G. R Edmunds 
 
 Fourteeo+b Amendment 
 

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LIBRARY Y’ 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS 
 
 Enforcement of Fourteenth Amendment. 
 
 SPEECH 
 
 OF 
 
 HON. GEORGE E. EDMUNDS, 
 
 OF VERMONT, 
 
 IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, APRIL 14, 1871. 
 
 The Senate, as in Committee of the Whole, hav- 
 ing under consideration the bill (II. It. No. 320) to 
 enforce the provisions of the fourteenth amendment 
 to the Constitution of the United States, and for 
 other purposes — 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS said: 
 
 Mr. President: I am sorry that, in order 
 
 to be specific in arguments about the Consti- 
 tution and the law, one is obliged to be dull. 
 If one only had the genius and the enthu- 
 siasm of those of our friends and our ene- 
 mies both — I do not care to be specific — who 
 are willing to oppose legislation upon the 
 imagination and upon rhetoric, then certainly 
 I should not attempt to make any speech at 
 all. But inasmuch as this is an important 
 public question, which involves, as Senators 
 have said, delicate responsibilities between the 
 States and the national Government, I think 
 it right that we should examine a little in de- 
 tail precisely what sort of a Government we 
 have and precisely what its rights are ; and if 
 it shall turn out on such an examination that 
 the bill which we have proposed is within the 
 clear sc one of co nstitutional authority, and is 
 of legislative precedent, 
 preservation of private 
 >e that even our Demo- 
 illing to agree that the 
 committed, and which 
 \ that other and greater 
 ae tribunals and com- 
 occur of being suffered 
 11 be reached by every 
 ation. They certainly 
 if crimes such as have 
 d are unrepressed by 
 thorities, every measure 
 islation which will have 
 rve life and liberty aud 
 o be resorted to. 
 
 Mr. President, with the 
 d by the honorable Senator 
 sits farthest from me [Mr. 
 
 Blair] the other day, not entirely with his 
 unlimited statement of it, but with the senti- 
 ment that — 
 
 “The Government certainly owed protection to 
 the Union men of the South, precisely and in the 
 same proportion as the people of the South owed 
 allegiance to the Government. As I remarked the 
 other day. the duty of protection on the part of the 
 Government and the duty of allegiance on the part 
 of the citizen arc reciprocal duties— the one is the 
 consideration for the other. If one fails in his duty 
 be has no right to exact the performance of the 
 other. If the Government failed to protect its citi- 
 zens, it could not require the allegiance of its citi- 
 zens. If it refused to make an effort toi>rotect them, 
 it had still less ground to require its citizens to yield 
 their allegiance.” 
 
 That, Mr. President, is sound doctrine, with 
 the qualification that the duty of the Govern- 
 ment to protect its citizens is not absolute in 
 the final sense; its duty to protect is that it 
 will exhaust all the resources of its power, by 
 diligent and faithful and vigorous effort to 
 preserve the liberties and the rights of its citi- 
 zens; and when it has done that it has per- 
 formed the full function of government, and 
 when it has refused to do that it has failed, 
 and is not entitled to be called a complete or 
 just Government at all; and it ought to be 
 put down by revolution or otherwise. 
 
 Now, sir, if the people of these southern 
 States, whose case is what you know and what 
 all the people know, are not protected to the 
 uttermost bound of the power of the nation 
 whose-citizens they are — the uttermost bound 
 I mean of course of its constitutional power — 
 then, on the principle of the honorable Senator 
 from Missouri, and the true principle, we have 
 absolved them from allegiance to us ; they owe 
 us no duty of obedience to law, and they are 
 remitted to themselves to protect themselves as 
 best they may. Do Senators wish to reach 
 that conclusion ? Do Senators wish to meet 
 inayearortwo that event? Is my honorable 
 friend from California [Mr. Casserly] so 
 desirous to foment a war of races, which will 
 supely come at last, as vengeance always fol- 
 
2 
 
 lows crime in some way, as to view, with indif 
 ference such a possibility ; or is he willing, if 
 he constitutionally may, to interpose the calm 
 force of law, through the judiciary, aided by 
 the lawful executive power of the nation, to 
 punish crime and uphold order? That is the 
 question that he will have to face, and that is 
 the only question. 
 
 We have been told, Mr. President, a good 
 many times, and for a good many years, that 
 this national Government of ours is, after all, 
 not a Government of the people, but that it is 
 merely a confederated Government of States, 
 and that wherever and whenever the national 
 authority undertakes to appeal to a citizen 
 either to do or omit to do a thing, it transcends 
 its authority ; that all the rights and duties of 
 a citizen are infolded in his State constitution, 
 and that we therefore, under the recent amend- 
 ments or under the old Constitution, must act 
 only upon that political body called the State, 
 as we would act in the case of our relations 
 with a foreign Power. This was the doctrine 
 of the Democratic party before the rebellion; 
 it was a doctrine common to it and the powers 
 of the rebellion during the war, and it has been 
 so since. Sir, that is a mistake. It is a mis 
 take which led to the rebellion ; it is a mistake 
 which has led to the fruits of that rebellion 
 which we are now reaping in the last and 
 basest form which the spirit that produced 
 the rebellion can possibly assume. 
 
 The honorable Senators over the way have 
 thought fit to read from those excellent com- 
 mentaries upon the strength and stress of 
 which the people of the United States, through 
 their States, adopted this Constitution, to show 
 what was the nature of this Government. So 
 will I. Mr. Hamilton, in these publications, 
 which were put forth, as I say, when this Con- 
 stitution was about to be adopted, and when, 
 as my friend from Wisconsin [Mr. Carpenter] 
 so properly suggests, the temptation was en- 
 tirely to diminish and belittle thq powers of 
 the Government — Mr. Hamilton, speaking 
 of the difficulties between independent States 
 and of the difficulties in the relations of the 
 national Government to the States under the 
 Confederation, says: 
 
 “ But if we are unwilling to be placed in this peril- 
 ous situation ; if we still will adhere to the design 
 of a national government, or, which is the same 
 thing, of a superintending power, under the direc- 
 tion of a common council, we must resolve to incor- 
 porate into our plan those ingredients which may be 
 considered as forming the characteristic difference 
 between a league aud a government, we iftust ex- 
 tend the authority of the Union to the persons of 
 the citizens, the only proper objects of government. 
 
 “ Government implies the power of making laws. 
 It is essential to the idea of a law that it be attended 
 with a sanction, or, in other words, a penalty or 
 punishment for disobedience. If there be no pen- 
 alty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or 
 commands which pretend to be laws will in fact 
 amount to nothing more than advice or recom- 
 mendation.” 
 
 Which is the redress and remedy our honor- 
 able friends desire to give to this existing evil, 
 and which I see from the debates in the House 
 they are to do by a sort of encyclical letter to 
 
 their friends whose excesses giveth§m so much 
 cause for mortification. 
 
 “This penalty, whatever it may be, can only be 
 inflicted in two ways: by the agency of the courts 
 and ministers of justice, or by military force; by the 
 coercion of the magistracy, or by the coercion of 
 a'ins. The first kind can evidently apply only to 
 men ; the last kind must, of necessity, be employed 
 against bodies-politic, or communities, or States. It 
 is evident that there is no process of a court by 
 which the observance of the laws can, in the last 
 resort.be enforced. Sentences may be denounced 
 against them for violations of their duty, but these 
 sentences can only be carried into execution by the 
 sword.” 
 
 That, sir, is precisely the principle upon 
 which this bill is framed. It does not seek 
 by military power to invade any State, or the 
 right of any State or any man ; it seeks to 
 denounce, by a declaration of what shall be a 
 crime, an unconstitutional act; and it endeav- 
 ors to enforce the penalty imposed upon that 
 by the proper intervention of the judiciary ; 
 and then it proceeds to lend the strong arm of 
 the nation to the assistance of that judiciary. 
 But he proceeds and says again : 
 
 “ The result of these observations to an intelligent 
 mind must be clearly this, that if it be possible at 
 any rate to construct a federal government capable 
 of regulating the common concerns and preserving 
 the general tranquillity, it must be founded, as to 
 the objects committed to its care, upon the reverse 
 of the principle contended for by the opponents of 
 the proposed constitution. It must carry its agency 
 of the persons of the citizens. It must stand in need 
 of no intermediate legislation, but must itself be em- 
 powered to employ the arm of the ordinary magis- 
 trate to execute its own resolutions. The majesty 
 of the national authority must be manifested through 
 the medium of the courts of justice. The Govern- 
 ment of the Union, like that of each State, must be 
 able to address itself immediately to the hopes and 
 fears of individuals, and to attract to its support 
 those passions which have the strongest influence 
 upon the human heart. It must, in short, possess 
 all the means, and have a right to resort to all the 
 methods of executing the powers with which it is 
 intrusted, that are possessed and exercised by the 
 governments of the particular States.” 
 
 This was the construction of the Constitu- 
 tion's it was by him who largely participated 
 in the framing of it, by him whose counsels 
 alone, through the publications embodied in 
 this book, gave us the Constitution at all.. To 
 exercise these high duties is not, asjthe honor- 
 able Senator from Illinois 
 complained, to “ enter 
 tor on the other side 
 but it is to obey the w 
 expressed in the 
 Government never ei 
 State. It is always 
 State already. It is 
 administered by the 
 Government it is. 
 
 This is not all as to 
 ernment. It is a 
 on the other sid^ 
 this time, of se 
 those is the departm 
 whose judgments, when 
 they advise us with 
 and we always do. 
 of the great tribunal w 
 pronounce upon constitut 
 
3 
 
 as they affect the relations of persons to the 
 Government and the relations of all private 
 rights. Says Mr. Justice Story, in the case of 
 Martin vs. Hunter, in 1 Wheaton : 
 
 “The Constitution of the United States was or- 
 dained and established, not by the States in their 
 sovereign capacities, but emphatically, as the pre- 
 amble of the Constitution declares, by ‘the people 
 of the United States.’ There can be no doubt that 
 it was competent to the people to invest the General 
 Government with all the powers which they might 
 deem proper and necessary; to extend or restrain 
 these powers according to their own good pleasure, 
 and to give them a paramount and supreme author- 
 ity.” ********* 
 
 “ It did notsuit the purposes of the people in fram- 
 ing this great charter of our liberties to provide for 
 minute specifications of its powers, or to declare the 
 means by which those powers should be carried into 
 execution. It was foreseen that this would be a per- 
 ilous and difficult, if not an impracticable task. The 
 instrument was not intended to provide merely for 
 the exigencies of a few years. .but was to endure 
 through a long lapse of ages, the events of which 
 were locked up in the inscrutable purposes of Prov- 
 idence. It could not be foreseen what new changes 
 and modifications of power might be indispensable 
 to effectuate the general objects of the'charter ; and 
 restrictions and specifications, which, at the present, 
 might seem salutary, might, in the end, prove the 
 overthrow' of the system itself. Hence its powers are 
 expressed in general terms, leaving to the Legisla- 
 ture, from time to time, to adopt its own means to 
 effectuate legitimate objects, and to mold and model 
 the exercise of its powers, as its own wisdom and the 
 public interests should require.” 
 
 Now, sir, what were these general objects to 
 which this learned judge refers in deciding this 
 cause ? They are stated, as he has said, in the 
 preamble of this instrument. Let us hear them. 
 They seem to have been forgotten or over- 
 looked — some time they must have been read — 
 by the honorable gentlemen who have opposed 
 this bill : 
 
 “We, the people of the United States, in order to 
 form a more perfect Union, to establish justice”— 
 which I believe is rendering to every man his 
 due — 
 
 case of Cohens us. Virginia, undertook to 
 enumerate the conditions under which the Gov- 
 ernment was formed, and the conditions under 
 which aldne it could succeed. He says : 
 
 “ If it could be doubted whether, from its nature, 
 it were not supreme in all cases where it is empow- 
 ered to act, that doubt would be removed by the 
 declaration that ‘this Constitution, and the laws of 
 the United States which shall be made in pursuance 
 thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be 
 made under the authority of the United States, 
 shall be the supreme law of tho land, and the judges 
 in every State shall be bound thereby, anything in 
 the constitution or laws of any State to the con- 
 trary notwithstanding.’ 
 
 “This is the authoritative language of the American 
 people; and, if gentlemen please, ot the American 
 States. It marks, with lines too strong to be mis- 
 taken, the characteristic distinction between the 
 Government and the Union, and those of the States. 
 The General Government, though limited as to its 
 objects, is supreme with respect to those objects. 
 This principle is a part of the Constitution; and if 
 there be any who deny its necessity, none can deny 
 its authority. 
 
 “To this supreme government ample powers are 
 confided, and, if it were possible to doubt the great 
 purposes for which they were so confided, the people 
 of the United States have declared that they are 
 given ‘in order to form a more perfect union, estab- 
 lish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for 
 tho common defense, promote the general welfare, 
 and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and 
 their posterity.’ 
 
 “ With the ample powers confided to this supreme 
 government for these interesting purposes are con- 
 nected many express and important limitations on 
 the sovereignty of the States, which are made for 
 the same purposes. The powers of the Union on the 
 great subjects of war, peace, and commerce, and on 
 many others, are in themselves limitations of the 
 sovereignty of the States, but in addition to these, 
 the sovereignty of the States is surrendered”— 
 
 And here I beg gentleftnen on the other side 
 to mark what he says — 
 
 "but in addition to these, the sovereignty of the 
 States is surrendered in many instances where the 
 surrender can only operate to the benefit of the peo- 
 ple, and where, perhaps, no other power is conferred 
 on Congress than a conservative power to maintain 
 the principles established in the Constitution.” 
 
 “ to insure domestic tranquillity”— 
 which I believe is to preserve peace every- 
 where within the boundaries of the Uuited 
 States — 
 
 “and to provide forthecommon defense, to promote 
 tho general welfare, and to secure the blessings of 
 liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and 
 establish this Constitution for the United States of 
 America.” 
 
 These, say the court, are the general objects ; 
 and in carrying out these objects in the methods 
 ^Ittd through the instrumentalities which the 
 Constitution had provided, Congress, the legis- 
 lative power, as a sovereign power over the 
 people, of themand'from them, and exercising 
 the same forces over them that a State does 
 over its citizens, was to select the means through 
 which these great objects were to be attained. 
 Therefore I say, sir, that from the. beginning 
 this was a Government of the uation and over 
 the inhabitants of the nation as inhabitants, 
 and not through the power of the States, just 
 so far as, and to the full extent that, the Con- 
 stitution in its grant of powers confided subjects 
 for consideration and provision to the national 
 Government. 
 
 Again, Mr. Chief Justice Marshall, in the 
 
 Again, in the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden, the 
 court declare: 
 
 “ And our Constitution being, as was aptly said at 
 the bar, one of enumeration and not of definition to 
 ascertain the extent of the power it becomes neces- 
 sary to settle the meaning of the terms employed 
 in it.” 
 
 The men who formed the Constitution did 
 not undertake to define what were the rights 
 of man which it undertook to secure. They 
 did not undertake to define the war, for illus- 
 tration, which it authorized Congress to make. 
 It enumerated, as the court have said, the 
 great objects over which and for which, to 
 secure the ends named in the preamble, the 
 powers of the people were delegated to the 
 authority of the Government, leaving to the 
 Government, through its proper departments, 
 the definition of those powers. 
 
