political farm of the nation. Should it fail,. Congress will abandon it; should it work well, it may prove a most excellent forerunner of measures of larger justice to the colored race in our land. I do not mean to say that the colored soldiers of this District should alone have the ballot, because no such rule is proposed or thought of as to white voting. If the white rabble of this District who did not enter our army, and who, to a great extent, were in sympathy with the public enemy, are to vote, as they undoubtedly will, it would be a very mean mockery of justice to withhold the ballot from loyal negroes, who, although they did not fight, furnished the government with their full share of men.

Mr. Speaker, I ask conservative gentlemen on this floor to consider duly one other fact. If difficulties are to be encountered in voting for this bill, still greater difficulties are to be met in voting against it, and I know of no half-way ground in dealing with fundamental principles. To vote against this measure is to vote against the first truths of democratic liberty. It is to vote for the old spirit of caste and the old, law of hate which have so terribly blasted our land. It is to vote down justice and install misrule and maladministration as king. It is to sanction and encourage, by the national example, the barbarous and worse than heathen laws of the Northern and Western States, already referred to, which so loudly call for our rebuke. It is to make a record which the roused spirit of liberty and progress, and the thick-coming events of the future, will certainly disown and turn from with shame. And while such a vote might tend to placate the conservative and the trimmer, it would offend those radical hosts now everywhere springing to their feet, and preparing for battle against every form of inequality and injustice, and in favor of " All rights for all." Sir, justice is safe. The right thing is the expedient thing. Democracy is not a lie. God is not the devil, "nor was Christianity itself established by prize essays, Bridgewater bequests, and a minimum of four thousand five hundred a year.' Far better will it be for a Northern representative and for the cause of Republicanism itself to vote on the right side of this question, even should it cost him his seat on this floor, than to vote on the wrong side, and thus maintain his place by the sacrifice of both his own manhood and the public welfare intrusted to his hands. Sir, I agree that the passage of this bill would tend to open the way to perfect equality before the law in all the States. I do not deny that the public would so understand it, and I decline none of the consequences of my vote. Mr. Jefferson, speak

ing of the negroes, declared that "whatever be their degree of talent it is no measure of their rights," and he likewise declared that "among those who either pay or fight for their country no line can be drawn." That is my Democracy. "The one idea," says Humboldt, "which history exhibits as evermore developing itself into greater distinctness, is the idea of humanity, the noble endeavor to throw down all barriers erected between men by prejudice and one-sided views, and, by setting aside the distinctions of religion, country, and color, to treat the whole human race as one brotherhood." Sir, on this broad ground, coincident with Christianity itself, I plant my feet; and no man can fail who will resolutely maintain it.

Mr. Speaker, I must not conclude my argument without referring to one further consideration, by which the passage of this bill, in my judgment, is urgently demanded. I have argued that the ballot should be given to the negroes as a matter of justice to them. It should likewise be done as a matter of retributive justice to the slaveholders and rebels. According to the best information I can obtain, a very large majority of the white people of this District have been rebels in heart during the war, and are rebels in heart · still. That contempt for the negro and scorn of free industry which constituted the mainspring of the rebellion cropped out here during the war in every form that was possible, under the immediate shadow of the central government. Meaner rebels than many in this District could scarcely have been found in the whole land. They have not been punished. The halter has been cheated out of their necks. I am very sorry to say that under what seems to be a false mercy, a misapplied humanity, the guiltiest rebels of the war have thus far been allowed to escape justice. I have no desire to censure the authorities of the government for this fact. I hope they have some valid excuse for their action. This question of punishment, I know, is a difficult one. The work of punishment is so vast that it naturally palsies the will to enter upon it. It never can be thoroughly done on this side of the grave. And were it practicable to punish adequately all the most active and guilty rebels, justice would still remain unsatisfied. Far guiltier men than they are the rebel sympathizers of the loyal States, who coolly stood by and encouraged their friends in the South in their work of national rapine and murder, and while they were ever ready to go joyfully into the service of the devil were too cowardly to wear his uniform and carry his weapons in open day. But Congress in this District

