June 15, 1864

[Here the hammer fell.]

Mr. KELLEY. Mr. Speaker, madness and despair rave, and I shall consume none of the brief time allotted me by following the gentleman from Kentucky, [Mr. Mallort,] who has just taken his seat. Nor do I avail myself of the floor in the hope that f can say anything which will change the mind of the House on the question now before it; but, sir, the privilege is not often given to men to perform an act the influence of which will be felt beneficently by the poor, the oppressed, the ignorant, and the degraded of all lands, and which will endure until terminated by the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds. And 1 rise that I may thus publicly thank God and the good people by whose suffrages 1 am here to day for the golden opportunity afforded me of doing such an act.

When the proposed amendment to the Constitution shall have been adopted and approved by the Legislatures, as I hope it will be, that instrument will be perfect as the genius of man can conceive. Experience, as the ages roll away, may, it is true, suggest improvements, but my poor imagination presents none. We were asked this morning whether we are wiser than the framers of our Government. I utter no word, I think no thought of disparagement of thosegreat men. They were good men and were wise in their day and generation, but all wisdom did not die with them, and we are expiating in blood and agony and death and bereavement one of theirerrors—the unwise compromise they made with wrong m providing for the toleration and perpetuation of human slavery. The Convention which framed the Constitution unwisely compromised with wrong, and the bill before the House proposes to submit their work to the people through the States for revisal in this particular. It was not unknown to many of i hem that evil must result from theiraction. They knew and said while in the Convention that right and wrong were in eternal conflict, and that the avenging God was ever on the side of right.

In proof of this I turn not to the remarks of men from New England, not to those from dear old Pennsylvania, but of those who represented Virginia in that august assemblage. 1 hold in my hand the third volume of Eliot s Debates of the Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, and I quote from Mr. George Mason ofVirginia when speaking, June 15 1788 on the first clause ofthe ninth section of article one of the Constitution:

Mr. Chan man," said he, "tills is a fatal section, which has created more danger than any other. The fiist clause allows the importation of slaves for twenty years, Under the royal Government this evil was looked upon as a great oppression, and many attempts were made to pre\e ut; but the interest of the African merchants prevented its prohibition. No sooner did the Revolution take place than it was thought of. Jt was one of the great causes ot our separation from Great Britain, its exclusion has born a principal object ot this State, and most ot the States In the Union. The augmentation of slaves weaken* the states, and such a trade is diabolical in itself and dis giaeeful to mankind; yetbv this Constitution it h continued tor twenty years. As much as I value a union of aii the States, 1 would not admit the southern States mto the Union unless they agree lo the discontinuance ofthi* disgr teetul trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the Union. This detestable kind of commerce'

As he proceeded he spoke of" this detestable kind of commerce," and said" 1 have ever looked upon this as a most, disgracefulthing to America. i cannot express my detestation of it.-'

Mr. Tyler, of Virginia, in the discussion of the same day, as I find on the very next page, lfc warmly enlarged on the impolicy, iniquity and disgracefulness of this wicked traffic. He thought the°reasons urged by gentlemen in defense of it were inconclusive and ill founded It was one cause of the complaints against British tyranny that this trade was permitted. The Revolution had put a period to it; but now it was to be revived.* He thought nothing could justify it.

Thus all the wise and good men of that period denounced the system of unpaid labor and property in human beings as wicked, infamously wicked, and the trade in men, women, and chil- $ren as diabolical. We who advocate this amendment do but propose to consummate that which the wisest and best men of that day wished to do in the Convention. We do but propose io advise the people to listen to their counsel and perfect their great work.

But the gentleman from Kentucky [Mr. Mallory] says the season is inopportune. Sir, justice ia ever in season, and it is never inopportune to 'doVight. But he also says that the rebellious States are in the Union andyetwedonotpropose to allow them to vote on this measure. The people of those States are probably not aware of the fact that they are in the Union. They believe themselves to be out of the Union, and if they only knew as well as the gentleman from Kentucky does that they have a right to be represented here as well as at Richmond, I doubt not they would have their Representatives here to oppose our action on this question. If in the Union, why are their Representatives not here? Who expelled them from this House ortheSenate Chamber? Ifthe Constitution be amended by default of their votes there will be no ground for a motion to open or set aside the judgment, as, to say the least, the default is the result of their voluntary absence. Sir, he who does not sustain this resolution is recreant to the teachings of the fathers of our country; and did I not sustain it I would be especially false to the traditions of the great State which I have the honor in part to represent. In the course I pursue I am guided by the wise counsels of Benjamin Franklin and the men ofPennsylvania who with him carried that State through the revolutionary war, and gave form and spirit to her free institutions. While yet the revolutionary war was pending—more than three years before our national independence was acknowledged—on the 1st of March, 1780, in view of the fact that they then had" every prospect of being delivered" from British thralldom, they "extinguished and forever abolished" slavery in Pennsylvania. Time will not permit me to read the noble preamble to that act of Christian statesmanship; but I will hand it to the reporter that it may appear as part of my remarks in the Globe. Its spirit is that of the gospel, and its grand sentences seem to have been plucked from John Milton s noblest essays: Preamble to an act for tho abolition of slavery in Pennsylvania.

When wo contemplate our abhoirpnee offh it condition to which the arms and tyranny of (ireat Britain wtne exerted to reduce us; when we look back upon the variety of dangers to which we have been exposed, and how miraculously our wants in many instances have been supplied and our deliverance wrought, when even hope andhuuiau fortitude liavc become unequal to the conflict, we are unavoidably led to a serious and grateful sense of the manifold blessings which we have undeservedly received liom the hand of that Being from whom every good and perfect gift cometh. Impressed with these ideas we conceive that it is our duty, and we rejoice that it is in our power, to extend a portion of that freedom to others which hath been extended to us, and release from that state of thralldom to which we ourselves were tvianmcally doomed, and tioin which we have now every prospect of being delivered, it is not {or us to inquire why, in the creation of mankind, the inhabitants of the several parts ot the earth were distinguished by a difference in feat me or complexion. Ii is sufficient to know rhatnll are the work of an Almighty hand. We find mthc riismbunon of the human species that the most fertile, a* well as the most barren, parts oi the earth are inhabited by men ot complexions dilleient from ours and liom each other, from whence we may reasonably, as well as religiously, infer that fie who placed them in their various situations hath extended equally His care and protection to all, and that u becomelh noiu to counteract IIh mercies. We esteem it a peculiar blessing granted to us that we are enabled this day to add one more .step to universal civilization, by removing, a much as possible, the sorrows of those who have lived in undeserved bondage, and from which, by the assumed authority of the kings of Great Hi train, no effectual legal relief coiiSd be obtained. Weaned by along course ot experience from tiio e narrow prejudices and p utialuiea we had imbibed, we find our hearts enlarged with kindness and benevolence toward men of all conditions and nation?, and we conceive ourselves at this particular period extraordinarily called upon, by the blessings wi ich we have received, to manifest the Sincerity ot out profession and to give a substantial proof oi our gratitude.