 Now, Mr. President, I think it must be. ad- 
 mitted — I had supposed that events had settled 
 it until I heard this debate — that this Consti- 
 tution, be it much or little, (for I am not now 
 on the point of its extent,) if it gives us au- 
 thority or if it withholds it, is to the extent of 
 its scope a Constitution of the people, and that 
 it brings the people, in respect to every right 
 
 1 00839 S 
 
4 
 
 \ 
 
 which it secures to them, into direct commun- 
 ication with that Government which exists 
 by the Constitution, and which only and solely 
 has the paramount power to enforce it. The 
 governments of the States cannot finally or 
 independently enforce or decline to enforce the 
 Constitution of the United States; it is not 
 their Constitution in thesense that the consti- 
 tution of the State is. It is the Constitution of 
 the whole people as a national body, and the 
 requirements of which they cannot finally pass 
 upon ; and therefore whatever rights are 
 secured to the people under it must be guar- 
 antied to them and made effectual for them 
 at last through the instrumentality of the 
 national Government, and through no other. 
 
 I need scarcely occupy your time, Mr. Presi- 
 dent, and that of the Senate, in showing how 
 perfectly the authority of Congress to execute 
 this Constitution, and theauthority of Congress 
 to choose the means by which it shall be 
 executed, is recognized by the judicial depart- 
 ment of the Government ; but lest my friends 
 on the other side should suspect that I had 
 slighted this part of their argument, I will read 
 to them an authority which I am sure they will 
 recognize — that of Prigg vs. The Common 
 wealth of Pennsylvania, in which the Supreme 
 Courtdecided, as they kuow, that theobligation 
 imposed to return fugitives from labor was an 
 obligation the performance of which by the 
 nation was secured by the Constitution of the 
 U nited States as it was. Although nothing was 
 said as*to the power of Congress to put it into 
 execution, although fto “appropriate legisla- 
 tion” was referred to or authorized in terms 
 to give it effect, the court said, as they know, 
 and said as the law was, painful and unfor- 
 tunate as was the incident which should have 
 brought it into application, that it was the 
 solemn duty of Congress under the Constitu- 
 tion to secure to the individual, in spite of the 
 State, or with its aid, as the case might be, pre- 
 cisely the rights that the Constitution gave him, 
 and that there should be no intermediate 
 authority to arrest or oppose the direct per- 
 formance of this duty by Congress. The court 
 say : 
 
 “ The State legislation may be entirely silent on 
 the whole subject, and its ordinary remedial process 
 framed with different views and objects,” — 
 
 which has a very apt application to some of 
 the State legislation in the States whose con- 
 dition we have been considering — 
 
 “and this may be innocently as well as designedly 
 done, since every State is perfectly competent, and 
 has the exclusive right to prescribe the remedies in 
 it? own judicial tribunals, to limit the time as well as 
 the mode of redress, and to deny jurisdiction over 
 Cases which its own policy and its own institutions 
 either prohibit or discountenance. 
 
 “If, therefore, the clause of the Constitution had 
 stopped at the mere recognition of the right, without 
 providing or contemplating any means by which it 
 might be established and enforced in cases where it 
 did not execute itself, it is plain that it would have, 
 in a great variety of cases, a delusive and empty an- 
 nunciation. If it did not contemplate any action, 
 cither through State or national legislation, as aux- 
 iliaries to its more perfect enforcement in the form 
 of remedy or of protection” — 
 
 “ Protection,” mark the word, Mr. Presi- 
 dent; it appears in the fourteenth amendment — 
 
 “then, as there would be no duty on either to aid 
 the right, it would be left to the mere comity of the 
 States to act as they should please; and would de- 
 pend for its security upon the changing course of 
 public opinion, the mutations of public policy, and 
 the general adaptations of remedies for purposes 
 strictly according to the lex fori” * * * * 
 
 “The fundamental principle, applicable to all 
 cases of this sort, would seem to be, that where the 
 end is required the means are given ; and where the 
 duty is enjoined, the ability to perform it is contem- 
 plated to exist on the part of the functionaries to 
 whom it is intrusted.” 
 
 Mr. President, my friend from Illinois, [Mr. 
 Trumbull,] when he addressed the Senate the 
 other day, seemed to have the apprehension 
 that we were or might be by this bill enter- 
 ing upon a great change in the character of 
 the Government, in the fact that we were en- 
 deavoring to protect personal rights, which, 
 he said, the traditions of the Government and 
 the course of the Constitution had always left 
 to the States. If that were so, it would be no 
 argument against the propriety of this bill, 
 provided the new phases and amendments of 
 the Constitution had made the change. But 
 it is not a new idea. As I have stated, the 
 government of the United States over the sub- 
 jects which are intrusted to it has always been 
 a government which dealt directly with the 
 people, and which, from the nature of things, 
 could not in any case effectually deal other- 
 wise than by open war directly with the State, 
 even in those cases where the prohibition is 
 directly upon the State, as in that, for instance, 
 of making a negotiation with a foreign Power. 
 
 If the State of Vermont, for example, nego- 
 tiates with the British Government for the 
 extradition of fugitives, what is the United 
 States to do about it as to the State of Ver- 
 mont? She can institute no process against 
 that State to set aside the treaty. Her only 
 redress against us would be either “ the last 
 reason of kings,” as the saying is, warfare, for 
 a violation of that duty, or else, as also has been 
 done, addressing itself directly to the people, to 
 the persons, in spite of any act of the State in 
 its collective capacity. And so in the very in- 
 stance to which I have referred as an illustra- 
 tion of the prohibition to make treaties, which 
 is a direct prohibition on the States, which has 
 nothing on the face of it to do the individual 
 action or individual right at all, the only 
 method through which the treaty- making 
 power of a State could be assailed or the act 
 of making a treaty by a State could be denied, 
 was, and has been, in the very case of the State 
 of Vermont, through the intervention of the 
 national Legislature acting upon the persons 
 in providing methods of personal repression 
 through the courts; so that many years ago, 
 when the Governor of the State of Vermont 
 entered into an arrangement, before we had 
 any extradition treaty with Great Britain, to sur- 
 render a notorious criminal to the authorities 
 of Canada, that criminal applied to the courts 
 and was released by the Supreme Court of the 
 
5 
 
 United States, dealing directly between him 
 and the person who held the office of Gov- 
 ernor, not Governor Jennison, but citizen 
 Jennison. 
 
 It is a delusion, therefore, to imagine that 
 at any time and in any way the faculties and 
 functions enumerated in this Constitution, 
 which have been given to the United States 
 or have been denied to the States, are to be 
 carried out solely through secondary meins. 
 Wherever the Constitution imposes a duty or 
 a prohibition, and it becomes necessary to 
 make it effectual, the Government always has, 
 and it always must, short of warfare, go directly 
 to the thing itself, take hold of the citizen. 
 
 In the course of this enumeration of per- 
 sonal rights, perhaps one of the chief in the old 
 Constitution was that of securing equal priv- 
 ileges and immunities to the citizens of the 
 several States. I should not have thought it 
 necessary to allude to this provision in this 
 debate but for the stress that my friend from 
 Illinois, [Mr. Trumbull.] who I am sorry to 
 see is not present at this time, laid upon it 
 when he was endeavoring to persuade himself 
 that the fourteenth amendment of the Consti- 
 tution had made no change in the constitutional 
 rights of citizens or in the constitutional duties 
 of the Government toward them. He under- 
 took to show that the provision in the four- 
 teenth amendment, using sometimes words of 
 the same character, was the same in substance 
 with the ancient provision. That is another 
 mistake. The ancient provision was that — 
 
 “The citizens of each State shall be entitled to 
 all privileges and immunities of citizens in the sev- 
 eral States.” 
 
 Not that the citizens of the United States 
 shall be entitled to privileges and immunities 
 in every State, but that the citizen of one State 
 going into another should have the rights of a 
 citizen there; and it was out of that that the 
 doctrine grew, and it came to be legal doctrine 
 almost at last, that the citizen of one State 
 going into another was not entitled to exercise 
 the rights of a citizen of that State in every 
 case; and it was out of that, that the doctrine 
 grew that the citizen of one State might not be 
 a citizen of the U nited States at all, in the sense 
 of being entitled to the privileges and immun- 
 ities of the citizen of another State. It was 
 only a State citizenship, and from that State 
 citizenship resulted the national citizenship in 
 that State, and when he had removed to another 
 State he then became a citizen in due process 
 of time of that State, and his national citizen- 
 ship resulted, as the branch results from the 
 root, from his citizenship of that State. In 
 other words, national citizenship before this 
 amendment was merely a consequence of State 
 citizenship, and, as the old saying is, as the 
 stream cannot rise higher than its source, so 
 the right of the national citizen, using that term 
 as applied to him, was not greater than the 
 right of the State citizen, however that might 
 be cramped or defeated by State legislation or 
 State constitutions. Upon that principle the 
 
 State of South Carolina imprisoned citizens of 
 Massachusetts because they visited its ports for 
 lawful commerce, and the Constitution of the 
 United States, so far as that went, if those per- 
 sons had gone there to remain, to reside, instead 
 of going in the casual course of business, would 
 have been powerless to protect them. 
 
 Mr. TRLJ MBULL. Do 1 disturb the Senator 
 if 1 ask him a question? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Not in the slightest • 
 degree. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. I should like to ask the 
 Senator from Vermont if the United States 
 were not bound, before the fourteenth amend- 
 ment, to protect all the privileges and immun- 
 itise of citizens of the United States, whatever 
 they were? Under the general clause giving 
 Congress authority to carry out and protect 
 whatever powers are vested in the United 
 States, if there was such a thing as a citizen 
 of the United States, which the Senator will of 
 course admit, whatever his privileges and im- 
 munities were, was not the Government of the 
 United States bound to protect them every- 
 w here ? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. That is what I have been 
 trying to show for half an hour, in the best 
 way I could. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. Then, if the Senator 
 assents to that, I desire to ask him whether 
 the privileges and immunities of a citizen of 
 the United States were not precisely the same 
 before the adoption of the fourteenth amend- 
 ment, and if not. wherein do they differ? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. My friend sees where he 
 is coming out, and 60 1 will wait a moment 
 before I auswer the question in form. I say, 
 and have endeavored to maintain, that the 
 United States was bound, is bound, and always 
 must be bound, like every other sovereign 
 Government, to protect every right that it gives 
 to its citizens. There can be no doubt of it. 
 That is precisely the position upon which I 
 stand. But what I said was that a citizen only 
 became a citizen of the United States, under 
 the language of this Constitution that I have 
 read, through the fact that he was n citizen of 
 a State, to begin with, except in the case of 
 naturalization, and then he became, by the 
 act of the nation, a citizen of the State ; that 
 the national citizenship was the consequence 
 of the State citizenship, and therefore that the 
 privileges of a national citizen must always 
 be measured by, and controlled by, the rules 
 that applied to State citizenship ; and hence 
 if the State of South Carolina wished to en- 
 slave a portion of*its citizens, if any citizen of 
 another State chose to go there and be en- 
 slaved, if he came within the description of 
 the enslaved persons, he must take his chance 
 and the Constitution could not help him. That 
 is the position. As I go along 1 will answer 
 the other part of the question of my friend, 
 and he will presently see what the answer is. 
 
 Now, sir, to put this question at rest as to 
 what was the nature of national citizenship, 
 whether it was fundamental because the person 
 
6 
 
 was an inhabitant of the nation itself, or born 
 in it, or naturalized to it, or whether it was the 
 mere consequence of the fact that he was a 
 citizen of a State, the thirteenth and fourteenth 
 amendments came in. The fourteenth amend- 
 ment declared that — 
 
 "All persons born or naturalized in the United 
 States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are 
 citizens of the United States and of the State wherein 
 they reside.” 
 
 . The order of the language of the old Consti- 
 tution is reversed absolutely. Instead of de- 
 claring, as it did before, that a citizen of a State 
 was entitled to the privileges of a citizen in 
 another State, it declared that every person 
 born within the territory qf the United States 
 was a citizen of the nation, and, by consequence, 
 a citizen of any State in which he might from 
 time to time reside. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. If the Senator will 
 allow me again, did that do anything more 
 than give citizenship to a class of persons who 
 before that time did not have it, and did it 
 give anybody any privileges and immunities 
 beyond those possessed by a confessed citizen 
 of the United States before its enactment? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I declare most emphat- 
 ically that it did ; that it gave the man who 
 had been a citizen of Vermont or of Massa- 
 chusetts before, and who under the old Con- 
 stitution, becoming a citizen of South Caro- 
 lina, only had such rights as the constitution 
 of South Carolina chose to give to their citi- 
 zens, either to be a slave or a free man, or 
 whatever condition they might impose upon 
 him, a national citizenship as an original and 
 fundamental right that no State could regu- 
 late or destroy or impede, because it says so ; 
 and as a consequence of that, it said wherever 
 he went he became a citizen of the State to 
 which he emigrated. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. Now, will the Senator 
 allow me to ask him one other question right 
 there ? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. With great pleasure. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. I ask him whether, 
 before the thirteenth amendment, he holds 
 that a native-born white citizen of Vermont 
 could be reduced to slavery in South Caro- 
 lina, without doing it in defiance of the Con- 
 stitution of the United States? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I say he could, upon the 
 doctrine of the decisions that had been made. 
 If I had been the judge I should have declared 
 that the preamble and terms of the Constitu- 
 tion secured the freedom of every man already 
 free, white and black, everywhere. I would 
 not have declared that a btack man by the 
 Constitution of the United States could be 
 made a slave anywhere. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. Does the Senator mean 
 to affirm that any decision was ever made that 
 a white man could be made a slave? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. No, sir; I do not mean 
 to affirm that there was any such decision. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. Then there is no decis- 
 ion to that extent. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. My friend and I are now 
 talking about principles. I say, under the Con- 
 stitution, as it was before these amendments, 
 the right of a white man and a black man alike 
 residing in the State of South Carolina, and 
 becoming citizens of it, depended upon the 
 laws of South Carolina and its constitution, 
 and if a majority of the people of South Car- 
 olina chose to reduce my friend and me to 
 slavery, if we were citizens of that State, the 
 national Government could not help it. I say 
 that upon the principle of the decisions that 
 have been made, not upon the constitution 
 as I wcfcpld have construed it myself ; and I 
 say that it was to correct that wrong and dis- 
 honest and base construction that was put upon 
 this instrument that this amendment waS|intro- 
 duced, not as a mere paraphrase of what had 
 been enacted before, but as a fundamental 
 security of a national right which should be 
 supreme everywhere, and against which no 
 State constitution or State legislation or usage 
 could in the slightest degree prevail. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. If the Senator will allow 
 me, we both agree that we would not have 
 made such a decision under the old Constitu- 
 tion ; but the Senator now puts it upon judi- 
 cial decision, that a white native-born citizen 
 of the United States might have been reduced 
 to slavery in another State. Now, I ask him 
 if the judicial decisions that sanctioned the 
 reducing to slavery of a human being were not 
 all based upon color, their being persons of 
 African descent, and if there is any decision 
 anywhere intimating that a white citizen of 
 Vermont or Illinois, being a citizen of the 
 United States, could ever have been reduced 
 to slavery in any of the States of the Union? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Mr. President, I have 
 already said that all the decisions upon the 
 subject of slavery as such, which is only one 
 form of depriving a man of his liberty, were 
 based upon color. But I assert that the Su- 
 preme Court of the United States under the 
 old Constitution has solemnly decided that 
 those great words in the fifth article of the old 
 amendments, that no man shall be deprived 
 of life, liberty, or property without due pro- 
 cess of law, did not prevent a State from de- 
 priving a man of life, liberty, or property 
 without due process of law ; that it was none 
 of our business if they did ; that we had no 
 power to protect a man against a violation of 
 his liberty or his life, because the Constitution 
 of the United States or of his own State pro- 
 hibited it ; be must look to bis own State for 
 redress, and that we had no power to interfere. 
 Therefore. I say, if the Constitution of the 
 United States did not protect the citizen of 
 Illinois against illegal imprisonment, being 
 white, aqd the courts of the United States had 
 no power to interfere and defend him, then the 
 people of Illinois, if they had chosen, could 
 have kept him in prison forever ; they could 
 have taken him to their corn-fields and com- 
 pelled him to labor; they could have made 
 him a slave. 
 
