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Men who possess opinion and a will;

Men who have honor - men who will not lie;

Men who can stand before a demagogue,

And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking; Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog

In public duty, and in private thinking.

For while the rabble, with their thumb-screw creeds, Mingle in selfish strife, lo! freedom weeps,

Wrong rules the land, and waiting justice sleeps."

CONFISCATION AND LIBERATION.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, MAY 23, 1862.

[The bill, in support of which this speech was made, simply declared free the slaves of armed rebels and their abettors, and made proof of loyalty by the claimant of a fugitive necessary to his recovery. It now seems utterly incredible that only three days afterwards so obviously moderate a proposition was voted down in the House, then overwhelmingly Republican; but the Emancipation Proclamation of the following year, and the radical policy inaugurated by Congress about the same time, fully made good the prophesies here uttered.]

MR. SPEAKER, - Before closing the debate on the measures of confiscation and liberation now before us, I desire to submit some general observations which I hope may not be regarded as irrelevant to these topics, or wholly unworthy of consideration. I do not propose to discuss these particular measures. I deem it wholly unnecessary. I believe everything has been said, on the one side and on the other, which can be said, and far more than was demanded by an honest search after the truth. Certainly I shall not argue, at any length, the power of Congress to confiscate the property of rebels. I take it for granted. I have not allowed myself, for a single moment, to regard the question as open to debate, nor do I believe it would ever have been seriously controverted, had it not been for the infectious influence of slavery in giving us false views of the Constitution of the United States. It was ordained "to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity." I take it for granted that our fathers meant to confer, and did confer upon us, by the terms of the Constitution, the power to execute these grand purposes, and made adequate provision for the exercise of that power. I feel entirely safe in indulging this reasonable intendment in their favor; and I hand over to other gentlemen on this floor, and in the other end of the Capitol, the ungracious task of dealing with the Constitution as a cunningly devised scheme for permitting insurrections, conniving at civil war, and rendering treason to the government safer than loyalty.

Sir, I have little sympathy for any such friends of the Union, and I honor the Constitution too much, and regard the memory of its founders too sacredly, to permit myself thus to trifle with the work of their hands. The Constitution is not a shield for the protection of rebels against the government, but a sword for smiting them to the earth, and preserving the nation's life. Every man who has been blessed with a moderate share of common sense, and who really loves his country, will accept this as an obvious truth. Congress has power

"To declare war; to grant letters of marque and reprisal; to make rules concerning captures on land and water; to raise and support armies; to provide and maintain a navy; to make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces; to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions; and to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into effect the foregoing powers."

Here we find ample and express authority for any and every measure which Congress may see fit to employ, consistently with the law of nations and the usages of war, which fully recognize the power of confiscation. And yet for long weary months we have been arguing, doubting, hesitating, deprecating. As to what is called slave property, we have been most fastidiously careful not to harm it. We have seen a lion in our path at every step. We have seemed to play the part of graceless stipendiaries of slaveholding rebels, seeking by technical subterfuges and the ingenious arts of pensioned attorneys in desperate cases, to shield their precious interests from all possible mischief. So long have we been tugging in the harness of our Southern taskmasters, that even this horrid conspiracy of rebel slave-masters cannot wholly divorce us from the idea that slavery and the Constitution are one and inseparable. Sir, while I honor the present Congress for its great labors and the many good deeds it has performed, I must yet count it a shame and a reproach that we did not promptly enact an efficient Confiscation Bill in December last, which would have gone hand in hand with our conquering legions in the work of trampling down the power of this rebellion, and restoring our bleeding and distracted country to the blessings of peace. Many thousands of dear lives, and many millions of money would thus have been spared, for which a poor atonement, indeed, can be found in the learned constitutional arguments against confiscation, which have consumed so much of the time of the present session of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, this never ending gabble about the sacredness of the Constitution is becoming intolerable; and it comes from exceedingly suspicious sources. We find that just in proportion as a man loves slavery, and desires to exalt it above all "principalities and powers," he becomes most devoutly in love with the Constitution, as he understands it. No class of men among us have so much to say about the Constitution as those who are known to sympathize with Jefferson Davis and the pirate crew at his heels. It will not be forgotten that the red-handed murderers and thieves who set this rebellion on foot went out of the Union yelping for the Constitution, which they had conspired to overthrow through the blackest perjury and treason that ever confronted the Almighty. I remember no men who were so zealously on the side of the Constitution or so studiously careful to save it from all detriment as Breckinridge and Burnett, while they remained nominally on the side of the Union. Every graceless miscreant who has wallowed in the filthy mire of slavery till he has survived his own conscience, every man who would be openly on the side of the rebels if he had the courage to take his stand, every opponent of a vigorous prosecution of the war by the use of all the powers of war, will be found fulminating his dastardly diatribes on the duty of standing by the Constitution. I notice, also- and I do not mean to be offensive - that the Democratic leaders who have recently issued a semi-rebel address from this city, are most painfully exercised lest the Constitution should suffer in the hands of the present administration.