Sec. 2. And whereas the condition of those persons who have heretofore been denominated negro and mulatto slaves has been attended with circumstances which not only deprive them ot the common blessings that they were by nature entitled to, hut has cast them into the deepest afflictions, by an unnatural separation and sale of husband and wife from each other and from their children—an injury the greatness of which can only be conceived by supposing that we were in the same unhappy case—in justice, therefore, to persons so unhappily circumstanced, and who, having no prospect before them whereon they may rest their sorrows and their hopes, have no reasonable inducement to render their service to society which they otherwise might, and also in grateful commemoration of our own happy deliverance from that state of unconditional submission to which we were doomed by the tyranny of Britain.

Sec. 3. All persons, as well negroes and mulattoes as others, who shall be born within this State, shall not be deemed and considered as servants for life, or slaves, and all servitude for life or slavery of children, in consequence of the slavery of their mothers, in the case of all children born within this State from and after the passing of this act as aforesaid, shall be, and hereby is*, utterly taken away, extinguished, and forever abolished.

Scarcely had the Congress of the United States assembled, when, as the presidentof an abolition society, Benjamin Franklin was admitted to the bar of the House of Representatives, that, bowing under the weight of honors and more than fourscore years, he might present the petition of the people ofPennsylvania praying Congress to follow the benign example of that State and abolish 'slavery. It was on the 12th of February, 1789. fie drew the petition, which grateful thousands thronged to sign. And, as truth is immortal, let us listen to those words, and now, when we can aid in doing it constitutionally, grant, so far as in us lies the power, their prayer, by submitting the proposed amendment to the people, it reads as follows:

To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United

States:

"From a persuasion that equal liberty was oilginally the portion, and is still the birthright, of all men, and influenced by the strong ties of humanity and the principles of their institution, your memonalists conceive themselves bound to use all justifiable endeavors to loosen the bands of slavery and promote a general enjoyment of the blessings of freedom.

Under these impressions they earnestly entreat your serious attention to the subject of slavery; that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of libei ty to those unhappy men who alone, in this land of freedom, are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amid the general joy oi surrounding freedom, are groaning m servile subjection; that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people; that you will promote mercy and justice toward this distressed race; that you will step to the very verge of the power vested in you for discouraging every species of Uafhc in the persons of our iellow mem

Let us, I repeat, heed, and, so far as we may, grant that petition. Who shall complain that the Congress of 1864 responds to the prayer of the men who secured our freedom and elaborated our institutions? Who shall induce us to pause in this great work till millions of rebels return to loyalty and their soldiers lay down their arms and come to contest the policy of the act? Sir, they will probably be here before the Legislatures have all passed on the question. The dispatch just read told ua that Grant is to the east of Richmond, and we know that Hunter s artillery thunders to the west of that doomed city. I apprehend legislation at Richmond is not done calmly to day We may deliberate, but they who address the Richmond congress most probably echo the ravings of the gentleman from Kentucky. Sir, what is it that we propose to do? Is it an act of doubtful power? No. It is simply to execute the fifth article of the Constitution of the United States, which provides:

Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it neces aiy shall propose amendments to this Constitution, which shall be valid to all intents and purposes as part of this Constitution when rati tied l by three Joiothsof the Legislatures of the several States, or by contentions in three fowths thereof, a-< the one or the othermode oi ratification may be proposed by the Congiess."

We propose to submit to the wisdom, patriotism, and humanity of the people of the States of this Union an amendment in accordance with this article, and for that we are denounced by those who in the name of Democracy plead for the perpetuity of slavery as violating the Constitution. 1 repeat the question of my friend and colleague, [Mr. A. Myers,] do gentlemen upon the other side know of any one act done against this rebellion that has been done constitutionally? Have they any other prayer than a prayer for the success of the rebellion, which will, in their judgment, save the Constitution by perpetuating and extending the area of human slavery? Their love of Democracy and the Constitution finds expressionin degrading the laboring man to a thing of sale upon the auction block in shutting out from more than half our territory schools and churches and civilization in all its aspects, whether it be religion, science, art, or social life.

Sir, I arraign slavery as the efficient cause of every national evil we have endured. It put the vice with which v e are now contending into the Constitution; it commenced a war upon the dignity of labor and the freedom of conscience and thought the very day our Government was organized; it inspired and gives physical power to the rebellion we are crushing at such fearful cost of vigorous life; it is, as it has been, the fruitful source of all our national woes.

The gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Cox] as usual avoided the subject under discussion, but cried out for the right of asylum. Sir, this sacred instrument, the Constitution of the United States, provides, section two, article four that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens m the several States." Does he not know that for more than thirty years those dear friends of his, for whose institutions he and his party plead so fervently, have, notwithstanding this light so specifically guarantied, denied not only the right of asylum, but the right of transit through their States to us, who doubted the wisdom or divinity of chattel slavery? He prates in behalf of the right of asylum for a slave dealer a slave trader one whom the civilized world brands as a pirate. I have not studied the Arguelles case, but if it be bad as his partisan rhetoric paints it, it is but a returning ofa" poisoned chalice" to" plague the inventor." The offspring of robbery, its life one continued crime, its only support despotic power, slavery has impaired the national regard for the rights of the individual. It was slavery that denied the right of asylum to the beautiful and accomplished daughter of Samuel Hoar, of Massachusetts, and expelled that venerable scholar, jurist, and statesman from the limits of South Carolina, who went to argue a great cause in her courts. It was slavery that did notdeny the right of asylum to William Lloyd Garrison, butofTered §20 000 to the man who would kidnap him and carry him to that State, that its humane dealers in the bodies and souls of men- might flay him alive, or slowly bum him at the stake, as they sometimes did a refractory slave, or put him in a barrel with holes bored in it, that he might retain his consciousness while slowly starving to death, as he drifted in the river to which they might commit him, as other poor devotees of freedom had done when treated thus by them.

It was slavery that by threats and demonstrations of violence twice banished that friend of the Union and of mankind, George Thompson, from the limits of our country. And it is rather late to prate with lips that have praised all these acts of the right of asylum to a stealer of men and a violator of the laws of nations, which make the slave trade piracy. Devotion to slavery alone can prompt such mad garrulity. The gentleman from Kentucky said that we have made the South a unit. I deny the proposition. Sir, I believe that when the calamity of Ball s Bluff occurred we were contending against a unit. 1 believe that we encountered a unit at Bull Run. But H is so no longer. We have dispelled the vain pride of the South and broken its unity of purpose. We have conquered its contempt for the northern Yankee, and at no day since this rebellion began were so many southern men coming into our lines to rally around the old A igas there are to day You cannot get information from one of our armies, be it where itrnay, on any day that does not tell you of the tens and hundreds of deserters that come into our lines claiming the protection of the Constitution and restoration to the privileges and blessings of citizenship. I speak not of black men, but of white men. You cannot pass through the streets of this city any day without meeting southern people who have fled from the despotism for the perpetuation of which the leaders of the Democratic party plead to the freedom and security of the Constitution as administered by Abraham Lincoln. We make the people of the South a unit! We will indeed soon make them a unit if Grant and Sherman and the proudly victorious armies of freemen who bear their standards go on as they are going, and the bond of Union will be gratitude to those who will have freed them from a fearful despotism and secured to them and their posterity the enlarged blessings of American citizenship.