7 
 
 
 So I am justified in saying that the decisions 
 under the old Constitution in principle and in 
 effect completely cover the proposition that 
 it was not in the power of the United States 
 to defend the right of a citizen of the United 
 States to life, liberty, or property, against the 
 invasion of it by any State or by any person 
 in a State with or without the authority of its 
 laws; and the reason was, as I have stated, 
 that the citizenship which draws to it protec- 
 tion, which draws to it the privileges and im- 
 munities which have been spoken of in tho 
 Constitution, and which we all agree include 
 the right to life, the right to liberty, tlfe right 
 to property, the right to freedom from all in- 
 terference without due process of law, afforded 
 no protection, because that citizenship rested 
 upon State authority, and, only as a conse 
 quence of that State authority and growing 
 out of it, had a national character. That 
 being known, the fourteenth amendment, not 
 being a mere empty dream or an empty asser- 
 tion of an old principle, declared that every 
 person born in the United States shall first 
 and always be a citizen of the nation, and sec- 
 ond, and as a consequence, be a citizen of the 
 State in which he resides. 
 
 Now, Mr. President, to return to the point 
 I was speaking upon — and in my discussion 
 with my friend I have got a Tittle out of the 
 order in which I intended Jo have spoken of 
 these subjects — this Constitution has always 
 been a Constitution of the people, and has in 
 a thousand ways provided for the protection 
 of the people, imposing duties, guarantying 
 rights, regulating affairs, prohibiting action to 
 States, and so it has, in a great variety of 
 instances in the course of these powers and 
 prohibitions, been applied to the people directly 
 to effect its purposes and to defend its powers, 
 and wherever and whenever that occasion has 
 arisen it has always been done precisely upon 
 the principles that this bill contains, that of 
 dealing with the people, that of enacting laws, 
 and never that of either by advice or protest, 
 warfare or proclamation, dealing with the 
 States. 
 
 I have as a matter of curiosity gone through 
 the ancient- statutes as to crimes in order to 
 see, as my friend from Illinois thought we 
 were making a great change in the Govern- 
 ment, how largely the founders of the Govern- 
 ment, in enacting its crimes acts, have gone 
 into the constant intercourse of the people in 
 their business relations, how much it has done 
 that might have been done by the States, and 
 in many instances how much it has done that 
 has always been done also by the States acting 
 upon the same class of subjects. Here are 
 some of them : 
 
 “An act to punish the negligence of steam- 
 boat officers,” not on the high seas alone, but 
 anywhere in the United States, by which any 
 person should be injured. Nobody disputes 
 that a State can pass laws to punish that. 
 Nobody disputes that the State laws give 
 
 rights of private action to people for negli- 
 gence of steamboat owners. 
 
 “ The embezzlement of goods of the United 
 States.” There is a power which it might be 
 said was necessary to protect the interest of 
 the United States. That is true; and while 
 it is perfectly true, it would be lawful for the 
 States to, and many of them do, have statutes 
 under which anybody can be convicted for 
 embezzling the goods of another, whether the 
 United States or a foreign Power, or any per- 
 son having property within their territorial 
 jurisdiction. 
 
 “The forging of powers of attorney to trans- 
 fer stocks.” There is a case of a purely pri- 
 vate crime between man and man, nothing 
 else. The power of attorney to transfer stocks 
 is not a Government security. It has no more 
 relation to it than any other power of attor- 
 ney has, except that the Government security 
 happens to be the subject to which the power 
 of attorney is applied, and it is punished as a 
 private cheat, as all species of counterfeiting 
 and forgery of personal documents are. No- 
 body ever questioned the propriety of that 
 legislation ; and at the same time all the States, 
 without exception, have enacted and enforced 
 laws against the forgery of precisely the same 
 instruments; and yet nobody ever heard that 
 the Union was about to fall to pieces because 
 the United States had invaded the sacred right 
 of the State to regulate the conduct of its own 
 citizens about crimes of this character. 
 
 “ Conspiracies to cast away vessels,” not on 
 the high seas merely, but anywhere within the 
 jurisdiction of the United States. 
 
 “ Conspiring to plunder stranded vessels.” 
 Plundering stranded vessels within the body 
 of a county of a State, which in every State in 
 the Union, I have no fear in saying, is an 
 offense against State laws ; and yet nobody has 
 been alarmed at that legislation. 
 
 “Assaulting an officer.” And here, sir, is 
 the shibboleth on which my friend from Illinois 
 has staggered and fallen. The committee put 
 into this bill an amendment providing that if 
 any man should assault an officer unlawfully 
 and wickedly, or rather conspire to assault him, 
 while in the performance of his duty, he should 
 be amenable to punishment. My honorable 
 friend from Illinois has said that this for him 
 spoils the whole bill. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. Not at all. I am in 
 favor of that. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I am very glad that my 
 friend has experienced a sudden conversion. 
 Let me read from his remarks. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. While the Senator is 
 hunting it up, I will say that my position was, 
 and I think he will find it the same in the 
 paper — if it is not I did not express what I 
 intended — that the Government had the right 
 to protect its officers in the discharge of their 
 duties ; but that the Government of the United 
 States had no right to punish for a conspiracy 
 to cut down the Senator’s apple trees in Ver- 
 
8 
 
 raont, when he is here as a Senator discharging 
 his duties. The bill as proposed to be amended 
 provides for punishing a conspiracy to injure 
 the property of another while the officer is 
 engaged in the discharge of his duties a thou- 
 sand miles away, if you please, and having no 
 connection with the discharge of his duties. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I am immeasurably happy- 
 that in the short course of thirty-five or forty 
 minutes I should have found one convert; I 
 
 able friend said : 
 
 “I had stated that I did not suppose the Senator 
 from Vermont was in favor — and I might say I was 
 quite well satisfied ho was not — of entering the 
 States to pass a general criminal code for the States, 
 or a general law for the redress of civil injuries in 
 the courts in cases of contest between individuals, 
 where the Constitution and laws of the United Sta tes 
 were not directly encroached upon. Assuming 
 that to be so. and that that is the opinion of every 
 member of the Senate, I should like now to get the 
 attention of Senators a moment, and especially of 
 the lawyers of the body, to a single amendment in 
 the seventeenth line of the second section. The 
 Judiciary Committee propose to insert these words, 
 
 ‘ or while engaged in the.’ ” 
 
 Now* let me read the text of the bill: 
 
 Or by force, intimidation, or threat, to induce 
 any officer of the United States to leave any State, 
 district, or place where his duties as such officer 
 might lawfully be performed, or to injure him in 
 bis person or property on account of his lawful dis- 
 charge of the duties of his office, &c. 
 
 That is the way the bill read in the first 
 place. The committee propose to amend 
 that so as to make it read : 
 
 Or to injure him in his person or property on 
 account of or while engaged in the lawful discharge 
 of the duties of his office. 
 
 Now, says the Senator from Illinois : 
 
 “I think that changes the whole character of that 
 section. Let me show how. 
 
 "As the bill originally stood, as it came from the 
 House, it provided for the punishment of a conspir- 
 acy to injure a person holding a United States office 
 in his person or property on account of his lawful 
 discharge of the duties of his office. That is legiti- 
 mate. I can vote for a law that punishes a conspir- 
 acy to injure a United States officer on accounted 
 his lawful discharge of the duties of his office. But 
 what is the amendment? Its effect is to punish a 
 conspiracy to injure his property ‘while he is en- 
 gaged in the lawful discharge of his duties.’ Is not 
 that very different?” 
 
 And then he proceeds to illustrate. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. That is exactly what I 
 say now. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Very good. Let us see 
 what kind of a law we have now. The hon- 
 orable Senator from Illinois made no distinc- 
 tion, for noue could be made, in his argument 
 between the case of assaulting the officer while 
 engaged in the discharge of his duties or injur- 
 ing his property. He put it upon the ground 
 that it must be on account of the act interfer- 
 ing with the discharge of his duties which 
 made the case criminal for our punishment. 
 Now, let us see. Here is the act of 1790, old i 
 enough to be outlawed, perhaps, in the esti- 
 mation of my friend, but it is In force yet: 
 
 "If any person or persons shall knowingly and 
 willfully obstruct, resist, or oppose any officer of the 
 
 
 United States, in serving or attempting to serve or 
 execute any mesne process or warrant, or any rule 
 or order of any of the courts of the United States, 
 or any other legal or judicial writ or process what- 
 soever, or shall assault, beat, or wound any officer, 
 or other person duly authorized, in serving or exe- 
 cuting any writ, rule, order, process, or warrant 
 aforesaid, every person so knowingly and willfully 
 offendingin the premises shall, onconviction thereof, 
 be imprisoned not exceeding twelve months, and 
 fined not exceeding $300.” 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. That is a very proper 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. We have had, Mr. Presi- 
 dent, for eighty years a statute which made it 
 a crimetto assault any officer while engaged in 
 the performance of his duties, not on account 
 of it, but to injure him in his person while he 
 was engaged in the performance of his duties. 
 Now, my honorable friend says that this change, 
 using the same words and only changing the 
 language so as to include property as well as 
 person, is a great departure and alters the whole 
 principle of the bill. 
 
 ' This is not the whole of my friend’s connec- 
 tion with this thing, and I ana sorry that he 
 should have been betrayed suddenly into mak- 
 ing the opposition to this change that he did, 
 because only three years ago, as I reminded 
 him on that occasion, he himself, as a mem- 
 ber of the Judiciary Committee, heartily con- 
 curred in and assisted to reporta provision of 
 exactly that same character, and which, I 
 think I am safe in saying, at that time met the 
 approval of the Senate from members of all 
 parties and without any differences of political 
 opinion affecting it at all. Here are the sec- 
 tions which my friend’s committee reported 
 with his concurrence, the sections which he 
 and I voted for when they were amended in a 
 part of their phraseology. The first making 
 it a crime “ if any officer shall be, while in the 
 performance of his official duty, unlawfully 
 assaulted, beaten, or shall have his property 
 unlawfully taken, injured, or destroyed while 
 engaged in the performance of his official 
 duty.” 
 
 The very language of the amendment which 
 we have proposed to put into this bill was bor- 
 rowed. I do not mean by saying “borrowed” 
 to say copied from, but the idea was. borrowed 
 from our own discussion and recommendation 
 in favor of that bill — which did not become a 
 law, not because it was defeated, but* because 
 it was not finally acted upon — in which and for 
 which we had the able and vigorous assistance 
 of my honorable friend. I thought, therefore, 
 that the committee might be justified, acting 
 upon the traditions of the old statutes, acting 
 upon the opinion of my friend so recently ex- 
 pressed to us, in making this amendment. I 
 suppose that when he opposed this amendment 
 the other day, as the Globe certainly says he 
 did oppose it; (for he said that it changed the 
 whole character of the section, and he could 
 not go for it,) my honorable, friend had for- 
 gotten, in the hurry of the ten thousand things 
 he is pressed with, that this very subject of 
 
9 
 
 securing an officer in person and property from 
 unlawful molestation while he is attending to 
 his duties was one which had met t his cordial 
 approval, as I think it ought the approval of 
 every one. But, Mr. President, I am taking 
 too much time with that. 
 
 As 1 have said, in all or nearly all of these 
 instances, and I have only given a few of them, 
 where the United States has exercised crim- 
 inal jurisdiction over the acts of citizens as 
 between each other, in order to carry out the 
 protections which the Constitution has given 
 to the operations of the Government and to 
 the rights of citizens under it, the States, at 
 the same time, as States, have had a criminal 
 code which covered almost completely the 
 same class of subjects. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. Does the Senator mean 
 to say that I ever expressed any opinions about 
 a bill that he has referred to as having been re- 
 ported here? I presume we considered it in 
 the Judiciary Committee, but it was never dis- 
 cussed in the Senate. I do not think I ever 
 said a word about it. I do not recollect the 
 circumstances about it now. It was reported 
 by the Senator from Vermont. I may have 
 given my acquiescence to the report without 
 examining it as particularly as I ought to have 
 done; but that I ever expressed any opinions 
 in the Senate in favor of a proposition that 
 would authorize the punishment of a conspir- 
 acy to injure the property of a man simply 
 because he was an officer of the United States, 
 when it had no connection with the discharge 
 of his duties, I deny. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Well, Mr. President, on 
 that denial it is a question between the record 
 and the recollection of my friend ; that is all. 
 
 Mr. TRUMBULL. The bill was not re- 
 ported by me, was it? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. No, it was not; it was 
 reported by the honorable Senator’s commit- 
 tee, reported with his concurrence, and the 
 Globe shows no dissent ; and I happen to know 
 personally that it was reported with his con- 
 currence. It was taken up in the morning 
 hour Tor consideration on the 29th of June, 
 1868, toward the end of the session, I have no 
 doubt in the presence of my friend, who always 
 attends, during the morning hour certainly; 
 and it was discussed and amended by inserting 
 in the second section words which by a cler- 
 ical mistake had been omitted, the very words 
 which we put into this bill, “while in the per- 
 formance of his duty and that amendment 
 was agreed to by the Senate. 
 
 Now, Mr. President, it is not my purpose to 
 find fault with my honorable friend from Illi- 
 nois for changing his opinion, if he has seen 
 fit and good ground to do it; but I think he 
 ought not to have said the other day that this 
 amendment which we propose changed the 
 whole character of that section and was with- 
 out any precedent to support it. 
 
 I was saying when my friend interrupted me 
 just now that from the foundation of the Gov- 
 ernment, over. this class of subjects — because 
 
 the whole spirit of this discussion turns upon 
 the question whether the national authority 
 has a right to deal with its citizens as citizens, 
 and not with States, or whether it must be left 
 to the States alone to act upon her citizens in 
 enforcing the national Constitution — embra- 
 cingalmost onehalf of all the business relations 
 of men in the country, embracing a thousand 
 different operations and a thousand different 
 situations of society, the United States have 
 had and administered a criminal code to pro- 
 tect the powers and to execute the duties which 
 the Constitution has confided to it. And in 
 doing this they have not either “ invaded ” or 
 “entered” any State, but they have exercised 
 the constitutional omnipresence of sovereignty, 
 and carried forward the beneficent sway of 
 justice among the people, for the people, and 
 by the people. 
 
 The Government has had a criminal code that 
 acted directly upon the people, upon whom 
 alone it could act. That has not been an inva- 
 sion of the rights of the States ; on the contrary, 
 it has been in aid of the good order and stabil- 
 ity of the society of the States, and at the same 
 time the States by their own laws and in their 
 own methods and through their own courts 
 have punished the same classes of offenses ; 
 and the Supreme Court of the United States 
 has more than once been called upon to decide 
 whether a State could, in view of the fact that 
 the United States had a code against a particu- 
 lar crime, also make the same act a crime ; 
 and it has always been decided that the sover- 
 eignty of the two governments was in these re- 
 spects independent and concurrent ; that they 
 both could act over the subjects that were com- 
 mitted to them, and therefore that a citizen 
 might properly be punished for violating a 
 State law and a United States law in doing the 
 same act. 
 