Mr. Speaker, I prefer to muster in different company. I prefer to show my fealty to the Constitution by treating it as the charter of liberty, as the foe of rebellion, and as amply armed with the power to save its own life by crushing its foes. Sir, who are these men in whose behalf the Constitution is so persistently invoked? They are rebels, who have defied its power, and who, by taking their stand outside of the Constitution, have driven us to meet them on their own chosen ground. By abdicating the Constitution, and conspiring against the government, they have assumed the character of public enemies, and have thus no rights but the rights of war, while in dealing with them we are bound by no laws but the laws of war. Those provisions of the Constitution which define the rights of persons in time of peace, and which must be observed in dealing with criminals, have no application whatever to a state of war, in which criminals acquire the character of enemies. The powers of war are not unconstitu

tional, because they are recognized and provided for by the Constitution; but their function and exercise are to be regulated by the law of nations governing a state of war, and not by the terms of the Constitution applicable to a state of peace. Hence I must regard much of this clamor about the violation of the Constitution on our part as the sickly higgling of pro-slavery fanatics, or the poorly disguised rebel sympathy of sniveling hypocrites. We must fight traitors where they have chosen to meet us. They have treated the Constitution as no longer in force, and we should give them all the consequences, in full, of their position. By setting the Constitution at naught, they have rested their case on the naked power of lawless might; and, therefore, we will not give them due process of law, by trying, convicting, and hanging them according to the Constitution they have abjured, but we will give them, abundantly, due process of war, for which the Constitution makes wise and ample provision.

I have referred, Mr. Speaker, to the influence of slavery in giving us false views of the Constitution. It has also given us false ideas as to the character and purposes of the war. We are fighting, it is said, for "the Union as it was." Sir, I should be glad to know what we are to understand by this. If it means that these severed and belligerent States must again be united as one and inseparable, with secession forever laid low, the national supremacy vindicated, and the old flag waving over every State and every rood of the Republic, then I agree to the proposition. Every true Union man will say amen to it. But if, by the Union as it was, we are to understand the Union as we beheld it under the thieving Democracy of the last administration, with such men as Davis, Floyd, Mason, and their God-forsaken confederates, restored to their places in Congress, in the army, and in the Cabinet; if it means that the reign of terror which prevailed in the Southern States for years prior to this rebellion shall be reëstablished, by which unoffending citizens of the free States can only enter "the sacred soil" of slavery at the peril of life; if, by the Union as it was, be meant the Union with another James Buchanan as its king, and Chief Justice Taney as its anointed high-priest, steadily gravitating, by the weight of its own rottenness, into the frightful vortex of civil war; then I am not for the Union as it was, but as I believe it will be, when this rebellion shall have worked out its providential lesson. I confess that I look rather to the future than the past, but if I must cast my eye backward, I shall select the early administrations of the government, when the

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