The gentleman from Kentucky also said that we do not use our colored soldiers to fight, but pet and save them at the expense of our white soldiers. Did we save them at Fort Pillow I And let me pause to ask who crucified the men at Fort Pillow, and why was it done? But that your infernal institutions had taught the people of the South to lookupon men, women and children as cattle soulless beings things to be scourged as you would scourge an unruly and dangerous animal, that horrible chapter would never have disgraced American history. It is not for you, the champions of slavery, to complain that the negro is not exposed sufficiently to the dangers of war, for your tnyimidons have fled before them in many battles, and when they have overmastered them have tortured, burned, anil crucified them under the teachings of that system of which we propose constitutionally to purge t he Constitution of our country. Did we save the negroes at Port Hudson, Port Wagner, Olustee, and Plymouth; or did you at each of these places illustrate the morality of your system? Your former colleagues are the defenders of slavery in arms, you are its defenders in this Hall to day and for the same reason; that is, because slavery is the strength of the rebellion, the power that is assailing our country, the only means by which the masses of white men whose toil is their only wealth can be reduced to ignorance and want, and the only possible means by which you can hope to restore topower that political organization which under the name of Democracy sought to subvert our free institutions.

What, asks the gentleman, are you going to do with the freed negroes? I will tell that gentleman a secret confidentially. Above us all there is a God—slave owners have not generally known the fact—who will take care of His children. I will trust the freed negroes to the care of God, under our beneficent republican institutions. We are told that the cries of the laborer whose hire has been kept back by fraud enter into the ears of the Lord ofSabaoth; and if the State of Kentucky is to day desolated by contending armies, it is because the Lord of Sabaoth is avenging the wrongs of His poor children, made dumb and voiceless by the atheistic laws of that State. It is the work of a just and avenging God punishing even in the third and fourth generation the wrongs done by your fathers and which you have not repented. And when the iron shall have so entered the soul of the aristocracy of the slave States as to make them feel in their despair that verily there is a God" who controls the destinies of men and of nations, and when they will trust to Him, in His righteous power, the care of His children, this war will ceaseand peace again bless our nation. When we break every yoke and let the oppressed go free, the broad fieldsthat war has desolated will again blossom as the rose and reward the labor of the husbandman.

Let us protect our posterity against the possibility of a recurrence of these fearful evils. Let us not becontent with crushing this rebellion. Let us not be content with producing all over the country, loyalty to the flag. Let justice to all men be our aim. Lot us establish freedom as a permanent institution, and make it universal. I appeal to those gentlemen on the other side of the House who shrink from the abhorient doctrines of the leaders of their party; to those of you who have read the Beatitudes and remember that at your mothers' knees you lisped a prayer that God would deal gently even with those who had trespassed against you, to vote with us, and not withhold from the intelligent people of this country the right to pass upon this question so fraught with blessed or fearful consequences. We do not make the amendment. We cannot make it. We can but initiate it. Gentlemen, you who profess to have such abiding confidence in the people, will you let them have an opportunity to say whether the Constitution shall be constitutionally amended? In their name, in the name of Democracy, in the name of Humanity, in the name of Christianity, I pray you for once to make good your professions and confide in the people sufficiently to permit them to say yea or nay on the question whether they will peaceably and constitutionally extinguish the scourge and disgrace of our common country, human slavery.

Mr. EDGERTON. Mr. Speaker, having on the question of its second reading voted for the lejeouon of the joint resolution now before the House, and intending to vote against it when put upon its passage, I desire to state some of the reasons that influence my vote.

In so far as the anti slavery sentiment which now exists in the United States is based in sin- I cere moral and political convictions, free from the taint of passion and fanaticism, I sympathize with and respect it„and I find fault with no man for opinions intelligently and honestly entertained. A large majority of the people of the United States who have had their birth and education in non slaveholding States, whether American or foreign, are not in favor of negro slavery. They regard it as an evil to be deprecated, not as a good to be fostered and perpetuated; and when welook back upon the history of our country from the organization of the Union until now, and see how much the question of slavery lias had to do with the political agitations and sectional and partisan animosity that have culminated in disunion and civil war, few candid men can hesitate to believe that it would have been far better if negro slavery had never existed on this continent. Say what we can in its favor, its existence and history aff"ord no bright pages in the annals of our country. For one, sir, I would rejoice to know that by the free, peaceful, constitutional action of the people of the slaveholding States, manifested through their own constitutions and laws, slavery had ceased to exist in all those States, and that the word slave could never again be truly applied to a human being within all the broad territory of the Federal Union; but I will not permit my opinions against slavery to lead me into hatred of slaveholders, nor into a lawless zeal to violate rights conceded to them by the Constitution of my country; and, in my judgment, so long as the Federal Union exists there is not and should not be any political power short of the free consent of each slaveholding State that can rightfully abolish slavery in the United States.

Negro slavery existed in all the States of the Union but one when the Federal Constitution was formed. It was a subject considered and earnestly discussed in the Convention that framed the Constitution, and the southern States, most largely holding slaves, were very sensitive and jealousas to any interference by the Federal Government with the question of slavery m the States. The Federal Constitution, therefore, accepted and recognized slavery as a fact and a legal relation under State laws; but it left it where it found it, subject to those laws. It neither in terms nor by implication assumed any control over the subject, except in three particulars:

1. It recognized and guarantied the right of the States to import slaves until 1808.

2. It provided that in the basis of representation and direct taxation in the Federal Government five slaves should count as three free persons.

3. It provided, in substance if not in words, for the surrender to the owner or master, of any slave escaping from a State, where held as aslave under the laws thereof, into another State.

It is indisputable, therefore, that the Federal Constitution went into operation m 1789 as the bond of union and the supreme law for all national purposes expressed in that Constitution of free and slaveholding States, and that there was nothing in the Constitution to abrogate or impair the right of a slave owner to the person and service of his slave in a slaveholding State any more than there was in it anything to impair the right of a father to the person and services of his minor child in any non slaveholding State.

Under the peaceful protection and fostering care of this Constitution, which, in the language of its framers, was" the result of a spirit ot amity and of that mutual deference and concession which the peculiarity of our political situation rendered indispensable," States that were slave States when the Constitution was adopted became of their own volition, by their own legislation, and in their own time and way, without interference, let, or lunderance from the Federal Government, free States. Other original States of the Union continued to hold their slaves. Territory was acquired and organized as slaveholding territory. New States, formed from national territory acquired by cession from the original States or by purchase or annexation, as in the case of Texas, were admitted into the Union, some as slaveholding, others as non slaveholding States; and on the rfoTh day of December, 1860, when South Carolina passed an ordinance of secession from the Federal Union, of the thirty three States of the Union fifteen were slaveholding States.

It is needless to comment on the growth and prosperity of the Union from its organization tfp to the time of the attempt at its dissolution. It is enough to say, what we all know, that its history demonstrated that a Republic of Federal States, part slave and part free, could grow and prosper, and become great among the nations, and diffuse unexampled freedom and happiness among its people. Left to its peaceful, he lthful action, the Federal system, committed to our care by our fathers, did not dishonor their wisdom or patriotism.