 We have had that as to passing counterfeit 
 money. The State of Ohio had a statute against 
 passing counterfeit money. A man was indicted 
 under it, and he defended upon the ground that 
 that was a crime by United States law and that 
 the jurisdiction of the United States over it was 
 exclusive. The Supreme Court of the Uni- 
 ted States decided that the State had a perfect 
 right to pass laws against counterfeiting money 
 as well as against the passing of counterfeit 
 money. Afterward a man was indicted under 
 the laws of the United States for passing coun- 
 terfeit money ; not to punish him in the lan- 
 guage of the Constitution for counterfeiting 
 coin, but out of the language of the Constitu- 
 tion to punish him for uttering counterfeit coin 
 or a counterfeit note, whatever it may have 
 been ; and the question was again made that 
 the United States had no right to invade the 
 function of a State and punish the passing of 
 counterfeit coin because the Constitution did 
 not name that, and the State laws operated 
 upon it. Again the Supreme Coqrt of the 
 United States decided that it was perfectly 
 within the constitutional power of Congress 
 to do that thing. 
 
So, sir, as to the fugitive slave law. There 
 the Constitution had not declared, in terms, 
 whose duty it should be to see to its enforce- 
 ment. The United States had passed a com 
 plete code upon the subject. The State of 
 Illinois had passed code upon the subject, 
 and had provided for the punishment of any 
 person who should harbor or secrete a fugitive 
 slave; and the suggestion was ma.de that my 
 friend from Illinois made the other day, that 
 this was changing the whole character of the 
 Government to have the States interfere where 
 the United States could, or to have the United 
 States interfere where the States could. But 
 the court say : 
 
 “But admitting that the plaintiff in error may be 
 liable to an action under the act of Congress for the 
 same acts of harboring and preventing the owner 
 from retaking his slave, it does not follow that he 
 would be twice punished for the same offense. An 
 offense, in its legal signification, means the trans- 
 gression of a law. A man may be compelled to make 
 reparation in damages to the injured party, and be 
 liable also to punishment for a breach of the public 
 peace in consequence of the same act; and may be 
 said, in common parlance, to be twice punished for 
 the same offense. Every citizen of the United States 
 is also a citizen of a State or Territory. He may be | 
 said to owe allegiance to two sovereigns, and may be 
 liable to punishment for an infraction of the laws 
 of either. The same act may be an offense or trans- 
 gression of the laws of both. Thus, an assault upon 
 the marshal” — 
 
 Here comes this dreadful trouble again about 
 assaulting the marshal while in the perform- 
 ance of his duty — 
 
 “ Thus, an assault upon themarshal of the United 
 States, and hindering him in the execution of legal 
 process, is a high offense against the United States, 
 for which the perpetrator is liable to punishment; 
 and tho same act may be also a gross breach of the 
 peace of tho State, a riot, assault, or a murder, and 
 subject the same person to a punishment, under the 
 State laws, for a misdemeanor or felony. That 
 either or both may (if they see fit) punish such an 
 offender cannot be doubted. Yet it cannot be truly 
 averred that t >e offender has been twice punished 
 for the same offense; but only that by one act he 
 has committed two offenses, for each of which he is 
 justly punishable, lie could not plead the punish- 
 ment by one in bar to a conviction by tho other; 
 consequently, this court has decided, in the case of 
 Fox vs. The State of Ohio, (5 IIow., 432,) that a State 
 may punish the offense of uttering or passing false 
 coin, as a cheat or fraud practiced on its citizens; 
 and in tho case of the United States vs. Marigold, 
 (9 How., 5(50.) that Congress, in tho proper exercise 
 of its authority, may punish the satno act as an 
 offense against the United States.” (Moore vs. The 
 People of the State of Illinois, 14 Howard, 19, 20.) 
 
 Now, sir, I think I have demonstrated, 
 though I have taken, perhaps, too much time 
 to do it, that over all the rights and over all 
 the duties and over all the guarantees that the 
 Constitution of the United States enumerates, 
 the power of the United States, by legislation, 
 by punishment, by any of the methods which 
 legislation may resort to, to enforce constitu- 
 tional duties and obligations may and must act 
 directly upon the citizen ; and that it is entirely 
 immaterial whether the State may or can do 
 the same thing for the same act or not ; and, 
 therefore, that it is no objection to the consti- 
 tutional exercise of power by Congress that the 
 States themselves in the case of these disor- 
 ders in the South may, if they will, punish the 
 
 same things according to their own laws. This 
 has been carried so far in the statutes of the 
 United States passed by the founders'of the 
 Government that in cases of admiralty and mari- 
 timejurisdiction, (which would seem by the Con- 
 stitution to have been exclusively confided to 
 the national authority and the national courts,) 
 the ancient statutes conferring jurisdiction and 
 setting up courts to practice that law, expressly 
 provided that the acts of Congress and the author- 
 ity of the courts under them should not be con- 
 strued to exclude the common law or prohibit 
 the courts of the States to grant relief in all 
 those cases in which the common law was 
 competent to afford it. So that to-day, although 
 the courts of the United States in one form of 
 procedure — procedure in rem — have exclusive 
 jurisdiction over maritime matters, the com- 
 mon-law courts of every State have ample 
 jurisdiction of the same matters, by suits in 
 personam between parties ; and yet we are told 
 that this attempt of the United States to pun- 
 ish crimes of this character is a new thing; 
 that we are changing the character of the Gov- 
 ernment by endeavoring to repress tumults 
 and insurrections which are leveled against 
 citizens in order to deprive them of that equal 
 protection and that right to seek justice which 
 the Constitution, from the nature of it, guar- 
 antees to them, and which it in express words 
 gives to them. 
 
 Now, sir, let us see what rights these new 
 amendments have given to citizens; and I am 
 sorry to have troubled the Senate so long in 
 discussing this general principle; but inas- 
 much as the whole constitutionality of our 
 legislation has been made to turn, as 1 have 
 said, upon the denial of our right to exercise 
 direct powers over the citizens as such, 1 have 
 felt justiSed in demonstrating, as 1 think I 
 have, from history, from the Constitution, 
 from the statutes, and from the decisions, that 
 this pretense is a sheer delusion. 
 
 Now, what do these amendments provide? 
 
 The thirteenth amendment provided that 
 there should be neither slavery nor involun- 
 tary servitude except for crime. That was a 
 prohibition. It did not name a Slate at all. 
 Under the old decisions, to which I have 
 referred, protecting life, liberty, and property 
 against invasion without due process of law, 
 Democratic Senators and my friend from 
 Illinois might have contended that this was 
 only a prohibition against slavery under the 
 authority of the Uuited States, and that any 
 State could now deprive a citizen of his liberty 
 for the reason that the thirteenth amendment 
 only operated as against the Government of 
 the United States as it was held under the old 
 one which I have read. 
 
 But that has not been contended, and every- 
 body knows that it would be scouted, for there 
 is added — if there could have been any doubt 
 about it before — the provision that “ Congress 
 shall have power to enforce this article by 
 appropriate legislation.” Therefore, wheu the 
 prohibition against slavery was enacted and 
 
11 
 
 the power was expressly put into the hands of 
 Congress to carry out that enactment, to see 
 that it was made effectual, was it not the right 
 and the duty of Congress, too, to the last point 
 of its power, to protect the liberty of all people 
 wherever it might be assailed by that form of 
 crime? Nobody questions it. Even my hon- 
 orable friend from Ohio who sits farthest from 
 me [Mr. Tiiurman] I think will admit, I be- 
 lieve he did the other day — I do not know 
 that the conversation was public, although it 
 was a business conversaiion — ‘that under the 
 thirteenth amendment there is no question but 
 that Congress may take all necessary means to 
 prevent the reestablishment of slavery. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. Will my friend allow me 
 to state exactly what my view is? 1 have 
 already stated it, although not in this debate. 
 In my judgment, that provision that Congress 
 shall have power by appropriate legislation to 
 give effect to this article which is found in each 
 of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth arti 
 clesof amendment confers no power upon Con- 
 gress that would not exist in Congress if those 
 words were stricken out of the Constitution. 
 They are not a particle broader than the clause 
 in the original Constitution that Congress shall 
 have power to pass all laws necessary and 
 proper, &c. ; and this very word “appropriate ” 
 is derived from the opinion of Judge Marshall 
 in McCulloch vs. Maryland, in which he says 
 that Congress, under that authority to pass all 
 proper and necessary laws, could use any ap 
 propriate means; and it is also said in the same 
 case that Congress would have all the powers 
 that it now has if that clause itself were left 
 wholly out of the Constitution. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Very well ; suppose that 
 is so, inasmuch as the clause is in, have we not 
 all the power that it gives? That is the point. 
 If we had the power, supposing the clause were 
 out, l hope my honorable friend does not con- 
 tend that we have it not because the clause is 
 in. Does he ? 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. No, I do not. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Very good; then my pur- 
 pose is answered ; and let me tell my friend 
 that there is a wide distinction, if he will study 
 the Constitution a little more closely, between 
 this phraseology of the second section of the 
 thirteenth article and the old phraseology. 
 This says that “ Congress shall have power to 
 enforce t his article by appropriate legislation.” 
 That said that Congress should have power by 
 all necessary legislation to carry into effect the 
 powers therein granted. The prohibitions upon 
 the States were not granted powers; they were 
 denied powers ; not denied powers of the 
 national Government, but denied powers of 
 the States ; and therefore the strict language 
 of the old grant of power to legislate did not 
 cover those cases at all. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. The Senator will pardon 
 me for saying that I think I could convince 
 him that there is no difference; but it would 
 require an argument, and I do not want to 
 interrupt his speech. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. My friend knows that 
 when he goes to an argument or threatens one 
 I am always convinced at once. [Laughter.] 
 But the chief point now is, as my friend agrees, 
 that here is, whether necessary or unnecessary, 
 an express grant of power to us, the national 
 Legislature, to defend the rights of citizens 
 of the United States and all inhabitants of 
 the country, whether citizens or not, against 
 slavery. Now, how are you going to do it? Are 
 you going to do it by passing a proclamation 
 to the State of Georgia when she may choose 
 to reenslave her negroes? Or, are you going 
 to do it by making war upon her? Or, are you 
 going to do it, as we by this bill do it under 
 the fourteenth amendment, by declaring that 
 any man who infracts that article shall be 
 punished ? 
 
 I take it, there is only one answer to that 
 question. If any State should undertake to 
 set up slavery, or any man in a State should 
 undertake to set it up, (because the old theory 
 was that the States did not set it up at all, 
 that it was a kind of hereditary personal right 
 that came down from the patriarchs in some 
 undefined way,) my friend from Ohio would be 
 among the inostearnestopponents of any legis- 
 lation which should address itself to the State 
 of Georgia. He would say, “The State of 
 Georgia is not in fault; she cannot as a State 
 be in fault at all, because her officers, her 
 Legislature, her Governor, her judiciary, all 
 together as such, have no power or authority 
 to do anything of the kind, and their acts, 
 therefore, are utterly void, and the people in 
 their collective capacity are not responsible 
 for them at all ; and you have no right to make 
 war upon the people because their officers, 
 their mere agents whom they have selected, 
 have exceeded their jurisdiction and author- 
 ity. Go,” he would say, “ to the guilty ones. 
 Address yourselves to the criminal who has vio- 
 lated this article of the Constitution and the 
 statutes of the United States by doing that 
 which the Constitution forbids.” 
 
 Thus you will have enforced the thirteenth 
 article of amendments and secured liberty and 
 punished slavery. It would be an extreme 
 case which could justify any other answer; 
 and inasmuch as slavery is so odious to man- 
 kind now, gentlemen of all political shades 
 would acquiesce, and there would not be a 
 debate or a party division upon the passage of 
 a bill which should provide forthe punishment 
 of the act of reducing any man to slavery, 
 under the thirteenth amendment. Nobody, I 
 venture to say, would have been heard to open 
 his lips to condemn such legislation, however 
 much some portion of the people might desire 
 to see slavery restored, or to question the pro- 
 priety or the constitutionality of enacting it. 
 
 But when you take the next step and come 
 to the next article of the Constitution, which 
 secures the rights of white men as much as of 
 colored men, you touch a tender spot in the 
 party of our friends on the other side. If you 
 *■ wish to employ the powers of the Constitution 
 
12 
 
 to preserve the lives and liberties of white 
 people against attacks by white people, against 
 rapine and murder and assassination and con- 
 spiracy, contrived in order to drive them from 
 the States in which they have been born or 
 have chosen to settle, contrived in order to 
 deprive them of the liberty of having a political 
 opinion, contrived for the purpose of driving 
 them from a city or town where they have 
 endeavored to carry on a peaceable and lawful 
 business or to cultivate the soil, then the whole 
 strength of the Democratic party and all its 
 allies is arrayed against the constitutionality 
 and propriety of such an act. 
 
 Sir, what did the fourteenth amendment say, 
 taking it a little in detail? The first section 
 of it is all that I need to read. It has four dis- 
 tinct and separate clauses. The first is the 
 one upon which I haye commented, and I will 
 now only state it : 
 
 ‘‘All persons born or naturalized in the United 
 States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are 
 citizens of the United States, and ofthe State wherein 
 they reside.” 
 
 I have said prematurely, in answer to my 
 friend from Illinois, and out of the order of 
 the proper discussion of this subject, all that 
 I will take the time to say about it. The next 
 is the provision that: 
 
 ‘‘No State shall make or enforce any law which 
 shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens 
 of the United States.” 
 
 There is a direct prohibition to the State; it 
 is a direct prohibition against the making of 
 a law ; it is a direct prohibition against the 
 enforcing of a law ; and that perhaps brings me 
 to the question here as well as anywhere else, 
 what is a State ? 
 
 My honorable friend from Ohio [Mr. Thur- 
 man] said yesterday, my friend from New 
 Jersey [Mr. Stockton] said the other day, and 
 everybody says on that side, that a State is the 
 legislative department, and that all the pro- 
 hibitions and commands of this section are 
 addressed to the law making power of a State, 
 and that any omission of the Governor to give 
 rights under his. department, any omission of 
 the judiciary to grant rights under their de- 
 partment, any violation by either of these 
 departments of a State government of any 
 right secured by this section, i3 not a violation 
 by the State, for that must be by the law-making 
 power. Now, apply it to this : 
 
 “ No State shall make or enforce any law which 
 shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citi- 
 zens ofthe United States.” 
 
 Not “abridge the privileges and immunities 
 of citizens of one State going to another,” 
 as the old language was, but “which shall 
 abridge the privileges and immunities of citi- 
 zens of the United States,” whether they are 
 citizens of one State or another — absolute 
 and complete. But what is the State? Is it 
 the Legislature? It is as to making law, with 
 the aid of a Governor. As to enforcing a law, 
 is the Legislature the State? How do Legis- 
 latures enforce laws ? I had been taught in 
 my little reading and experience in the pro- 
 
 fession of the law that the enforcement of the 
 law belonged to the judiciary and the execu- 
 tive combined. I had never heard before that 
 it was a part of the legislative functions of a 
 government to enforce laws; and yet. if my 
 friend is right, although the very word “ en- 
 force” is used in this prohibition, it is after 
 all only a command to the members of the 
 Legislature that they shall not enforce any 
 such law ; and therefore the executive and 
 the judicial departments of the State are not 
 prohibited from enforcing any law they please 
 which violates the privileges and immunities 
 of citizens of the United States. 
 