has the power to punish by ballot, and there will be a beautiful, poetic justice in the exercise of this power. Sir, let it be applied. The rebels here will recoil from it with horror. Some of the worst of them, sooner than submit to black suffrage, will doubtless leave the District, and thus render it an unspeakable service. To be voted down and governed by Yankee and negro ballots will seem to them an intolerable grievance, and this is among the ex cellent reasons why I am in favor of it. If neither hanging nor exile can be extemporized for the entertainment of our domestic rebels, let us require them at least to make their bed on negro ballots during the remainder of their unworthy lives. Of course they will not relish it, but that will be their own peculiar concern. Their darling institution must be charged with all the consequences of the war. They sowed the wind, and if required must reap the whirlwind. Retribution follows wrong-doing; and this law must work out its results. Rebels and their sympathizers, I am sure, will fare as well under negro suffrage as they deserve, and I desire to leave them, as far as practicable, in the hands of their colored brethren. Nor shall I stop to inquire very critically whether the. negroes are fit to vote. As between themselves and white rebels, who deserve to be hung, they are eminently fit. I would not have them more so. Will you, Mr. Speaker, will even my Conservative and Democratic friends be particularly nice or fastidious in the choice of a man to vote down a rebel? Shall we insist upon a perfectly finished gentleman and scholar to vote down the traitors and white trash of this District who have recently signalized themselves by mobbing unoffending negroes? Sir, almost anybody, it seems to me, will answer the purpose. I do not pretend that the colored men here, should they get the ballot, will not sometimes abuse it. They will undoubtedly make mistakes. In some cases they may even vote on the side of their old masters. But I feel pretty safe in saying that even white men, perfectly free from all suspicion of negro blood, have sometimes voted on the wrong side. Sir, I appeal to gentlemen on this floor, and especially to my Democratic friends, to say whether they cannot call to mind instances in which this has been done? Indeed, it rather strikes me that white voting, ignorant, depraved, partyridden, Democratic white voting, had a good deal to do in hatching into life the rebellion itself, and that no results of negro voting are likely to be much worse. I respectfully commend this consideration to my friend from Iowa [Mr. KASSON], and to conservative gentlemen here on both sides of this hall. Sir, as I have argued

to come.

elsewhere, all men are liable to make mistakes. The democracy I stand by, the fitness to govern which I believe in, is the aggregate wisdom and practical common sense of the whole people. This, and not the wisdom of our rulers, or of any select few, carried us safely through the rebellion, and this only can be trusted in time There is no other reliance under God for us, as the champions and exemplars of Republicanism, and the sooner we bravely accept this truth the better it will be for all races and orders of men composing our great body politic. In demanding the ballot in this District for the despised and defenseless, I simply demand the national recognition of Christianity, which is "the root of all democracy, the highest fact in the rights of man." I beseech gentlemen to remember this. As the lawgivers of a disenthralled Republic, let us not write "Infidel" on its banner, by trampling humanity and justice under our feet in these high places of power. The question is ours to decide. The right, so earnestly prayed for, is ours to bestow. The assumption set up by the white voters here of the right to decide this question is as superlatively ridiculous as it is sublimely impudent. They have no more right to vote themselves the exclusive depositaries of power in this District than the inmates of its penitentiary have to vote themselves at liberty to go at large. Congress is the sovereign and sole judge; and what the colored men here ask at our hands, for their just protection, and as their sure refuge, is the ballot, —

AMENDMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION.

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JANUARY 29, 1866.

[The House had under consideration the Joint Resolution reported from the Committee on Reconstruction for the amendment of the Constitution. The views here expressed bearing upon the second section of the Fourteenth article of Amendment did not then prevail, but their soundness will now scarcely be questioned, and has been fully vindicated in the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment.]

MR. SPEAKER, Before this debate shall be concluded I desire to submit some observations which I deem important, and which I respectfully commend to the consideration of those who advocate 'the proposition reported by the joint committee of fifteen. How I shall finally cast my vote on that proposition I cannot now certainly decide. I find difficulties in my path; and I shall feel much obliged to any gentleman who may be able and willing to clear them away, and thus, perhaps, assist others on this floor in reaching a just conclusion. I should regret exceedingly to separate myself from those with whom I habitually act here, by opposing the measure referred to, and I must not do so without recording my reasons; and these reasons, in so far as they possess weight, may serve as my protest against whatever is objectionable in that measure should its modification be found impracticable, and I should finally give it my support as the best thing within our power.

Under the constitutional injunction upon the United States to guarantee a republican form of government to every State, I believe the power already exists in the nation to regulate the right of suffrage. It can only exercise this power through Congress; and Congress, of course, must decide what is a republican form of government, and when the national authority shall interpose against State action, for the purpose of executing the constitutional guarantee. No one will deny the authority of Congress to decide that if a State should disfranchise one third, one half, or two thirds of her citizens, such State would cease to be republican, and might be required to accept a different rule of suffrage. If Congress could intervene in such a case, it could obviously intervene in any other case in which it might deem it necessary or proper. It certainly might decide that the disfranchisement by a State of a whole race