It is undoubtedly true as a fact of history that the Union could riot have continued, nor theConstitution as it now is have been adopted; if the northern States had insisted upon the prohibition of slavery in the Constitution, or in providing for power in the Federal Government to control or abolish it. It was a local State institution, analogous in its legal features to the domestic relation of parent and child, guardian and ward, master and servant, one of the class which, by the theory of the Union, was reserved from the control of the Federal Government; and to have conceded the right of the Federal Government to control it would have been to concede a principle of Federal intervention with the internal polity of the States that would have been fatal to the peace and permanence of the Union. By the confederation of July 9 1778 each State retained its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right notexpressly delegated to the United States; and if not in similarlanguage, the Federal Constitution in its tenth amendment contains, in spirit and substance, the same reservation of rights to the States or their people. From the beginning of the Government until the commencement of civil war for its destruction it was the received interpretation of the Constitution of the United States by all political parties having any claims to numbers or respectability that the right to control or abolish slavery in the States was not in the Federal Government, and it was because of this absence of power in that Government, and of its supposed obligation to protect slavery, that a small party of the zealots of anti-slavery pronounced the Constitution itself to be "a covenant with death and anagreement with hell." It was for that cause they hated it and cursed it, and worked for its destruction by poisoning the mind of the people with their traitorous heresies.

In so far as the present Administration and its party are concerned, I presume they will not deny, in reference to this question of State control over the institution of slavery, the authority of the fourth resolution of the Chicago convention of May, 18C0, m these words;

"That tiie maintenance inviolate of the rights oi tlie States, and especially the rinlit ot' each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance nl power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend."

Again, on the 11th of February, 1861, pending the eff"orts at compromise in Congress and in the' peace conference consequent upon the threatened dissolution of the Union, the House ot Representatives in the Thirty Sikth Congress by a vote of 116 ayes to 4 noes adopted this resolution:

«P ewlaei Thatneithertlie Federal Governmentnnr the people nor governments of the iion siaveholding States iiavc a purpose or a constitutional right to legislate upon or interfere with slavery in any of the States ot the Union. On the same day this resolution was amended and passed by a unanimous vote of one hundred and sixty one members, so as to read as follows: Reso vei That neither Congress nor the people or tile governments of tile uon slaveholdlng States have the right to legislate upon or interfere with slavery in any ol tho slaveholding States of the XJnion."

But again, on the 4th of March, 1861, President Lincoln, under the obligations of his official oath, and under circumstances, lfever, demanding truth and patriotism, reaffirmed the fourth resolution of the Chicago convention, and declared it to bo his law, accompanying it with this declaration:

Appii hension seems to exist among the people of the southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and peace and personal security ail' to be endangered. There has never been any reasonable cause for such apprehension. Indeed, tliemo t ample evidence to the contrary lias all the while cxi t d mid been open to their inspection. It is found in neai y all the piiblt hed speeches ot lum who now addres es you. i do but quote (mm one of those speeches when[ decline mat I have no purpose, directly or iiidin etly to liiu tli it with the institution of slavery Id UitJ Stall s where u txis to 1 believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no Inclination to do so.' Those whonominated and elected me did so with the full knowledge that I had made this and many similar declarations, and had never recanted them. And more than this, they placed in tile platform for my acceptance, and as a law to themselves and to me, the clear and emphatic resolution which I now read."

Here the President read, as his law, the fourth resolution of the Chicago platform.

It would be incredible, Mr. Speaker, except for the reason that it is a fact of history admitting of no question, that the author of the above declaration is also the author of the emancipation proclamations of September 22 1862 January 1, 1863, and of the amnesty proclamation, so called, though it more properly deserves the name of the tyrant s and usurper s proclamation, of December 8, 1863.

Again, who would believe, sir, except because we knew from history and experience the power of fanaticism and party spirit in overthrowing reason and corrupting morality, that the same party and the same political leaders who on the 10th May, 1860, adopted the fourth resolution of the Chicago convention, and on 11th February, 1861, voted for or approved the resolutions of the House of Representatives just read, would, on the 8th day of June, 1864, in the face of the intelligence and public conscience of the American people and of the intelligent judgment of the world, have the assurance to publish to the world as articles of their political faith the resolutions I now read, namely, the third and fifth resolutions of the self styled Union convention lately held in Baltimore, namely:

"Resolved, 3. That as slavery was the cause and now constitutes the strength oi this rebellion, and it must be always and everywhere hostile to the principles of republican government, justice and the national safety demand its utter and complete extirpation from the soil of the Republic; ami that while we uphold and maintain the acts and proclamations by which the Government in its own defense has aimed a death bloiv at this gigantic evil, we are in favor furthermoic of such an amendment to the Constitution, to be made by the people in conformity to its provisions, as shall terminate and forever prohibit the existence of slavery within the limits oi juii dictiou of the United States."****« s

Resolved, 5. That we approve and applaud the practical wisdom, the unselfish patriotism, and the unswerving fidelity to the Constitution and the principles of American liberty with which Abraham Liiieolnlias discharged, under circumstances of unparalleled difficulty, the great duties and responsibilities of the presidential office; that wo approve and indorse, as demanded by the emergency and essential to the preservation of the nation, and as within the provisions of the Constitution, the measures and acts which lie lias adopted to defend the nation against its open and secret foes; that we approve, especially, the proclamation of emancipation and the employment as Union soldiers of the men heretofore held in slaveiy."

Mr. Speaker, when American citizens, public men, the leaders of a great political party, can thus stultify themselves and insult the truth of history; when they can thus prove their lack of all political integrity; when their "candied tongues" can thus lick the feet of power and" applaud" the destroyer of constitutional liberty, we have indeed reached a mournful era in our history as a nation, and there i3 cause for the hope of the patriot s heart to fail.

In answer to the wild ravings against slavery, and the revolutionary measures attempted in regard to it by the Administration and its party, I think I may safely appeal from the present testimony of that party, now thoroughly lost to reason, and infidel to its own plighted faith, to its testimony at Chicago and in Congress, which I have quoted, when under thonameof the Republican party it was comparatively clothed and in its right mind.

1 will assume, sir, for charity s sake, that the resolution of the Chicago convention, and the declarations of Mr. Lincoln s inaugural, and the resolutions of February 11, 1861, honestly expressed the opinions and purposes declared in them. We thus find the party now in power then affirming and committed to two cardinal principles:

1. Absence of power in the Federal Government and in the non slaveholding States to legislate upon or interfere with slavery in the slaveholding States.

2. The right of the State governments to control their own domestic institutions, including slavery, and that the maintenance of this right "is essential to that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric [meaning of course the whole system of Federal and State government] depend." This proposition of the Republican party of 1860 and 1861 of course involved as its logical consequence the further proposition that to take from any State the right to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively" would be to destroy that balance of power on which the perfection and endurance of the Union depend. In other words, when the right of State self government as to its domestic affairs is taken away, the Union ceases to be perfectand will not endure

We have no better proof of this fundamental truth than the present condition of our country. Disunion and civil war attest the danger of disturbing the balance of power in our Federal system. Out of their own mouthsand by their own professed principles are the party in power convicted and condemned.

Thus stood the case as to Federal power over slavery when civil war was commenced.