 Why, Mr. President, this is absurd ; it flies 
 in the face ofthe very language, it flies in the 
 face of everything we know ofthe nature and 
 constitution of a government, be it State or 
 national. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. Will the Senator allow 
 me to interrupt him at this point? 
 
 Mr* EDMUNDS. With the greatest pleasure. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. I do so because the Sen- 
 ator has attributed to me quite a mistake. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I thought it was quite a 
 mistake. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. Either the Senator did 
 not understand me, or 1 do not understand 
 him. The language is, “ no State shall make 
 or enforce any law which shall abridge the 
 privileges and immunities of citizens.” He 
 will admit at once that it is only the legislative 
 power in a State which can make a law. He 
 will also admit at once that the courts and the 
 executive power of the State do not enforce 
 laws’ that are not made by the State, or not 
 recognized as law by the State, being the 
 common law of the State. Therefore, when it 
 is said there that “no State shall make or 
 enforce any law,” it can only apply to laws 
 which are made by the Legislature of the State, 
 or to the common law' of the State. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I do not see that that 
 changes it. That is exactly what I said. Of 
 course, if the Legislature do not make a law 
 which abridges the privileges or immunities 
 of citizens, then there is no such law that the 
 other departments of the State government 
 can enforce. But suppose the Legislature 
 does make a law which abridges the privileges 
 of a citizen, and suppose that the judicial and 
 executive departments of the State govern- 
 ment undertake to put it in force; what then? 
 According to his argument you can only pun- 
 ish the Legislature; you can make war upon 
 "them or you can indict them, or do whatever 
 our friends on the other side think would be 
 adequate to the end ; and I should like any one 
 of them to be kind enough to point out what 
 he would do in sucn a case. What, then, was 
 the use of putting in this prohibition against 
 enforcement? None at all in that case. I 
 repeat, with all respect to my friend, that an 
 argument of that kind borders, if he will par- 
 don me for saying so, upon absurdity. 
 
 The enforcement of laws, as I have said, 
 does not belong to the legislative department 
 
13 
 
 at all ; it belongs to the other departments ; 
 and as to the enforcement of law, the other 
 departments are the government; they are 
 the whole government. Why, sir, what a 
 position we should be in if this honorable 
 Senator’s position were sound ! Look at our 
 case with England during the rebellion. There 
 were the acts of Parliament which denounced 
 punishment against the fitting out of expeditions 
 against friendly Powers ; there was the execu- 
 tive department, the Crown, armed with all its 
 constables and sheriffs and its military power; 
 there was the judiciary in the full exercise of 
 its functions. Through the fault of the Execu- 
 tive and through the fault of the judiciary 
 expeditions were fitted out; they did make 
 war upon our commerce; they did violate our 
 rights. “Now,” says my friend, “the Crown and 
 the judiciary of England are not the Govern- 
 ment ; they are to blame, but they are not the 
 State; the duty of executing the statutes of 
 England does not belong to them, or if it did, 
 they are not responsible for not doing it; the 
 power of England is in the Parliament ; and 
 inasmuch as Parliament had done all that was 
 necessary for it to do before, as the statutes 
 were there, England is not responsible at all.” 
 That doctrine cannot be maintained. A State 
 is a corporation ; it exists only, in contempla- 
 tion of law, as an organized thing; and it is 
 manifested, represented entirely, and fully in 
 respect to every one of its functions, by that 
 department of its government on which the 
 execution of those functions is respectively 
 devolved. Therefore, if it is the duty of the 
 executive and judicial departments of a State 
 to enforce a law and they do not enforce it, 
 the State does not enforce it. If it is their 
 duty not to enforce a law and they do enforce 
 it, it is the State that enforces it. 
 
 The next provision is the one that “no State 
 shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or 
 property without due process of law.” Under 
 the old Constitution a similar provision existed, 
 not using the word “State,” and, as i have 
 already stated, the courts decided that that 
 prohibition did not apply to the States at all, 
 and that therefore it only applied to the Uni 
 ted States. Hence this clause in the amend 
 ment, which also Congress is to enforce by 
 appropriate legislation, “no State shall de- 
 prive any person of life, liberty, or property, 
 without due process of law.” So that, taking 
 the two clauses together, the old one and the 
 new one, you have in the Constitution of the 
 United States a sweeping declaration that 
 neither the United States nor any one under 
 them, nor any State nor any one under it, 
 shall deprive any person of life, liberty, or 
 property, without due process of law. Is not 
 that, then, as complete as any language can 
 make it? Does it not cover all the power of 
 the nation in every department of the Govern- 
 ment, both national and State? Nobody can 
 dispute it; it says so in terms. Taking the 
 two together, the States are prohibited, the 
 nation is prohibited, everybody is prohibited 
 
 from denying the rights of citizens to life, lib- 
 erty, and property, without the regular aud 
 due process of law — constitutional iaw. 
 
 Now we come to the next clause, “Nor deny 
 to any person within its jurisdiction the equal 
 protection of the laws.” And here, again, 
 after this clause, follows the potent, although 
 my friend from Ohio and my friend from Illi- 
 nois think the unnecessary, declaration that 
 “ Congress may enforce this provision by appro- 
 priate legislation.’' Now, what is a State to 
 do? It is not to deny to any person within its 
 jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws; 
 not the equal making of its laws, which had 
 been provided for before, not the right to life, 
 liberty, and property, which had been provided 
 for before; but it is not to deny the protection 
 of its laws. 
 
 What is protection of law? Do I need to 
 weary the patience of the Senate with under- 
 taking to define what is the protection of the 
 law? I take it any, the humblest, citizen in 
 the land knows what the protection of the law 
 is. The meanest criminal in the land knows 
 what it is to violate the protection of the law. 
 
 I shall assume, therefore, that if there has been 
 any, or if there may be any of the offenses 
 named in this act committed in any State, those 
 offenses will deprive citizens of the United 
 States and every one else upon whom they are 
 committed of the protection of the law, unless 
 the criminal who shall commit those offenses 
 is punished and the person who suffers receives 
 that redress which the principles and spirit of 
 the laws entitle him to have. 
 
 “No State is to deny,” say the gentlemen. 
 That means, they say, the State in its collect- 
 ive capacity. VVhat part of the State? My 
 friend from Ohio says the Legislature. Then 
 the Legislature, reading it in that way, shall 
 not deny to any person within its jurisdiction 
 the equal protection of the laws, it had said 
 that before. The very second provision in 
 this section declares that no State shall make 
 or enforce any law which shall interfere with 
 the privilege and immunity of a citizen of 
 the United States; and everybody agrees that 
 that privilege and that immunity is the very 
 same thing that is mentioned in other language 
 in the next clause — the privilege of life, the 
 privilege of liberty, the privilege of the ac- 
 quirement of property. So that, on the theory 
 of my friend from Ohio, a great constitutional 
 amendment, carefully prepared, discussed in 
 both branches of Congress, passed by two 
 thirds of each House, ratified by three fourths 
 of the States, committed the awkward blunder 
 of stating over again, in obscure language, 
 what it had stated in its second provision only 
 four lines above in clear language : that it had 
 said that no State (which can only act through 
 its Legislature) shall make any law which shall 
 do this thing, and when it had, then, coming 
 to the last clause, had restated the same thing 
 in vaguer language, that they should not deny 
 to any person the equal protection of the law. 
 That cannot be maintained. A Legislature 
 
14 
 
 act'p-g directly does not afford to any person 
 the protection of the law; it makes the law 
 under which and through which, being exe 
 cuted by the functionaries appointed by the 
 State for that purpose, citizens receive the 
 protection of the law. 
 
 But they say this is merely a prohibitory sec- 
 tion, a mere denial of the right of a State to 
 interfere with life, liberty, and property, and 
 to prevent due redress. What is a denial, Mr. 
 President ? Is it merely a refusal in the sense 
 of a man’s appealing to the Legislature Tor a 
 law and being told that he cannot have it; or 
 what is it? It is a security to the citizen that 
 he shall have the protection of law. Although 
 the word is negative in form, it is affirmative 
 in its nature and character. It grants an abso- 
 lute right, and let me tell my honorable friends 
 who deny it that it is not a chance word ; it 
 has been heard of in the law before: it has a 
 history connected with human liberty ever since 
 in Anglo Saxon races human liberty and hu- 
 man rights have existed. The very word has 
 come down from the earliest constitutions, 
 from the very earliest written constitution of 
 civilized liberty, to us as a word of art which 
 carries in it an obligation of a supreme and 
 universal affirmation — a character which makes 
 it the duty of every court and every govern- 
 ment over every people which are entitled to 
 its protection to see that they have it. 
 
 New let us see. Here is the ancient charter 
 of liberty which the bold barons, as you know, 
 our English ancestors, wrested from King John; 
 the rich aud perpetual product, like our own 
 amendments, of a great struggle for liberty ; 
 and in it are contained, in order to grant to 
 the citizen this very protection, and in order 
 to secure to him the duty of all the courts of 
 all England to give it, as they have done, these 
 very words: “ Nulli vendemus , nulli nega- 
 bimus , aut differemus rectum vel justitiamN 
 “ We will sell to no man, we will not deny 
 or defer to any man either right or justice.” 
 
 Under that, not by force of parliamentary 
 legislation, but as giving ever-affirmative rights, 
 performing an affirmative duty, the first slave 
 that set his foot on English soil was set free, 
 because the courts could not deny to him that 
 justice which that -charter said should not be 
 denied. And under it, as I have said, in every 
 civilized State, comprising all the States of our 
 nation, and comprising that great common- 
 wealth, or kingdom as I ought strictly to say, 
 from which we derived our law and our his- 
 tory for eight hundred year§, until now it is 
 questioned for the first time, it has been the 
 recognized and bounden duty of all courts, and 
 of ail executive officers intrusted with the ad- 
 ministration of justice and the law, to give that 
 which the citizen was entitled to, to execute 
 justice and afford protection against all forms 
 of wrong and oppression. Why, sir, it has 
 blazed on the forehead of constitutional liberty 
 from that day to this. And yet, now being 
 adopted as the greatest security settled through 
 the course of centuries as a protecting, as an * 
 
 affirmative right in the citizen — those interests 
 of liberty and property and life to which he is 
 entitled — now for the first time it is attempted 
 to be frittered away by the statement that it is 
 a mere negative declaration, a kind of admon- 
 itory prohibition to a State, and that Congress 
 is to invade the rights of the States and the 
 liberties of the people when, these rights being 
 denied, when criminals go unpunished by the 
 score, by the hundred, and by the thousand, 
 when justice sits silent in her temple in the 
 States, or is driven from in altogether, it in- 
 terposes in their behalf ; when the Government 
 of the whole people, through their laws and tri- 
 bunals, takesin its hand this ancient monument 
 and guarantee of justice now found in its Con- 
 stitution and applies it as it always has been 
 applied. Wh$, sir, if I were in any other place 
 I should say — 
 
 “ 0 Shame, where is thy blush ?” 
 
 I am astounded, sir, that what might be 
 called party zeal, an effect of a kind of tacit 
 alliance with these misguided southern men, 
 (not, I hope, in their crimes, but for the bale- 
 ful objects of their joint political future,) 
 should have blinded our Democratic friends 
 to the history of enactments of this character, 
 and should have led them further than on 
 sober reflection they will willingly go, and fur- 
 ther than the people on reflection will be 
 willing to let them go. 
 
 Therefore, I take it, Mr. President, that I 
 need not occupy much time in saying that 
 whatever this provision of the fourteenth arti- 
 cle guaranties to a citizen, that the citizen is 
 entitled to have; and if he is entitled to have 
 it, how is he to have it? The. section answers, 
 he is to have it, in the language of the Con- 
 stitution, which is the voice of the people, 
 through the 'legislation of this body. The 
 people have declared that he shall have this 
 protection. The people have declared that.the 
 State authorities shall not deny it to him. The 
 people have declared that it is the solemn duty 
 of Congress to see that he has it because they 
 have decreed that “ Congress shall have power 
 to enforce the provisions” of this section of 
 this clause ‘ ‘ of this article by appropriate legis- 
 lation.” Therefore the Constitution contem- 
 plated that whenever an occasion should arise 
 where it was necessary to protect these rights 
 Congress should protect them. 
 
 It is impossible to resist the conclusion. 
 Suppose this did change the Government, as 
 my friend from Illinois appears to fear, do you 
 not rather think, Mr. President, that it is a 
 good change? If the Constitution did not 
 before, holding a sovereignty over its citizens, 
 have the faculty of, through its legislative 
 branch, protecting those citizens in the rights 
 that the Constitution gave* them, the rights 
 which a common human nature gives them, 
 against any assault by any State or under any 
 State or through the neglect of any State, then 
 it was high time, for the honor of the American 
 name and for the rights of humanity, that the 
 institutions of this country should change. 
 
15 
 
 If, as under the thirteenth article, slavery was 
 a constitutional institution, as it was claimed 
 before, 1 am sure the people will not be alarmed 
 that a great change has come over the spirit 
 of this Government; and instead of its being 
 a Government of slavery, tolerated or upheld 
 or jinked at, it has become a Government of 
 freedom; that instead of its being a Govern- 
 ment which should suffer the local authorities 
 of a State to deny the common rights of citi- 
 zens to any of its people, it has become a 
 Government in which the national power has 
 guarantied it to them, and whjgh it is the duty 
 of the national power, in every honorable and 
 in the most exhaustive sense, to see is fully 
 and fairly enforced and made a practical 
 reality. 
 
 If this is the Constitution (and how it can 
 be ot herwise in the lace of its history and what 
 it says is more than a puzzle to me, an amaze- 
 ment to me; if this is the Constitution) which 
 gives to our people a right to the protection 
 of law, and it is a Constitution which makes 
 it our duty to see that they have the protec- 
 tion of law, what sin are we committing in 
 endeavoring to legislate so that they shall have 
 it ? None, sir. 
 
 And now what do we propose to do? Some 
 peoplehaveimagined, havestated, orhinted, or 
 insinuated in their observations that we were 
 making war upon the States in this bill ; that we 
 were overturning the judiciary ; that w'e were 
 resorting to new methods. That is a mistake, 
 a misrepresentation. The bill, likeall bills of 
 this character, in its first and second sections, 
 is a declaration of rights and a provision for 
 the punishment of conspiracies against con- 
 stitutional rights, and a redress for wrongs. 
 It does not undertake to overthrow any court. 
 It does not undertake to make any war. It 
 does not undertake to interpose itself out of the 
 regular order of the administration of law. It 
 does not attempt to deprive any State of the 
 honor which is due to the punishment of crime. 
 It is a law acting upon the citizen like every 
 other law, and ft is a law to be enforced by 
 the courts through the regular and ordinary 
 processes of judicial administration, and in 
 no other way, until forcible resistance shall 
 be offered to the quiet and ordinary course 
 of justice. 
 
