem of 
 the restoration of its dissevered members com- 
 plicated with another and perh.aps a greater, in 
 the tremendous question whothcr all these het- 
 erogeneous elements are to be flung into the cru- 
 cible, and fused down under the fierce; flames 
 of war into an elective monarchy, it seems 
 to me, Avith all due respect to the President, 
 that we have reached a crisis in our affairs, when 
 itbehooves the people to look to their securities, 
 and their Representatives here to resume the 
 government of this nation, and to say to the 
 advancing tide "thus far and no further."' 
 
 Standing, as I do, upon the traditions of the 
 fathers — upon the radical but conservative max- 
 ims of republican liberty — upon the great prin- 
 
31 
 
 ciples that have been consecrated by the strug- 
 gles of more than two hundred years — I cannot 
 but tremble for my country when, in addition to 
 all this, I hear the national Representatives in- 
 structed by other than their lawful masters in re- 
 gard to their duties here ; when I find myself 
 semi-otiicially advised by the executive head of 
 ihe nation, who has just "been thanked by a rebel 
 Legislature for the act, that amendments to its 
 fundamental law, proposed by its delegates here 
 tor its security, are unnecessary, or inadmissi- 
 ble, or entitled to no more respect than the res- 
 olutions of a town meeting, while bills that have 
 passed this House, and are now actually depend- 
 ing in the Senate, are made the subject of pub- 
 lic discourse and animadversion at the other end 
 of the Avenue ; when I hear a high ofBcer of 
 that deitartment confessing and justifying the 
 exercise of a dispensing power over our lav/s, 
 in the employment of traitors, and the payment 
 to them of moneys wrung from the sweat of 
 the toiling millions of the loyal North ; when 
 I see members of both these Houses ready and 
 anxious at such a time to abdicate their right- 
 ful powers — as a Legislature, not by a harmless 
 reference to a committeeof their own bodies — 
 .but Ijy championing their own disability, and 
 dinging down their crowns at the footstool of 
 executive power; when I l;|ear on thi-s floor, 
 from men who opposed the war throughout, 
 and now, b}^ a logic which I do not question, 
 support the policy that gives the victory to the 
 enemy, the appeal of the people to their own 
 Congress coin])ared to the howls of a drunken 
 populace nt the oioors of the revolutionary 
 Assembly of France, that in the name of lib- 
 erty flooded its capital with blood, and in the 
 name of religion dethroned the monarch of the 
 world ; when I read in newspapers controlled 
 by gentlemey of this House who have discovered 
 no sensibility to attacks upon its own privileges, 
 the mere assertion of a right on its part to ex- 
 press an opinion in regard to the disposition of 
 our troop*, with no organized enemy in the field, 
 denounced as an invasion of the prerogative ; 
 when I hear oven the suggestion of the nation's 
 sentiment in regard to the appropriate doom of 
 the traitor chiefs, who now stand impeached 
 before the world of a connivance in the starva- 
 tion of our soldiers, and the butchery of our 
 President, reprobated in the same way by pub- 
 lie journals in the confidence of the Govern- 
 uient ; and when, to crown all, my very vision 
 is blasted by appeals to the-Executive from the 
 disloyal papers of the North, to employ that 
 patronage which the loyal j^eople have alone 
 
 bestowed on him, to coerce their Representa- 
 tives into submission to his views, and, failing 
 that, to enact the role of another Cromwell or 
 Napoleon in this Capitol, while an answering 
 shout comes back upon the southern breeze, 
 that the bayonets of the soldiery, who flung that 
 despotism to the earth must be invoked to re- 
 instate it here. I think I am no alarmist, I am 
 not apt to indulge in gloomy auguries in regard 
 to the future of a nation that has otitlived so 
 many blunders, and been so often ransomed 
 by an Almighty arm. The proverbial honors 
 of a prophet of evil have no attractions for me. 
 Poesy has told us the story of Cassandra. 
 History has vouchsafed to hand down to us 
 the name and fate of the madman who ran 
 up and down the streets of Jerusalem cry- 
 ing "Woe! woe!" while the armies of Titus 
 were encamped about its walls. But if I stood 
 alone on this floor, and it were my last utter- 
 ance, holding the high trust which God has 
 given me, with a nation jn travail, and in view 
 of the dark portents that cloud the horizon, 
 and shake the very atmosphere around us, I 
 would say to the people, ' ' Awake from your 
 felse security, or prepare yourselves for another 
 holocaust. Your enemy still lives. His 'im- 
 paired vitality' has been restored. Red-handed 
 treason rears its head as proudly and defiantly 
 and insultingly as before. It menaces your 
 capital. It claims to dictate to your President. 
 It presumes to use the very organs of your Gov- 
 ernment to denoirace your attitude as a revolu- 
 tionary one, and to arraign your servants here as 
 though they were in rebellion against the South. 
 It moves upon the citadel where your defend- 
 ers are intrenched. See that no warder sleeps, 
 no port is left unguarded. Look to it that no 
 sentinel unbars your gates. Steel the hearts of 
 your defenders against the weakness that would 
 betray like treason. See that their mail is proof 
 — no joint agape, no rivet out of place. See that 
 no Trojan horse, filled with armed men — no 
 Tennessee with fair outside, but big with ' pesti- 
 lence and war' — shall win its v^-ay within your 
 walls. When these great criminals do return, if 
 ever, let it be only through the door that you shall 
 indicate, andwith such infrangible and irreversi- 
 ble securities as you only have the right to de- 
 mand," Thisis my position. Here I have taken 
 my stand, and by the help of God I will maintain 
 it to the end. Others mayfalter in the trial, but 
 through me no right shall be abridged — no priv- 
 ilege surrendered — no single leaf plucked — no 
 jewel torn from the crown of the representative 
 body. 
 
i