We all know that one and the chief cause of that war, so far as the southern States were concerned, was jealousy in those States of the growing and overshadowing political power of the northern States, and fear that that power, in the hands of a party hostile to slavery, determined in some way to abolish it, and pledged to exclude it from all the Territories of the United States, would soon be exercised to reach and abolish it in the States, by amendments of the Federal Constitution, or some other exercise of political power by the free States. The people of the southern States, after the election ofNovember, I860, fcltthatthe power of the Federal Government had substantially passed into the hands of an aggressive antislavery or abolition party, and that in so far as their own peculiar domestic institutions were concerned the southern States were no longer able to protect them within the Union, and had therefore ceased to be equal States in that Union. Whether well founded or not, we know that this belief, this jealousy and four prevailed in and excited the southern States to war against the Federal Government.

The closing weeks of the Thirty Sixth Congress will ever be memorable in the history of this country for the struggle between the radical or revolutionary and the conservative and constitutional elements of which that Congress was composed. During the same period a similar struggle between the friends of the Union and Us enemies was going on in the peace conference held in this city. On the one side, both in Congress and in the conference, were the desire and effort toavoid the impending peril ofcivil war, and to restore theUnion and its harmony by conciliation and compromise. On the other side was the evident determination to yield no point ofthe antislavery policy which had carried the Republican party into power, but to press that policy even to the extremity of the shedding of blood. The only substantial result ofthe effort to meet the southern States in a spirit of conciliation, and to settle the question of slavery so as to allay their fears as to further interference with it within the States by the Federal Government or the free States, was the joint resolution of Congress, approved March 2 1861 providing for the submission to a vote of the State Legislatures of an amendment to the Constitution, in these words:

No amendment shall be made to tile Constitution which will authorize or give to Conciessthe power to abolish or interfere within any State with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State."

This resolution passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 133 against 65, and the Senate by a vote of 24 against 12. What there was of wisdom in this action of Congress came too late. Whether because the southern people saw in the negative vote of the radical Republicans in Congress upon this resolution the evidence of a determination still to agitate the slavery question and to continue anti-slavery aggression, and therefore did not consider it as offering any security to them, or whether because they were determined that the Union should be broken at all hazards, it is certain that the joint resolution of Congress failed to stop the progress of disunion or to stay the coming of war. I refer to the resolution now as additional evidence to what 1 have already cited of the opinion of a large majority of the people, as expressed through their representatives at that time, that the right to legislate upon and control slavery should not exist in the Federal Government nor betaken from the State governments. The resolution itself, in fact, expressed no more than what was the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution as it now is; and the southern people so understood it, and did not therefore accept it as any substantial concession by tlie non slaveholding States.

The assertion of power or right in a majority of the States, either through the legislation of the Federal Government or through amendments of the Constitution, to interfere with or control the domestic institutions of a State, such, for example, as slavery, essentially repudiates the principle upon which the Union was formed, namely, the political equality of the States. Such aright or power conceded places the minority of States at the mercy of the majority. A Federal State to which the Constitution affords no guarantee that its domestic institutions shall not be changed by other States norby the Federal Government loses the very essence of its freedom, independence, and sovereignty.

The arguments against the proposed joint resolution arise, first, from the character of the proposition itself; and, secondly, from the time and circumstances or the condition of public affairs in which it is presented.

I do not propose, Mr. Speaker, to consider in detail all the objectionable features which this proposed amendment to the Constitution presents. I am, sir, at a loss for words wherein to express my sense of its true character. It assumes the name and form of liberty and the functions and power of free government to perpetrate and cover up a great public wrong. It is not the only instance in history of an attempt to prostitute liberty to unholy purpose and malignant passions. "O liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" was the last exclamation of Madam Roland—herself a true lover of liberty she stood upon the scaffold, amid the demoniac yells of a Parisian mob, the zealots of "liberty, equality, fraternity."

I shall notice in general terms some of the cardinal objections to the joint resolution:

1. It proposes a revolutionary change in the■ Government. Itseeks to draw within the authority of the Federal Constitution and the Federal' Congress a question of local or internal policy belonging exclusively to the slaveholding States, and is in conflict with the principles on which the Union was originally formed, and with the whole theory and spirit of the Constitution as to the rights of the States. It means that three fourths of the States may dictate to the other one fourth what shall be their domesticinstitutions and how they shall govern their internal affairs, and that even the right to govern as to such affairs may bo taken away. It means that three fourths of the States may at pleasure, by a constitutional amendment, appropriate without compensation or confiscate the property of the other one fourth. In its present form the resolution is aimed at slavery; but it might, with equal propriety, be aimed at any other local law or institution of a State. It might as well propose that freedom of religious opinion should be abolished, and one form of religious worship only prevail in all the States; or that marriage should not take place except between certain classes and at certain ages and otherwise define marital rights, or be extended to regulate the relations of parent and child, or the canons of property, or the elective franchise. The principle of the proposed amendment is the principle of consolidation, and cannot be drawn into precedent without a final subversion of our constitutional Government. It is absurd to call a Federal Union wherein such a principle of consolidation has been introduced into its fundamental law a Union of free and equal States. The minority would be ever the subjects, not the coequals, of the majority of the States.

2. The amendment proposes to change the constitutional basis of representation and taxation. By the Constitution as it is five slaves count as three free persons only in the apportionment of Federal Representatives and direct taxes. The effect ofthe amendment, therefore, will be to increase southern representation, based upon the negro population, to the extent of two fifths at least of that population; and no man who knows the motives and policy of the party in power questions but that their object in part, by the proposed amendment, is to make the negro population not merely a passive but an active basis of representation in the Federal Government. First, the negro a citizen of the United States; secondly, the negro a free citizen of the United States, protected everywhere, in defiance of existing State constitutions and laws, as such citizen; and thirdly, the negro a voting citizen of the United States, are all propositions logically involved in the proposed amendment. The same revolutionary power which enfranchises negroes by presidential edicts of emancipation, or by constitutional amendments, carried, as this would be, in the southern States, if it receives the twothirds vote of this Congress, so as to be submitted to the State Legislatures, by fraudulent elections and by duress of arms, would soon admit negroes to the elective franchise in all the States, and negro representatives in Congress would speak the voice of southern if not of the northern States. This is the designed effect of the proposed amendment in its change of the constitutional basis of representation.

In its operation upon the basis of taxation in the southern States, the effect of the proposed amendment would be to increase their quota of direct taxation while it diminished their wealth and ability of pay men t: first, in the direct loss of the value equal perhaps to 2 000 000 000 ofall slave property, by the act of abolition without compensation; second, in the diminished value of all southern agricultural lands, consequent upon the destruction of the organized system of labor that has made them productive and valuable; third, in the diminution, resulting from the same cause, of the products of all farm or plantation property. Whatever might be the remote and ultimate effects of abolition upon the wealth of the southern States, no man can doubt that its immediate effect would be to immensely reduce their aggregate wealth and to overburden with taxation and impoverish the present owners of property in those States.

3. The effect of this amendment would be to turn loose at once, without preparation or education for freedom, without property or the means whereby to live, and without the guidance, restraint, and protection of the superior intelligence and forethought of their masters or owners, the whole slave population of the southern States, numbering from three and a half to four million persons. A change so sudden and so radical in the industrial and social system of States, and especially in the condition of such a class of persons as the negro population of the southern States, is without precedent or justification in history; and we have no warrant for believing that it would be a benign and healthful change. On the contrary, we have the testimony of one who, although an instrument, and an active instrument, in bringing about this great social revolution, has declared—but in this as in many other instances proved false to his own opinions—that" gradual, not sudden emancipation is better for all." All who know anything of the negro character know this to be true. Sudden freedom to the negro, without the capacity to appreciate and improve it, has proved notablessing buta curse. On this point let tens of thousands of homeless, diseased, demoralized, starving, naked, helpless "contrabands" bear testimony.