 When you come to the later sections, which 
 are in aid of the first, you have the simple 
 and ordinary provision in the third that, when 
 the laws are oppoted, when the courts are 
 in danger of being unable to carry out their 
 decrees, to arrest and punish offenders, the 
 executive arm is to go to their assistance, is 
 to oppose force to force, as is done in every 
 [ city and county in the country every day, 
 when the occasion for it Occurs, under State 
 laws and under national laws, as the Senator 
 from California himself says lie demanded to 
 have done in his own State on one occasion 
 by the troops of the United States. When 
 force is to be opposed to the quiet progress of 
 i the law the arm of the nation is to resist force 
 
 with force, is to gather up the offender and 
 turn him over to the court of justice for trial. 
 That is all there is to it. We are not attempt- 
 ing to overturn the judiciary ; we are attempt- 
 ing to uphold it. We are not attempting to 
 overthrow the Constitution ; we are attempt ing 
 to uphold it. We are not attempting to inter- 
 fere with the liberty of the people, unless the 
 liberty to commit crime is the liberty of the 
 people ; we are attempting to protect and 
 uphold it. 
 
 The fourth section troubles some of ray hon- 
 orable friends very much indeed. It is said, 
 in the first place, that it is unconstitutional, 
 because it authorizes the President in ceitaiu 
 cases named to suspend the writ of habeas 
 corpus. 1 feel very clear that it is constitu- 
 tional in that respect. The Supreme Court 
 of the United States have decided, contrary 
 to what my friend from Ohio [Mr. Thusman] 
 had supposed, that the Congress of the United 
 States may delegate to the President the power 
 to determine when an exigency occurs which 
 shall call for the execution of some statute. 
 They do delegate powers coustantly ; not legis- 
 lative powers, but powers to act in a contin- 
 gency which the Legislature prescribes or pro- 
 vides for or defines in advance. That was the 
 case under the embargo laws. The President 
 has no power to lay embargoes or to relieve 
 embargoes; he has no power to make war; 
 and yet, under the embargo laws, with uni- 
 versal acceptance in the case that was referred 
 to and shown to gentlemen the other day, the 
 Supreme Court of the United Stales unani- 
 mously decided that it was competent for Con- 
 gress to vest in the President the discretion to 
 determine in what contingency he should, in 
 effect, repeal the embargoes and in what con- 
 tingency he could revive them again. So in 
 12 Wheaton is a case (Martin vs. Malt) which, 
 perhaps, 1 ought to refer to for a moment. 
 On the subject of exercising the military power 
 in calling forth the militia, which is, in the 
 language of the Constitution, Confided to Con- 
 gress in the provision authorizing it to pro- 
 vide for suppressing insurrections and repel- 
 ling invasions, on the very point upon which we 
 are now speaking, the Supreme Court of the 
 United States unanimously decided that this 
 power could be rightfully vested in the Execu- 
 tive. It says: 
 
 "Is the President the sole and exclusive judge 
 whether the exigency has arisen, or is it to be con- 
 sidered as an open question, upon which every offi- 
 cer to whom the ordersof the President are addressed 
 may decide for himself, and equally open to be con- 
 tested by every militiaman who shall refuse to obey 
 the orders of the President? We are all of opin- 
 ion that the authority to decide whether the exigency 
 has arisen belongs’ exclusively to the President, and 
 that his decision isconclusive upon aU othe persons. 
 We think that this construction necessarily results 
 from the nature of the power itself." 
 
 And again, which is perhaps a better author- 
 ity with my learned friends on the other side, 
 here is the opinion of a Democratic Attorney 
 General, given to a Democratic President, on 
 the sutyect of lending military assistance to 
 
16 
 
 the Governor of California on a certain occa- 
 sion. Mr. Cashing, the Attorney General, 
 informed the President that — 
 
 “It is the function of the President of the United 
 States, indubitably, to decide, in his discretion, 
 what, facts existing constitute the case of insurrec- 
 tion contemplated by the statutes and by the Con- 
 stitution.” 
 
 And he cites, to support that, the decision I 
 have just read, and the case of Luther vs. 
 Borden, the Rhode Island rebellion case, 
 which also affirms it. So that we have not 
 only the practice of the Government since its 
 foundation, not only the action of its Execu- 
 tive Departments, but two solemn decisions of 
 that tribunal of final resort which is to determ- 
 ine such questions, that the power to determ- 
 ine what facts constitute an insurrection when 
 powers are vested in the President, what 
 facts constitute a rebellion, what exigency 
 shall justify him in suspending the laws as to 
 embargoes, in the nature of things belongs 
 to or certainly may by law be vested in that 
 department which gentlemen now seem to have 
 forgotten, but which the Constitution has 
 created for the protection and exercise of the 
 power of the people — the President of the 
 United States. 
 
 Therefore, there is no good ground to main- 
 tain that- this provision of this bill which au- 
 thorizes the President of the United States to 
 suspend the writ of habeas corpus in the case 
 of a rebellion is open to any question as to 
 its constitutionality ; and let me suggest to my 
 honorable friend from Ohio that the case of 
 Bollman and Swartwout, which he referred to 
 yesterday, does not decide or intimate that the 
 President may not be clothed with that power. 
 It only declares that it belongs to Congress to 
 withdraw from the Supreme Court of the Uni- 
 ted States, if it chooses, the jurisdiction to hear 
 a writ of habeas corpus , as in some cases has 
 been done since that time. And Judge Story, 
 whose commentaries the Senator read yester- 
 day, instead of stating that Congress has not 
 the power to delegate that authority to the 
 President, speaks of Congress “authorizing” 
 the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus , 
 using that term. 
 
 Then Judge Story suggests in a query, it is 
 true, afterward, that it seems, as that may be 
 a legislative power, Congress alone would be 
 authorized to exercise it; that is, as I under- 
 stand him, to exercise the power of providing 
 for the contingency in which and upon which 
 the President should exercise the function of 
 suspending the writ; because it had been con- 
 tended in Judge Story’s time, and it is yet by 
 eminent lawyers, that this is a presidential 
 power altogether, and that without any act 
 of Congress the President under the Consti- 
 tution is authorized, of his own mere will, sub- 
 ject to his high responsibility to the people, 
 to suspend the writ himself at any time when 
 he thinks the public safety and a case of inva- 
 sion or revolution require it. I do not myself 
 agree to this last view. Under the English 
 constitution, from which we derived this pro- 
 
 cess, in aid of liberty, the suspension of the writ 
 was, when the occasion demanded it, always 
 authorized by Parliament, and exercised by the 
 Crown under that authority. And in the same 
 manner, I have no doubt, it was designed to 
 be exercised under our Constitution. 
 
 So that, when you come to put it in the form 
 of law, there is no ground whatever upon which 
 it can be questioned. The principles of the Gov- 
 ernment are against the honorable Senators’ 
 position ; tne decisions of the courts are against 
 it ; the nature of the power is against it ; the 
 philosophy of firovernment is against it; for 
 the reason that it is much safer to invest the 
 exercise of this power in the President of the 
 United States in times of great public excite- 
 ment, when the two Houses of Congress are 
 divided into heated parties, and'when, there- 
 fore, an inflamed majority might attempt to 
 suspend it when the President v/ould not do 
 it at all, than it is to leave it to the partisan 
 passion of factions in Congress. 
 
 Mr. BAYARD. I will ask the honorable 
 Senator from Vermont whether he conceives 
 that in the case of the exercise of discretion 
 a party holding a delegated power has a right 
 to commit it over to a third party ? He has 
 stated the case of contingency. Let me put 
 him another. Does he conceive that it would 
 be competent for the Congress of the United 
 States to authorize the Secretary of the Treas- 
 ury to increase the duties on imports fifty per - 
 cent, at such time as he should consider 
 the condition of the public Treasury would 
 admit it? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I do not know what . 
 answer I should give to that question just now. 
 
 I will take it into consideration. 
 
 Mr. BAYARD. The answer of the honor- 
 able Senator is about equal to the usual cour- 
 tesy he has shown in debate. When I was dis- 
 cussing this bill the day before yesterday he 
 did not hesitate to interrupt’ me by questions, 
 all of which I endeavored to answer as best I 
 could. He interjected into *»y speech at that ‘ 
 time a very long remark of his own without any 
 reference to the fact of whether it was desirable 
 to me to have it there or not. Now I ask him f 
 aquestion simply proposing to test the accuracy 
 of the principle he is presenting to the Senate 
 and to the country, whether* where Congress 
 has discretion it can delegate it to the President 
 or to any other officer of the Government? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. 1 ask my friend’s pardon, 
 if he thought my reply was discourteous. As 
 an humble member of the bar, and not having 
 thought of that precise question, I was really in 
 a painful state of ignorance as to exactly what 
 the law was on that point, and candor com- 
 pelled me to say that I must take it. into con- 
 sideration. I hope my friend did not suppose 
 I objected to his asking the question, or to 
 making any observation upon it he liked. But 
 he certainly is asking a little too much of my 
 courtesy to insist on my answering a question 
 that I do not know how to answer. He really 
 ought not to do that. 
 
17 
 
 Mr. BAYARD. We are all cognizant of 
 the honorable Senator’s capacity both to ask 
 and answer questions. He is here discussing 
 a question of this gravity, nothing less than 
 whether the Congress of the United States has 
 the power to delegate its high judgment and 
 discretion, reposed in it for the benefit of the 
 people of this country, to be exercised by a 
 third party, whether an officer of this Gov- 
 ernment or not. It seems to me that there is 
 a great principle attending that. The exer- 
 cise of the discretion of suspending the writ 
 of habeas corpus , of ascertaining whether the 
 public safety requires it, is something in my 
 opinion'that cannot be delegated by the Con- 
 gress of the United States to any one. They 
 only can suspend that writ, the great safeguard 
 of the people’s liberty, when Ihe public safety 
 shall require it, and then, superadded to that, 
 the two occasions of rebellion and invasion. 
 Now I ask, this being a matter of discretion, 
 when the public safety may require the raising 
 of revenues to a greater grade than they were 
 before, whether the Senator would consider 
 it competent for Congress to delegate its dis- 
 cretion to the Secretary of the Treasury to in- 
 crease the duties upon imports should the pub- 
 lic safety require it, and I will superadd, the 
 existence of rebellion and invasion at that 
 time ? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Without going to the 
 Secretary of the Treasury to find out what the 
 law is, it is sufficient to say, what I have already 
 said, I think, and that is that the authority 
 which the Legislature may vest in the Presi- 
 dent of the United States to suspend the writ 
 of habeas corpus is not the delegation of a 
 legislative discretion at all, any more than it 
 is the delegation of a legislative discretion to 
 authorize him to expel intruders from the pub- 
 lic lands by force, as has been done, whenever 
 he shall think the interest of the United States 
 requires it. I could give my friend a hundred 
 instances where what he calls a legislative dis- 
 cretion, but what I call an executive discretion 
 to act upon a contingency, and in respect to 
 which the person in whom the discretion is 
 confided must be the judge from the nature of 
 things as to whether the contingency has hap- 
 pened, has been delegated, and always must 
 be ; and this belongs to that class of cases. 
 
 It is a singular commentary upon this hos- 
 tility to having the writ of habeas corpus actu- 
 ally suspended under authority of law, except 
 in the heat of a party debate in and by the two 
 Houses of Congress, that the only time, until 
 the rebellion, when the writ of habeas corpus 
 was attempted to be suspended, it was at- 
 tempted in the very way that my honorable 
 friend wishes to have it, by the party heat of 
 men in the Senate introducing a bill to sus- 
 pend the writ of habeas corpus of their own 
 will, withdrawing from the President any right 
 or discretion about it at all, and they sent 
 it over to the other House secretly, with a 
 confidential message that they hoped they 
 would put it through ; and the House spurned 
 
 it with indignation and contempt. That shows 
 that safety and good policy require that this 
 power should be vested, and in perfect con- 
 formity to the course of history and to the con- 
 stitutional declaration of analogous principles 
 where the law shows it has been vested. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. Will the Senator allow 
 me to ask him a question right there, to see it 
 I understand him ? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Certainly. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. I understand him to 
 argue that the power can be more safely 
 lodged in the President than in Congress, 
 because of party heats that might exist in 
 Congress at the time the act should be passed 
 to suspend it. Could any act passed by Con- 
 gress to suspend it have any effect until it was 
 approved by the President? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. That would depend a 
 little, as in Mr. Johnson’s time, upon how 
 strong the majority in Congress happened to 
 be. I was aware, without my honorable friend 
 reminding me of the fact — I had learned in 
 the course of my studies — that an act of Con- 
 gress usually required the approval of the 
 President, at least to be submitted to him, 
 and then to be passed, if he did not approve 
 it, by the constitutional majority. But my 
 friend cannot be ignorant of the fact, and, in 
 candor, I think he will confess it, that even in 
 the case of a party majority it would be one 
 thing to pass an act, with the approval of the 
 President, absolutely suspending the writ of 
 habeas corpus , where, if he vetoed it, he would 
 be obliged to fly in the face of his party 
 friends, as some Presidents in old times have 
 been weak enough to be afraid of their party — 
 I am glad we have not had any lately — and 
 quite another to refrairf from exercising a 
 granted power and to stand by the right, 
 whether particular people in the party or out 
 of it should like it or not. The difference 
 would be very great between a case of the 
 first kind and the passage of a law which 
 should confide to him, in the case of a great 
 public emergency, the discretion and the re- 
 sponsibility of doing a specific act. We know 
 in legislative experience that we confer by 
 authority upon the President, the executive 
 branch of the Government, many powers every 
 year that neither he nor we would enact as a 
 positive thing to be done. Government can- 
 not be carried on in that way. 
 
 In the instance I have referred to, the only 
 one in our history of an attempt to suspend 
 the habeas corpus by a positive act of Congress, 
 suspending it by force of law instead of sus- 
 pending it upon a state of facts that was to 
 arise, in the judgment of the executive depart- 
 ment of the Governtnent, which is what this 
 bill does, it ignominiously failed, as it ought to 
 do. It was passed in the Burr troubles, in 1807, 
 by one party of the country which had control 
 of the Senate, in the heat of excitement, and 
 it was rejected by the sanje party, or rather 
 another one, in the other House^ either from 
 the sound reason that it was the fruit of undue 
 
18 
 
 excitement, or else from a similar passion upon 
 the other side. 
 
 Mr. BAYARD. I only wish the honorable 
 Senator would give us a chance to have the 
 same check applied to the present suspension ; 
 then the proposition, if made by the Senate, 
 might meet with equal indignation in the House. 
 That is one of the checks on power which our 
 Constitution intended to give. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Perhaps it would satisfy 
 my friend better to have it submitted to our 
 friends in the minority here. 
 
 Mr. BAYARD and Mr. THURMAN. It 
 would be in safer hands. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. No process that would 
 let one of the members of those bands down 
 there out of jail would be omitted, I have no 
 doubt. 
 
 Now, Mr. President, I have finished what I 
 have to say about the validity of this bill, and 
 I come to the objection that my honorable 
 friend from Illinois [Mr. Trumbull] and my 
 friend from Missouri [Mr. Schurz] have, that 
 we are undertaking to create a case of con- 
 structive rebellion, and that we are going be- 
 yond the line of safe precedent, the line of 
 constitutional consideration, in undertaking to 
 say that such and such facts shall amount to 
 a rebellion. I do not think it necessary to say 
 that myself. I should be quite as well satis- 
 fied, and better satisfied, with the bill as an 
 efficient and powerful measure in a great 
 emergency if it simply declared that if, in the 
 course of these disturbances; a case of rebel- 
 lion should occur, then and in that case the 
 President, if thepublic safety in his judgment 
 should require it, might suspend the writ of 
 habeas corpus for a limited time. The fact is, 
 this section has accumulated much more in the 
 statement of an existing condition of things 
 than is necessary to make a case of rebellion. 
 