4. This proposed amendment is designed to be the coadjutor and crowning effort of that stupendous system of confiscation or legalized plunder by which the party in power propose to restore the Union. They have already gone as far as they could do by acts of legislation and executive edicts of emancipation to seize and appropriate the property and free the slaves of those in arms against the Federal Government and to partition the southern lands among negroes, and now the final act of confiscation in the shape ot this amendment is proposed to operate upon friend and foe. Union man and rebel alike, in the appropriation to public use without compensation of the entire slave property of the United States.

We have hitherto considered it a fundamental principle of civil polity, as it is a provision of our Constitution, that private property cannot be taken for public use without just compensation. This proposed amendment ignores and tramples upon that principle. If the public good really demands that the slave owners of the South should surrender their slave property, is there any principle of constitutional freedom or of public justice that justifies the demand for that surrender without making adequate compensation? None, sir; and it is the plunder of despotism, not justice nor constitutional liberty, to take the property without making the compensation. There was a time, sir, when the President of the United States, now in office, and many of his friends in the Thirty Seventh Congress, thought thatslaves were property, and that if they were emancipated for the public good the United States should cooperate and help to pay for them, i refer for evidence on this point to the various messages and resolutionscomprising his compensated emancipation scheme sent to the Thirty Seventh Congress by President Lincoln, and to the action of that Congress on the subject. In this, as in most other cases, the Presidentand his party have been false to their professions. What they once thought should not be taken without being paid for he, by his emancipation proclamation, and they by their proposed amendment to the Constitution— which he no doubt will approve if it passes this Congress—propose to take by the strong hand of a despotic majority without payment or compensation.

Again: if the proposed amendment be based upon the idea of punishment to slaveholders for their rebellion, then is it evidence of an attempt to punish a whole class for the crime of a part, the innocent for the guilty. If the slaveholders of South Carolina, for example, have rebelled and forfeited their slaves to the vengeance or justice of the law, they, and they alone, should be punished according to the law; but, sir, should the slaveholders of Kentucky, who have not rebelled nor forfeited any constitutional right, be swept into the same great revenge which it is proposed to visit upon the slaveholders of South Carolina? "Slavery has committed the unpardonable sin and it must die" is a declaration, in substance if not m words, uttered in this Hall. It is the shibboleth of the party m power, the key note of their policy; and in the consummation of their purposes they ruthlessly trample upon constitutions, laws, instincts of race, the love of kindred, and even the common feelings of humanity. What matters it, sir, to the zealots of the anti-slavery idea that a while man of the South, his wife, his children, boi n perhaps to affluence and educated m all the refinements of social life, should be driven from their inheritance and become homeless, houseless wanderers, and even mendicants, before their own slaves, so long as the negro, without intelligence, without education, without capacity for self government can be installed as owner of the soil from which his master and protector has been driven, and become a political instrument whereby the party now controlling the Federal Government can perpetuate their hold on public power? What matters it that our land is drenched in blood, our people demoralized, oppressed, impoverished, and grinding taxation makes the labor of our once thrifty husbandmen a struggle only for the means whereby to live, and drives forth to the labor of the fields, like the slave women of the South or the serfs of European despotism, our white women and children, so long as slaveholders and" slavemongers are crushed, and negroes are free, owners of southern soil, voters at elections, statesmen in Congress, and companions and equals at our firesides and in our marriage beds? This joint resolution is the legitimate fruit of that hatred toward the slaveholders of the South and to the Union and the Constitution which found expression in the publication known as the Helper book, and in the declaration of Garrison," 1 he Constitution of the United States, a covenant with death and an agreement with hell." The abolition of slavery and the destruction and impoverishment of slaveholders," the ruffians, outlaws, and criminals of the southern States, feed fat the grudge of northern abolitionists; and what matters it that the Union and Constitution perish in the flames if the fanatics of abolition can but dance around the holocaust of negro slaveiy

On the issue that the principles and policy ot the abolition party now in power inevitably involved a revolutionary change m our Federal system; in other words, in fear that the Republican party, if not in other apparently less legitimate ways of carrying out their nnti slavery policy, would do it by amending the Federal Constitution and coercing the minority of States to accept the amendment, eleven of the southern States declared their independence of the Federal Government, and have attempted to establish that independence by war.

In the midst of this war, gigantic; barbarous, unnatural, filling the land with sorrow, and swiftly leading the Republic on the road to its ruin, while mighty opposing armies confront each other, and almost everyday witnesses the slaughter of hundreds, if not thousands, of our heroic young men, and while the resultsof the war in the restoration of a divided Union and the preservation of the Constitution are yet unknown and uncertain, this revolutionary proposition to amend the Constitution of the United States by introducing into it the very principle against the establishment of which eleven States have seceded and appealed to arms, is brought forward for agitation among the people—brought forward, too, as I believe, when its advocates well know that it cannot receive the constitutional two thirds vote of this Congress to warrant its submission to the Legislatures and peopleof the United States.

There can, therefore, it seems to me, be no practical purpose to be accomplished by this attempt at constitutional amendment at this time, except to indicate to the world, and especially to the men in arms against us, that the war on our part is to accomplish the very purpose with which they charged us in the beginning, namely, the abolition of slavery in the United States, and the political and social elevation of negroes to all the rights of white men. If this Congress desires to prove to the people of the southern confederacy that they had a cause for beginning a war for their independence, the proof cannot more effectually be made than by the passage of this resolution. It is a plain, undisguised attempt to indicate what the Administration and party in power intend shall be the result of the irrepressible conflict they have declared and invited even to the extremity, of civil war.

Mr. Speaker, I have no desire to discuss the right or policy of slavery at this time. It may be a sin; it may be impolitic; it may be unprofitable. Arguments on both sides have been and can be made, and radical differences of opinion exist on the subject, and neither the power of a political majority nor the power of war can determine the abstract right or wrong of the opposing opinions. 1 am not the apologist nor friend of slavery, but no abstract or theoretical opinions about slavery determine my vote on the question before the House. If so he that slavery is dead, as the result of civil war, as many say, not of the emancipation proclamation, which the authorof it has himself aptly termed brutemfidmen, I have no regrets for it; no tears to shed over its grave; its own advocates have done their part to slay it; let them reap as they have, sown; I have no desire to revive or restore it. If, however, slavery be wounded nigh unto death but not slain, I for one will not, for the sake of giving it its death blow either swear to or admit the right to abolish it by executive edict, or introduce into the Constitution of my country, by way of amendment, a principle and a precedent that may in an evil hour of excited passion like the present put the dagger to the heart of the freedom and independence of my own State, and make me the serf of a despotism. Better, sir, for our country, better for man, that negro slavery exist a thousand years than that American white men lose their constitutional liberty in the extinction of the constitutional sovereignty of the Federal States of this Union. Slavery is the creature ot the States alone, not of the Federal Union; they made it, let them unmake it. If the States wherein slavery still lives, a mangled, bleeding, prostrate form, see fit to give it the final blow that shall make it a thing of the past, let them do it ill their own time and way. If, however, they see fit to nurse itintoafurtherbriefvitality, let them do it; it is their ward, not yours nor mine

My arguments against the joint resolution are in substance as already indicated:

That it seeks to draw within the authority of tile Federal Constitution and Congress a question of local or internal policy, belonging exclusively to the slaveholding States, and that it is therefore in conflict with the theory and spirit of the Constitution, and subversive of the principles and basis of the Union.

2. That it is a scheme malignant in its motives, and essentially unjust and dishonest in its purposes. In cannot on any principle of constitutional or public law be justified as an act of punishment; and as a scheme of virtual appropriation of private property without compensation, it is equally repugnant, to the principles of free and just government.

3. That the tendency of the resolution, offered at this time especially, is to strengthen the resistance to the restoration of the Union, and to render such restoration improbable if not impossible.

4. That even if the proposed amendment were just and politic in the abstract, it should be brought forward at a time when it can be fairly and calmly discussed, and passed upon by a full and fair expression of the opinions of the people of all the States; and we know that no such full and fair expression of opinion can be obtained at this time, or pending this war. The work of remodeling the Constitution, if that be necessary, is a work for the calm thought of times of peace, not for the excited passions of war. It is said the laws are silent in the midst of arms," and we know by a painful experience that this is too true, even in our own States that have been far removed from the theater of the war, and where the civil courts should be open for the free operation of the laws in the punishment of offenders and for the protection of the innocent.

In confirmation of this statement, sir, I need but mention that a true American patriot and statesman, known to us all—the peer in patriotism and statesmanship of any man upon this floor—still lives in exile, a banished man, the victim of lawless oppression, because the laws he honored and obeyed were silent and impotent in the midst of arms, and he appealed to them m vain for justice and protection. And, sir, I would here say, because it is due to truth to say it, that so long as that flagrant and shameless act of despotism, the bamsjimentofVnllandigham, remains unrebuked and unpunished by the American people, they claim without truth the title of freemen, and their boast of constitutional liberty is a boast and nothing more. But more is it true that laws are silent in States occupied and overrun by the opposing armies. There law and reason alike are voiceless and powerless, and freedom of speech and of suffrage, the basis of all true political freedom is subdued by arms. Itismockery and insult to talk of submitting to the people of the seceded States questions of amendment to the Federal Constitution when they are under the duress and subjected to all the calamities and excitements of war.

Again, sir, I would ask, is it right, is it wise, is it magnanimous, is it in accordance with the principles of our Federal system, that this Congress, in the absence virtually of the Ru jieseut ati ves of eleven States, parties to the Constitution, while the places of those States are vacant, and their voices not heard in our Halls—except I might, perhaps without exaggeration, say, in the thunders of their warlike array, protesting against our policy of aggression and usurpation it right or wise, I ask, that we, a fraction of the constitutional representation in Congress, should attempt to provide for a fundamental change in the Government that will overturn their social and industrial systems, and affect for all time the absent and protesting States? I freely say that there is neither wisdom, justice, magnanimity, nor humanity in the attempt of this. Congress, at this time and in this way, to innovate upon the Constitution. Let us first determine how much of the ten itory that once acknowledged the Coni tuution of the United States as its supreme law is our territory, and whether or not that Constitution is to remain the supreme law of the land, before wo attempt to amend it. Let us reconcile those in aims against it to the Constitution as it is b< fore we attempt to incorporate into it a provision they have denounced, and we have no right to impose without their free consent.

1 have watched with the anxiety due to their importance the proceedings and legislation of this Congress, and noted well the spirit and purposes of the majority that control it. The majority here seem to me to be governed by the spirit of: revolution, not of conservation. TheydonotbeHeve in the Constitution of the United States as its framers made and interpreted it. They do not believe in the Union as the fathers made it. They do not propose to restore that Union nor to retain the Constitution in its integrity. Coworkers with and copyists of the revolutionists of secession, this Administration and this Congress have abandoned the old Union and Constitution —our surest hope and our best defense—and adopted the dangerous experiment of revolution against revolution. The party of secession would disintegrate by revolution; this Congress would consolidate by revolution. The one by force of arms would make a new nation of slaveholding States; the other by force of arms and by force of revolutionary and unconstitutional legislation would make a new nation, a regenerated Republic, as they are pleased to style it, without slavery, but in truth States emasculated of the manly freedom that was once the pride and boast of the people of all the United States.

It is vain, sir, for gentlemen of the majority here to claim that they are the friends of peace on the basis of the Union and Constitution as they existed before the war began, or to deny that they are the advocates and instruments of revolution. The records of this Congress, with daily accumulating evidence, falsify the claim and the denial. You desire no peace and you do not intend, if you can help it, to accept peace until you have abolished slavery; deprived if n Jt robbed by confiscation the property holders of the South of their rightful inheritance; made negroes socially and politically the equals of white men; and remodeled the Constitution to suit your own political purposes. Your ears are deaf to appeals and arguments for the old Union, and you speak of it as a hated thing of the past. You openly scoff at the Constitution, and the ablest among you denounce it as" an atrocious idea." You do not seek the ways of peace. Your policy is subjugation, not restoration. The instruments by which you work are the instruments of vengeance and despotism, not of humanity and justice and constitutional freedom. Your records show no resolves or enactments for conciliation and peace and reunion, but for conscription, wherein you attempt to legalize the slavery offreemen to a military power that acknowledges no limit but its own will; confiscation by whose agency revenge, avarice, and fraud combine for plunder; inordinate taxation that borders on confiscation; proscription of your political opponents; proscription of the press, of free speech, and proscription of freedom of debate, even in these Halls consecrated to it by the Constitution and by every hope of a freeman s heart. You openly justify wanton acts of executive usurpation, and violations hitherto unprecedented of constitutional liberty. While hundreds of thousands of your kindred, of patriots whom you have lured into war under the solemn pledge that it should be a war to restore the Union and Constitution with all the dignity, equality, and lights of the several States unimpaired, are slaughtered by the demon of war, and the people groan under the burdens you have laid upon them, and are still exerting your skill indevicesoftaxation to increase, with eager haste you counsel together and legislate foe the division among negroes of southern lands, on which you cannot and dare not set your feet. You are arrogant in your present power and despise your enemies without cause. You exasperate while you should conciliate; you threaten where you should negotiate, and work for vengeance where you should labor for peace. You openly declare your purpose to treat as devils those of your kindred race whom you have exasperated to madness; those who have been your fellow citizens and who, however malignant and inhuman your purposes concerning them, you must in the end treat as men and equals, if not as fellow citizens and brethren.

Mr. Speaker, the line of policy which this Administration and its party and the majority m this Congress have adopted toward the people of the southern States, and toward the Democratic party of the North, is the dictate of passion and partisan spirit, and indicates more the arrogance of power than of patriotic statesmanship. That line of policy will not succeed. The experience of history and of human nature teaches us it will not succeed. The work of this Administration and Congress is the work of disunion, not of Union. It will destroy, not build up. It is fruitful of evil, not of good, and must and will be changed—peacefully and in the methods of the Constitution, so far as the northern Democracy are concerned, so long as they are left free to use the methods of the Constitution, but forcibly if need be when an oppressed and indignant people have no other remedy for the preservation of their constitutional rights but to rise in the majesty of their strength and assert and maintain them by the strong arms of freemen.