 My friends have spoken as if there must be a 
 great civil war, that it must cover a great tract 
 of country, a whole State, or a whole section 
 of States, in order to make a case of rebellion. 
 That is an entire mistake both in reason and 
 on authority. It has been decided by the courts 
 over and over again that what amounts to levy- 
 ing war against the United States does not 
 depend on the number of people engaged in 
 it; they may be one hundred thousand, or ten 
 thousand, or one hundred, or two hundred, as 
 my friend from California says the number is 
 in Alamance county, of the people for whom 
 he has put in so satisfactory a plea for sympa- 
 thy and consideration, or it may be two ; that 
 the levying of war against the United States, or 
 the raising of an insurrection or a rebellion, 
 which is another name for the same thing — an 
 aggravated insurrection is all there is to it — 
 does not in any degree depend upon the num- 
 ber of people who may be concerned in it, nor 
 upon the extent of territory over which it may 
 have sway. 
 
 Why, sir, in the excellent times of the Dem- 
 ocratic party, a few years ago, they indicted 
 a man for treason and brought him to trial 
 
 before Judge Grier, up in Pennsylvania, for 
 being present levying war against the United 
 States, where a band — I will not say a band ; 
 I have got used to that word by hearing so 
 much said about the Ku Klux — where a body 
 of negroes, not more thau one hundred, came 
 in hot haste, as neighbors, to the house of an- 
 other negro, where an officer was endeavoring 
 to carry him off into slavery, and resisted with 
 clubs and stones and branches of trees (and I 
 do not know but some of them had guns — I 
 presume they had) the marshal of the United 
 States or the deputy marshal, in endeavoring 
 to seize and carry off that man; and Judge 
 Grier told the jury, reciting from all the cases 
 that had been determined on these subjects, 
 just what I have said, (and if anybody doubts 
 it, here is the bo®k. ) I do not want to trespass 
 on the patience of the Senate by reading it, 
 that the number of people who were engaged 
 in it had nothing to do with it ; that the ex- 
 tent of territory over which they might carry 
 on the operation had nothing to do with it ; 
 that treason, the levying of war against the 
 United States, could exist in either case, which, 
 of course, is greater than a mere insurrection 
 or a mere rebellion ; and that was the ground 
 upon which the jury found for the poor specta- 
 tor who happened to be a white man and who 
 heard the tumult and came and stood by ; but 
 in order to make an example for the Pennsyl- 
 vanians, they thought it better to indict a white 
 man who was present, rather than to indict a 
 negro who was busy in the performance. The 
 ju^ige told the jury, as I have said, that the 
 only escape for the man would be upon the 
 fact, as it appeared, that he had not contem- 
 plated, as the purpose of his performance, the 
 overthrow of the Government of the United 
 States or the undertaking to overthrow its 
 Jaws ; that his was the mere private object, if 
 he was connected with it at all, of rescuing that 
 particular man from what he regarded as an 
 unlawful arrest. He might have been guilty 
 of aiding an insurrection or rebellion, but the 
 treason for which he was prosecuted was not 
 necessarily the same thing. 
 
 Now, therefore, if the purpose of this con- 
 spiracy is that which this statute imputes to it — 
 and the statute does not declare that there is 
 any such conspiracy — we have not tried the 
 case in advance, as my honorable friend from 
 California supposes, in putting in his plea for 
 the criminals ; we are trying no case ; we are 
 legislating as we always do in criminal mat- 
 ters, for future and not for past crimes — it will 
 be, in the contingency named, a plain case of 
 rebellion. 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. I put it to my friend 
 whether he thinks it is fair to say twice, as he 
 has within ten minutes, that I have put in a 
 plea for the Ku Klux. If the Senator listened 
 to me, he knows that is not a fair statement 
 of what I said. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I did listen to the honor- 
 able Senator, and I say upon my honor and 
 my conscience that I think it is perfectly fair. 
 
19 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. Then the fault must be 
 either with my mode of expression, which I 
 do not think is the case, or with the gentle- 
 man’s understanding. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. That maybe. I do not 
 pretend to have a very large understanding ; 
 and as to the extent of the Senator’s power of 
 expression, I will leave him to judge. Mr. 
 President, if I am any judge of the tendency 
 and effect of a speech, whatever may be the 
 sounding of its phrases, however much it may 
 be tinctured with generalizations of horror at 
 crimes, which I have no doub^my honorable 
 friend feels, I think any impartial hearer of 
 what he has said, who belongs to no party — 
 I do not know but that I could leave it to my 
 friend from Missouri, [Mr. Schurz,] who as- 
 sumed rather a neutral ground here ; I would 
 leave it to anybody who is a fair judge, and 
 who has no prejudice — would say that the 
 whole tenor and effect of the Senator’s speech 
 was a plea for the Ku Klux, for the body that 
 compose it, not a plea for their acts. Do not 
 let the Senator misunderstand me, because I 
 should be very sorry to feel that I had done 
 him an injustice when he has no full right of 
 reply ; but he must excuse me for putting my 
 own construction upon the tendency, not upon 
 the object — my friend’s objects are, as I must 
 suppose he thinks, always good— upon the ten- 
 dency of the remarks that he has addressed to 
 the Senate. 
 
 Every member of that organization (and I 
 have no doubt that thousands of them will read 
 it) will say to his brother as he meets Him in the 
 woods at midnight, or lies in ambush around 
 the house of some citizen to slay him unawares, 
 because only that he is, like myself, a Ver- 
 monter and a Republican, as happened within 
 ten days in Florida: “ We have some people 
 among our friends at the North who sympa- 
 thize with our wrongs and sufferings. To be 
 sure they do not wish us to commit these 
 crimes, but they feel that we are wronged. 
 Negro suffrage has been imposed upon us. 
 We have been taxed to build school-houses. 
 We have seen the freedom of worship. We 
 have been compelled to build roads. We have 
 seen this despised and degraded race occupy- 
 ing situations of honor and responsibility. Our 
 friends sympathize with us. They wish we 
 •could right these wrongs and grievances by the 
 force of law ; they wish that we could wait 
 until we could get into a majority and turn 
 these fellows out by fair voting. But they do 
 not know at Washington and away up North 
 that we are in a minority on fair counting. 
 They do not know that we think the true way 
 to get rid of this question forever is not to wait 
 until the Constitution of the United States is 
 changed under the auspices of the party of our 
 friends there when they get the chance, or 
 repudiated, as their greatest leader says it 
 ought to be; but our best hope now is to do 
 what we are doing; and while they do not 
 sympathize with the method they sympathize 
 with the inducement and they sympathize with 
 
 the end.” That is the position in which my 
 friend will be regarded, I have no doubt, in 
 the States where these organizations have 
 sway. 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. If my friend will allow 
 me, I endeavored throughout to distinguish 
 between the mass of the people and the crim- 
 inals and guilty men who, as I understand it, 
 now compose these klans. I do not think that 
 one of those men, or two or three or more of 
 them meeting in the woods at midnight or at 
 any other time, if they should ever read my ' 
 speech, will understand it at all as the Senator 
 from Vermont understands it, unless indeed 
 he should take the trouble to send them his 
 speech as a key to mine. [Laughter.] 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. As I am not in corre- 
 spondence with any of them or any of their 
 friends, I would have to borrow my friend’s 
 frank to send them down with. [Laughter.] 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. I wish to ask theSeuator 
 a question, with his permission. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Certainly. 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. Does the Senator from 
 Vermont really think, when a Senator rises in 
 his place and states what he believes to be 
 among the causes of these disorders in the 
 South, that that is an apology for them ; that 
 that is any proof of sympathy with them? 
 When a Senator gives an account of the con- 
 dition of the country there, and of what would 
 be likely to excite men’s opposition, and there- 
 by enables us to judge what is the cause, is 
 that sympathy with them ? Is that an apology 
 for them ? If so, I hope the Senator will read 
 the speech delivered by my friend, the Senator 
 from South Carolina, [Mr. Sawyer,] and he 
 will there find a more thorough investigation 
 of the causes of these difficulties than has been 
 made by any Democratic Senator on this floor. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I suppose my friend 
 merely wished to make a speech under the 
 cover of asking me a question, and I have no 
 objection to that ; but if he meant it for a 
 question I will answer it. I repeat that I 
 really think, and I repeat that nine tenths of 
 the people who hear me really think that the 
 scope of the speech # of the Senator from Cali- 
 fornia, take it from beginning to end, weigh 
 it in gross, weigh it in detail, with the trim- 
 mings off, as they say in New England, is a 
 speech which shows sympathy, as I stated 
 before, with the causes upon which these men 
 pretend to act as causes of grievance which 
 he feels as they do, and that it shows a sym- 
 pathy with the purpose that they have in view 
 of getting rid of negro equality, getting rid of 
 the northern immigration of men who do not 
 bow their knees to them, and think as they 
 think, talk as they talk, and vote as they vote. 
 
 I am quite willing to take the responsibility 
 of stating that, not as an apology, I beg my 
 honorable friend to understand, but as a justi- 
 fication of my opinion. My friend from Ohio 
 has the same right to his opinion that I have 
 to mine. He may think that the tendency of 
 the speech of my friend from California — and I 
 
20 
 
 
 only take that as a type and one of the best of 
 the kind — he may think that the speech of my 
 friend from California and the speeches of his 
 associates are not in sympathy with the causes 
 upon which these organizations pretend to act, 
 or with the designs which they have in view. He 
 may imagine that they have all been devoting 
 themselves to a condemnation, to a discourage- 
 ment of these things, to an effort to restore law 
 and order in those States, to an effort to have 
 justice administered and to have peace pre- 
 vail, to an effort to protect citizens of Ver- 
 mont, or Ohio, or California, who may have 
 a political faith w^ich they were born to and 
 which they believe in, and who may emigrate 
 to some one of those southern States and buy 
 land and settle down upon it in the right which 
 the Constitution says they have, but which, as 
 a fact, they have not at this time; but they 
 shall have it if the power of the Government 
 is strong enough to give it to them, and I think 
 it is, if I can have my way, that they may have 
 the right to settle there and live in peace ; that 
 is all. 
 
 Now, sir, this is one way or the other. Either 
 our friends over the way wish to repress this 
 condition of things, if they have the power, 
 or they do not ; and it seems to be a matter 
 of dispute between my friend from Ohio and 
 myself as to exactly what the meaning of 
 their speeches is. I am sorry that they have 
 not been a little more frank. If there is any 
 legislation to which Congress can resort con- 
 stitutionally to repress these evils, if they do 
 exist, why do not the honorable Senators pro- 
 pose it? The trouble is that the legislation 
 that they would propose would be what their 
 leaders have proposed before, to go backward, 
 to repeal reconstruction as they call it, to re- 
 peal these amendments, to reduce the people 
 of the southern States to the same condition 
 that they were before the war. That is their 
 way of redress. But if you ask them to aid 
 us, if we have the constitutional power, to 
 protect the people of these States in imposing 
 taxes for the increase of education and the 
 diffusion of knowledge, and in the peaceable en- 
 joyment of their homes, v^Jien the people who 
 own the soil and the property in order to prevent 
 that taxation and to drive out the people who 
 wish to have the money expended for those 
 purposes, conspire and combine to burn down 
 their school-houses and their homes, to scourge 
 and whip them, to rob, murder, and pillage 
 them, and punish them and drive them away, 
 our friends on the other side find no power 
 under the Constitution, or any occasion, in 
 fact, to take any step of that sort. 
 
 The only function which is left to them, if 
 they are to be responsible for action, is either 
 no action at all, leaving the thing as it stands 
 now, either from inability or want of power to 
 cope with it, and thus disgracing ourselves in 
 the face of the world and in the face of the 
 Ruler of the world, or we must take the step 
 proposed by the honorable Senator from Mis- 
 souri, [Mr. Blair,] one of the justly prized 
 
 leaders of the party, high in the line of promo- 
 tion, and entitled to its first honors; and that 
 
 is, to drive out the “ carpet-baggers,” to drive 
 
 out the “scalawags,” to restore the true 
 order of things, take away the ballot from the 
 negro 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. I ask the Senator where any 
 such expression has ever occurred in anything 
 that I have said ? The Senator cannot point 
 to a line or a word of the kind that he is now 
 attributing to me, and I think the Senator 
 should be cautious in attributing language to 
 others. He ha% no warrant for imputing any 
 such language to me. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. If I have attributed any- 
 thing to the Senator that he has not said I 
 am very glad to be corrected. He wants the 
 language. I have it not before me. I did not 
 profess, and I do not profess in anything more 
 that I shall say, which shall not be much, I 
 assure the Senate, to quote any language of 
 his verbatim et literatim . I only repeat that, 
 if I read the honorable Senator’s celebrated 
 letter aright, in substance and in effect it was 
 precisely as I have said. If I read the honor- 
 able Senator’s speech the other day aright, and 
 I think I did, it was in substance and effect 
 what 1 have stated now, an attack upon what 
 he was pleased to style the “ carpet baggers ” 
 as being responsible for this order of things. 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. I will say that the Senator, . 
 in giving the substance and effect of my letter 
 and speeches, is about as unfortunate as he is 
 in attributing to this side of the Chamber any 
 desire to defend the outrages of the Ku Klux, . 
 or any other outrages. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Certainly; I thought I 
 had guarded myself against misunderstanding 
 about that before. I have stated to the Sen- 
 ator from California and to the Senator from 
 Ohio that of course every one of my honor- 
 able friends is equally opposed to outrages of 
 every kind and to every measure to repress 
 them; and that, I suppose, is why they are 
 opposed to the suspension of the writ of habeas 
 corpus , which might result in depriving one of 
 a class of people who might possibly be caughtf, 
 masked and disguised, in burning a house down 
 from being locked up and not let out by a 
 friendly judge on the spot. They are opposed 
 to outrage ; but 1 repeat that they and their 
 friends throughout the country (but they are 
 not a very large number) are in sympathy, and. 
 it is useless to deny it, and nobody does deny 
 
 it, with what these bands consider to be their 
 cause of grievance. They are in sympathy 
 with the hatred and opposition to the negroes 
 voting. Am I misrepresenting the honorable 
 Senator now, or any of his colleagues? 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. Does the Senator refer 
 to me? 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I was referring to the 
 whole body. 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. If the Senator is firing 
 at the flock, that is a very safe way of firing. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I seem to have hit one 
 bird, at any rate. [Laughter.] 
 
21 
 
 Mr. THURMAN. The Senator in a closing 
 speech, to which nobody has an ^opportunity 
 to reply, makes an assault on his fellow-Sen- 
 ators on this side of the Chamber. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I give my friends the 
 opportunity of interruption and explaining 
 as often as they like. 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. Then, if the Senator 
 will permit me, I challenge him to put his 
 finger on anything that I said in my speech 
 of that sort. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. If it is to receive a chal- 
 lenge for anything outside of the Chamber, I 
 am decidedly opposed to it. [Laughter.] 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. I trust 1 understand my 
 own duty too well and the Senator’s prowess 
 too well to venture on any experiment so haz- 
 ardous as that would be. Now, I call on the 
 Senator to put his finger on any word of mine 
 which authorizes in the slightest degree his 
 accusation that I am in sympathy with the Ku 
 Klux in their hatred of negro suffrage. What 
 did I say on that subject that would warrant 
 such an accusation on the part of the Senator? 
 No one heard me utter such a word. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I cannot even now, when 
 my friend has had an opportunity to explain, 
 exactly find out which side of that question he 
 was on. 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. It is no explanation. I 
 demand to know what word I said that justi- 
 fies the accusation of the Senator. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Inasmuch as my good 
 friend’s speech is not before me, and inasmuch 
 as 1 took no notes of it, and inasmuch as it 
 contained a good manj words, I must decline 
 to lay my finger on the word. I repeat the 
 statement, however, and I hope my friend will 
 not think I mean to do him injustice. He is 
 an adroit rhetorician. He knows as well how 
 to sugar over a fact that it would be a little 
 disagreeable to have stick out very prominently 
 as any man with whom 1 am acquainted. He 
 is a master of fence in rhetoric ; and he must 
 have read largely, I take it, of the writings of that 
 celebrated man who thought that the purpose 
 of language was not always to express ideas, 
 but sometimes to conceal them. If he and his 
 friends are in favor of negro suffrage, let them 
 declare it now. If they are opposed to it and 
 mean to overthrow it, let them say so broadly 
 in the face of the Senate. If they have opinions 
 and designs which they wish to conceal, let 
 them remain silent. 
 
 Now, I say again that if there is any position 
 which the Democratic party occupies before 
 the country, and has occupied for the last ten 
 years, which is known and understood of all 
 men, it is that they were opposed first, last, 
 beginning, and end, through and through, 
 always, to the extension of the ballot to the 
 negro anywhere and in any State. Possibly, 
 when I say “ in any State,” in some one of 
 the northwestern States, I may have stated it 
 too largely. Let me tell my honorable friends 
 that if they would manfully take the position 
 to-day and declare here publicly, aud in lan- 
 
 guage that their southern friends could under- 
 stand, that they are in favor of negro suffrage 
 being preserved as the Constitution preserves 
 it, as a right which no man, Democrat or Re- 
 publican, Ku Klux or southern, should be 
 permitted to assault with impunity, the list 
 of murders for the next two months would be 
 considerably reduced in the southern States. 
 It is probably true that the list of Democratic 
 majorities would be considerably reduced in 
 the lew States where they have them also. 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. The Senator will allow 
 me to say that he still has failed to put his 
 finger on any language of mine that proves me 
 to sympathize with the Ku Klux in their hatred 
 of negroes or in their hatred of negro suf- 
 frage. I f the Senator is not able to make good 
 that accusation he ought not to repeat it, for 
 the reason that he must know that unless it is 
 true, and clearly true, to accuse a member of 
 the Senate of sympathy with a gang of men 
 who undoubtedly have been guilty of murder 
 and other crimes under circumstances most 
 aggravating is a thing that ought not to be 
 suffered by the Senate. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I do not know exactly — - 
 
 Mr. CASSERLY. What I mean to say is, 
 that it is a thing which is trespassing on the 
 rights of the Senator who is attacked. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. My friend is mistaken 
 if he supposes I have attacked him. I have 
 no attack to make on the Senator. He has just 
 as good a right to his opinion as I have to 
 mine. I am a Democrat in the true sense on 
 that point; that is, a northern Democrat in a 
 Republican State. The southern ones do 
 not think so, I believe. [Laughter.] 
 
 Mr. President, I repeat, whether my friend 
 is satisfied with it or not, what I said before, 
 that the whole tenor of the speech of my hon- 
 orable friend was precisely what I have stated ; 
 and that is, that it was a speech of sympathy 
 with the causes — I used before the word “in- 
 ducements,” and if it will please my friend 
 any better I will use that word now — with the 
 inducements upon which these gangs of men 
 and conspiracies, if there are any such, which 
 my friend seems now to confess there are, 
 affect to found their grievances, which are a 
 justification or an apology to them, not to my 
 friend, for the shocking and systematic out- 
 rages they commit. And my friend has had 
 the opportunity three times now, in pleading 
 not guilty to that arraignment in the form that 
 he says 1 made it, to tell us what his opinion 
 on the subject of negro suffrage is, but he 
 has not told us. 
 
 Mr. POMEROY. Ask him now. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. I have asked him, and 
 I have asked my friends on the other side as 
 a body, one and all, to get up and declare here 
 if they will — aud I will give them ten minutes 
 of time each, if the patience of the Senate will 
 allow it — whether they are in favor as a body, 
 as a matter of justice and right, or as a matter 
 of policy, if not of justice and right, faithfully 
 and honorably and fully to guaranty and to 
 

 • 22 
 
 secure to the negro in every State and every- 
 where the free and uninterrupted right of the 
 ballot. 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. I responded the other day to 
 that question when it was asked me by the 
 Senator from Ohio, [Mr. Sherman,] inaspeech 
 that I had the honor to make. I do not know 
 whether it attracted the attention of the Sen- 
 ator from Vermont or not. I said what I be- 
 lieved to be true, that the people of the South 
 were willing to give a fair trial to negro suf- 
 frage, and not to deny to the negroes the right 
 given to them by the fifteenth amendment, 
 until it was found that with that suffrage the 
 institutions 6f the country could not be pre- 
 served, when I believed that constitutional 
 measures would be taken to preserve the insti- 
 tutions of the country, whether negro suffrage 
 was destroyed or not. That is what I said. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Yes, Mr. President; I 
 think I can comprehend the answer, which is 
 not an answer to the question that I asked, as 
 to what the Democratic party was for; but he 
 says he believes that the people of the South 
 are willing to give the experiment of negro 
 suffrage a fair trial. 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. Yes; and I added that the 
 trial had been had here in the District of 
 Columbia, where Senators had acquired prop- 
 erty, where streets for miles and miles had 
 been laid out at the expense of the city, upon 
 which there were no houses, and they had 
 found it very convenient to take away negro 
 suffrage and the power to rob and destroy the 
 property of the citizens. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. So much the better, Mr. 
 President; that is franker still. The position 
 of my honorable friend, and I suppose of his 
 party, is that he is willing that the people of 
 the South should give to negro suffrage a fair 
 trial until it shall be found, as he says it has 
 been now found 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. By Congress, by yourself 
 and others. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. To be a failure. The 
 interjection of the Senator is a total error. I 
 understand the Senator. If he will possess his 
 soul in patience he will see that I will not do 
 him injustice. He and his party are willing that 
 their southern friends should allow the negro 
 to have a fair trial, under the Constitution, of 
 voting like other men, until it shall be found, 
 as it has been found, as he wrongly asserts, 
 by Congress, that they are not entitled to it, 
 and that the institutions of the country cannot 
 be preserved by it; that is to say, the Demo- 
 cratic party was willing to give to the southern 
 colored population and the colored population 
 of the other States the right to vote under the 
 thirteenth amendment until last month, when 
 the District government here was changed 
 from a municipal to a territorial one; that is 
 to say, in his judgment, it has been determ- 
 ined and is certain already that the institu- 
 tions of the country are not safe under the 
 exercise of such a power, and that it ought to 
 be reversed and gotten rid of; and he states 
 
 it with the frankness that belongs to a gentle- 
 man and a man of honor. 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. I atn sorry to see that the 
 gentleman is not so frank as he is pleased to 
 compliment me with being. I said that Con- 
 gress had so found. The Senator, among 
 others, had found 'it necessary to lay restric- 
 tions on the suffrage, negro suffrage among 
 the rest, in order to preserve the property of 
 this city from confiscation. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. That is an entire mistake, 
 but I am very glad to hear the application of 
 the Senator for mitigation of sentence. Per- 
 haps it ought to be considered a little. He 
 and his friends again are in favor of allowing 
 the southern people (whom .he distinguishes 
 from the negro people) to give to the negro 
 people the right to vote until it shall be fouud 
 that their institutions cannot go on ; and he 
 says 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. I dislike to interrupt the Sen- 
 ator, but I will say that he asked me what 
 were the opinions of the Democrats. I simply 
 answered what I believed were the opinions 
 of the southern people, and I told him what I 
 believed their opinion was upon this subject. 
 That is all. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Very good. Now, if my 
 friend will give me part of the time, I will try 
 to state what I understand his position to be. 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. Very well; I will not inter- 
 rupt the gentleman further. I thought he called 
 for the interruption. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Oh, yes; I wished, though, 
 to finish the sentence I was expressing. 
 
 Now, Mr. President, the position again is — 
 and I do not wish the honorable Senator, unless 
 he is desirous of withdrawing it, to put him- 
 self out of the fair view of it — his position and 
 that of his party is, as I understand him, and if 
 I have understood his letters and his speeches 
 and the speches of his party friends, what he 
 has now stated again — the variation of the 
 phrase makes no difference — that he is willing, 
 that the experiment of negro suffrage shall be 
 tried with the southern people, and by the 
 southern people, if he pleases to have it in that 
 way, until it shall be found that their institu- 
 tions cannot go on safely with it 
 
 Mr. MORTON. And they are to be the 
 judges. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Do I state my friend 
 fairly? 
 
 Mr. BLAIR. Yes, sir. 
 
 Mr. EDMUNDS. Now, Mr. President, how 
 are we to find it? Has not my friend, in a 
 speech that has occupied more than one day 
 in delivery, endeavored to show that one of 
 the great causes of the present disorders in the 
 southern States was this very negro equality; 
 the power of the negroes to put themselves into 
 office ; the power of the negroes to tax the com- 
 munity to support education and justice; the 
 power of the negroes, as he expresses it, to 
 have a corrupt Legislature — a power which does 
 not belong to the negro or the Republican, I 
 admit. It onfy belongs to the white men and 
 
23 
 
 Democrats in the State of New York, where 
 my friend’s party is pretty strong at this pres- 
 ent time. Boss Tweed and Peter B. Sweeney, 
 with their allies, are the only class of people 
 in a great State, and with white men, who are 
 entitled to have corrupt Legislatures without 
 changing the ballot; but if it happens that in 
 some southern State the colored man, if it be 
 him, has imitated the vices of some of his 
 northern brothers in the Legislature, then it 
 is time to break down negro suffrage. That is 
 the position of the Senator and his party, and 
 they are welcome to it, even from their own 
 point of view. 
 
 But who is it my friend intends to decide 
 whether this experiment is a failure or not? 
 The very men who have complained from first 
 to last that it was an outrage upon them that it 
 was resorted to ; that it must be a failure ; that 
 it ought to be reversed ; who appealed to my 
 honorable friend and his party in the last presi- 
 dential campaign to take measures to reverse 
 it; and a party that intended — I will not say 
 \>y arms — but a party that intended by some 
 means — and when that party wants to do any- 
 thing it generally finds the constitutional 
 means somewhere — by all constitutional means 
 to reverse what the Republican .party had done, 
 as one of the fruits of the war ; to reverse all 
 reconstruction, and to remit the southern peo- 
 ple, as my friend calls them, to wit, the south- 
 ern rebels, because the great mass of white 
 society were rebels in one way or another, to 
 their rights, and those rights, as they call them, 
 were rights that recognized no equality in the 
 negro, either in a civil or a political sense. 
 
 That is the position ; and the trouble is — my 
 friend says that is the cause of these Ku Klux — ■ 
 that the people who compose the ruling classes 
 in the South, the white men, the great body of 
 intelligence among the white men in the South, 
 are determined to resist this great change in 
 the form of the government and in their social 
 condition. They therefore sympathize, as Sen- 
 ators on this floor do, not with the methods of 
 these orders and organizations, but with the 
 grievance which they pretend they have, to 
 wit, negro suffrage and northern immigration 
 and freedom of opinion, and with the design 
 which is to drive it out and expel it. 
 
 The disorders in the South are not like the 
 disorders in many other States, where there 
 always are disorders, the results of private 
 malice. The slaying of men there, as a rule, 
 is not because the murderer and the assassin 
 have any hostility or quarrel with the person 
 who is the victim ; but it is one step in the 
 progress of a systematic plan and an ulterior 
 purpose, and that is not to leave in any of 
 those States a brave white man who dares to 
 be a Republican or a colored man who dares 
 to be a voter. The one is to be expelled or 
 slain and the other is to be reduced to what 
 they consider to be his normal condition. And 
 while it is possible that there are many people 
 in those States, as I have no doubt there are, 
 
 who are pained at the severity and cruelty of 
 these political methods, they, notwithstanding, 
 do encourage and tacitly consent to them by 
 their inaction. The white people of the South 
 (and my friend says they are all members of 
 the Democratic party, and in a large degree 
 they are) could have peace, order, quiet, lib- 
 erty, protection of life and property in every 
 one of those States in two weeks if they only 
 would. They and their northern allies are 
 accessory to these enormous crimes which dis- 
 grace them and the nation by the very fact that 
 they suffer them to go cn without taking any 
 noble steps to end them. 
 
 The great party at the North that sympa- 
 thizes with this party at the South is accessory 
 also. It has it in its power by uniting with 
 us in legislation, it has it in its power without 
 legislation, by taking the bold and open ground 
 that this war is a finality and that the constitu- 
 tional results of it are to be accepted in good 
 faith and that the rights of citizens are to be 
 protected in every State, to give life to those 
 whose life is threatened, to give the peaceable 
 possession of property to those who are de- 
 spoiled, to revive industry, to increase educa- 
 tion, to promote happiness. But, sir, the fear 
 is that if they come over to our principles of 
 preserving the rights of all, traitors, rebels, 
 murderers, assassins, whoever they may be, as 
 well as of the old friends of our flag, black 
 and white, by the impartial execution of law, 
 of the protection of private property, of free- 
 dom of opinion, of the expression of that free- 
 dom, of the free exercise of the ballot, it will 
 be found that our party is right and their party 
 is wrong. There is the trouble, sir ; and there- 
 fore it is that every measure which we pro- 
 pose in order to uphold that, which the people 
 and the States have guarantied by the Con- 
 stitution is assailed by all that ingenuity and 
 contrivance can resort to to put it in an unfair 
 and improper attitude before the people; not 
 by honorable Senators, of course, v*ith any 
 such purpose; but they look at it with per- 
 verted eyes. They think that a provision to 
 punish crime is an attack upon liberty. They 
 think that a provision to put down insurrec- 
 tion is an enforcement of martial law against 
 the liberties of the people. 
 
 Mr. President, I have the impression that no 
 man who has read and observed the history of 
 the last twenty years need be afraid with this 
 book, the Constitution of his country, in his 
 hand, to go forward either as a party man or 
 as a statesman — and in a large sense they are 
 the same thing — to go forward in the discharge 
 of all the constitutional duties which this Con- 
 stitution imposes upon him lest the people will 
 not support him. Why, sir, it has been said 
 that the Republican party — and I only speak 
 of it now in the sense that I spoke of it a 
 moment before as the party of the country — 
 is to be endangered in the minds of the intel- 
 ligent citizens of this country because it uses, 
 to borrow the expression of one of the oppo- 
 
nents of this bill, the last measures of the Con- 
 stitution to preserve life, liberty, and property. 
 It does not use the last measures of the Con- 
 stitution. I wish it did; but I hope this will 
 be adequate. The party need not be afraid or 
 ashamed, publicly and boldly, everywhere, in 
 every hamlet of the land, to stand upon this 
 law if it be enacted, and to defend it, and to 
 
 challenge any man who denies our right and 
 our duty to pass laws of this character and for 
 the purposes for which we pass them, to meet 
 him. No, sir, the result upon a question like 
 this of an appeal to the people whose memories 
 are longer than two years or ten years will be, 
 in my opinion, a supreme triumph to the party 
 that bravely does its duty because it is duty. 
 
 Printed at the Congressional Globe Office.