If we are to restore the Union with the seceded States and save the Constitution, other arguments than war and denunciation and insult and the invocation of the spirit of revenge and plunder must be used. It was not in that way the Union and Constitution were formed, nor can they thus be saved. In persisting in your policy, of which the joint resolution now before the House is but one. expression, you are but paving the way for the division and dishonor of your country, and for your own dishonor, when impartial history shall sit in judgment upon the men and events of these perilous days.

Mr. ARNOLD. Mr. Speaker, I regret that this late day of the session compels an abridgment of discussion upon a subject of such overshadowing importance, yet I cannot let the occasion pass without briefly giving my reasons for voting for this constitutional amendment.

SHALL SLAVERY STILL LIVE?

Slavery is to day an open enemy striking at the heart of the Republic. It is the soul and body, the spirit and motive of the rebellion. It is slavery which marshals yonder rebel hosts which confront the patriot armies of Grant and Sherman JSLt is the savage spirit of this barbarous insti-> tutiosi which starves the JJ in on prisoners at Richmond, which assassinated them at FoiJ Pillow, which murders the wounded on the field of battle, and which fills up the catalogue of wrong and out-j rage which mark the conductof the rebels during all this war. j In view of all the long catalogue of wrongs' which slavery has inflicted upon the C3un ry 1, demand to day of the Congress of the United; States the death of African slavery. We can have no permanent peace while slavery lives. It now reels and staggers toward its last deathstruggle. Let us strike the monster this last decisive blow.

The Thirty Seventh Congress will live in his- j history as the Congress which prohibited slavery in all the Territories of the Union, and abolished, it at the national capital. The President of the I United States will be remembered as the author of the proclamation of emancipation, as the lib-; erator of a race, the apostle of freedom, the great j emancipator of his country. The Thirty Eighth Congress, if we pass this joint resolution, will! live in history as that which consummated the; great work of freeing a continent from the curse* of human bondage.

Never, since the day when John Adams plead for the Declaration of Independence, has so important a question been submitted to an American Congress as that upon which you are now. about to vote. The signing of the immortal Declaration is a familiar picture in every log cabin and residence all over the land. Pass this resolution, and the grand spectacle of this vote, which, knocks off the fetters of a whole race, will make this scene immortal.

Live a century, nay, a thousand years, and no such oppoi tunity to do a great deed for humanity," for liberty, for peace, and for your country, will ever again present itself. Pass this joint resolution, and you win a victory .over wrong and injustice lasting as eternity. The whole world will rise up to do you honor. Every loverof liberty in Germany, France, Italy, Great Britain, the world, will rise up and call you blessed. The gallant soldiers in the field who are giving their lives for liberty and Union will call down upon you the blessings of Heaven. Let the lightnings of God (fit instrument for the glorious message) transmit to the toiling and struggling soldiers of Sherman and Hunterand Butler and Grant the thrilling words, "Slavery abolished forever," and their joyous shouts will strike terror into the ranks of the rebels and traitors fighting for tyranny and bondage. The thousandsof wounded in the hospitals around this capital would hail tthe intelligence as a battle fought and a great victory won.

This constitutional amendment has passed the Senate, long regarded as the citadel of the slave power; how strange if it should fail in the popular branch of Congress! The people and the States are eager and impatient to ratify it. Will those whoclaim to represent the ancient Democracy refuse to give the people an opportunity to vote upon it? Is this your confidence in the loyal masses?

The passage of this resolution will strike the rebellion at the heart. I appeal to border State men and Democrats of the free States; look over your country; see the bloody footsteps of slavery; see the ruin and desolation which it has brought upon our once happy land; and I ask, why stay the hand now ready to strike down to death the cause of all these evils? Why seek to prolong the life, to restore to vigor, the institution of slavery, now needing but this last act to doom it to everlasting death and damnation?

Gentlemen may flatter themselves with a restoration ofthe slave power in thiscountry." The Union as it was 1" It is a dream, never again to be realized. The America of the past is gone forever. A new nation is to be born from the agony through which the people are now passing. This now nation is to be wholly free. Liberty, equality before the law is to be the great corner stone

Much yet remains to be done to secure this. Many a battle on the field has yet to be fought and won against the mighty power which fights for slavery, the barbarous system of the past. Many a battle has yet to be won on the higher sphere of moral conflict. While our gallant soldiers are subduing the rebels in the field, let us second their efforts by sweeping from the statutebook every stay and prop and shield of human slavery, the scourge of our country, and let us crown all by incorporating into our organic law the glorious prohibition of slavery. For myself, I mean to fight this cause of the war, this cursed cause of all the expenditure of blood and treasure from which my country is now suffering, this institution which has filled our whole land with desolation, sorrow, and anguish; I mean to fight it until neither on statute book nor m Constitution shall there be left a single sentence or word which can be construed to sanction the stupendous wrong.

Mr. Speaker, I thank God and a liberty loving constituency for the privilege of voting for this constitutional amendment, for universal emancipation throughout our country Let us now, to day in the name of liberty, justice and ofGod, consummate this grand revolution. Let us toj day make our country, our whole country, the home of the free.

1 conclude, in the language of the President:

So much good has not been done by one effort in all past time as m the providence of God it is now your hli di privilege to do. May the vast future not have to lament that you have neglected it."'

Mr. liNGrERSOLL. Mr. Speaker, having very recently taken a seat in this body, it was my intention. to have contented myself with voting for all such measures as I believed to be just and expedient, and against such as I believed to be unjust or inexpedient without taking part in the discussion of such measures. But ill justice to the liberty loving and Union loving men who sent me here, and m justice to myself I ask the indulgence of the House for the few minutes which have been generously given me by my friend, the honorable gentleman from California, [Mr. Shannon,] out of his hour, in which to discuss the joiutresolution now under consideration. I have the proud honor to represent a district in which a very great majority of the people are thoroughly and unalterably anti-slavery. They are in favor of justice and against oppression and wrong everywhere and in every f oim There are two grand objects for the accomplishment of which they have already freely given of their best blood and treasure, and stand ready to day to give much more of both, if necessary, for the absolute and unconditional crushing out of this most wicked and devastating rebellion, and for the complete and utter extinction of human slavery the sole and fearful cause of the rebellion.

1 know full well if the lamented Lovejoy, my honored and noble predecessor, could come to day from the unseen world and take his place among us, his manly and eloquent voice would be heard in this Hall, as in days past, with all the earnestness of his great soul, pronouncing in favor of theadontion of this resolution, in favor of universal liberty and the rights of mankind. The cause of liberty and equal and exact justice lost a noble and heroic friend when he died, and the Union cause and the country lost one of their best and boldest champions. A grateful people hold him in affectionate remembrance, and it is to be hoped they may emulate his many virtues. He died in the midst of his great and good work; but God, in His infinite wisdom and goodness, did not suffer him to depart until the abolition of slavery in this country was approaching with rapid step the grand and glorious day of its consummation. And I say with all my heart, may Heaven speed the day. Universal liberty was the child of his heart, and he lived long enough to see thatdivine child adopted as its own by the nation.