Mr. WARNER. At the opening of this congress we were confronted by a most extraor. dinary and dangerous condition of national affairs. The war which had crowded into the space of io, 4 years the events, transmutations, and progress of ordinary centuries, had spent its force; the passions and purposes and energies of the nation were no longer entirely absorbed in the marshaling of armies and in their deadly conflicts. On one hand the insurgents had sullenly withdrawn from that arena discomfited, having renounced none of their iniquities or crimes, or abandoned any of their errors, prejudices, or ultimate purposes to control the Government. On the other hand, the loyal nation, swayed by all the delirium of success, surveyed the scene of their untold sacrifices and conflicts, stirred to no purposes of vengeance, moved to no act of retribution, impelled to no excess of action, and seemingly scarcely susceptible of any emotion or virtue but charity, or of being awakened to any consciousness or belief but that of the ot. safety of our then more than ever imperiled country. The conflict of arms had shocked the world, had wrung an unparalleled tribute of torture from humanity, and scarred the face of the continent. But the rebellion had not spent its force in brute concussion alone. It had changed the whole course of our civilization; it had settled forever many doubtful and long debated questions of constitutional right and governmental policy; it had crystalized all political elements and forces, and arrayed them eitherfor or against the national unity and national life. But beyond this it had a still higher significance. A rebellion of political elements, of ideas, and an antagonistic system of government, it had marshaled all their constituent elements and forces; it had marshaled a nation extem porized; it had States with all their high, sacred trusts and guardianships, and peoples with all their fortunes, hopes, and civilization, and in that death struggle for the mastery of the nation, with all the terrible energy of despair, had cast them into the scale, and lost, for they were the hazard of the die. Discuss it as we may, torture the actual facts and condition as we will, refine and sublimate this matter as we please, this Congress was called to contemplate and provide for this state of facts. Ten insurgent communities, comprising ten million people, lawfully under the disability of unsuccessful treason and war, conquered by no other force than arms, held to our dominion then, and now, by that force alone, and who, by the laws of war and of conquest, speaking in their adjudications as the highest arbiter of Christendom and above all other laws and constitutional formula, had forfeited all civil rights and all civil government. We were called to contemplate and act upon these admitted facts. 6 million people, law ful belligerents, owing to our sovereignty alle giance, having no rights toward their former State governments, and outlaws under the national Government; a people in fact launched by their act of unsuccessful treason into the shoreless sea of anarchy, having neither a government nor the right of government, but, nevertheless, subjects of government; having neither laws nor the right to laws, property, nor the right of property, nor any other right, but holding all, even life itself, upon the tenure of the arbitrary will of the conqueror! We were called to contemplate and provide for 4 million people, who by the act of the nation as the price of its life had received the highest benison of all human governments, the right to liberty and American citizenship. It became our duty as far as possible to lift the load of woe which the degradation of 2 centuries of oppression and slavery had not in vain heaped on the head of that devoted peoto: to eradicate as far as possible by all umane and congenial legislation those obsta cles which otherwise would prevent their being incorporated into the body politic, and which inevitably hereafter render them not only a dangerous element to our political and national stability, but a financial problem the solution of which might involve the question of national financial disaster and ruin. These were presentments which well might confound our philanthropy and tax the utmost resources of our highest order of statesman ship. But this was not all. The national executive had proclaimed the fact of the entire extinction of all State government in the in surgent States. He had ignored every constitutional function which they could perform; and arrested, imprisoned, or driven into exile every functionary who dared to assume or exercise a right or function under those governments. He had proclaimed and issued his edicts to that effect, that new State governments should be created in the place of those subverted, through the medium of the loyal people alone; and made the determination of that loyalty to depend upon unjust, unwise, and arbitrary rules, with no appeal to any other dept of the Government, but prescribed and enforced to suit the caprices of his passions and prejudices and more than imperial will. He. placed the iron heel of State and national disfranchisement upon the entire g.” and suffered their communities and States to commence their existence alone through his license and the medium of his amnesty and pardon, He had compelled these communities and States thus organized to submit to the behests of their military governors and dictators, appointees and creatures of his; and through them molded their several constitutions and internal policies, not in conformity to the desires or political sentiments of their people, but in conformity to his own; and these bas tard State governments, having no legitimate origin either in the people of those States or as an emanation of the State or national governments, but wrung from a conquered and violated people as the price of their submission to his policy, having representatives subser vient to his purposes, he presented to this Congress with an audacity shocked at no inconsistency; proclaiming the entire work of reconstruction and restoration of these States an accomplished fact, and denying that any other dept of the Government had the prerogative, power, or right to question the of such action on the nation, or to call in question either his power or purposes in the premises. Thus had been ofrom existence the whole fabric of southern society. Their State and municipal governments, State and municipal institutions, had as a fact all been subverted; and the champion of State immutability and State inviolability would do well to square his logic in the light of this incontestable and in exorable fact. The insurgent State governments upon which the revolution opened, and in ct those upon which it closed, were then as now presented to us as defunct and dead, as ine perative and inexistent as are the ancient Governments of the bes, Palmyra, or Greece today. And this stupendous fact was but resultant from another fact, admitted and acted upon by every dept of the Government, the moral and political incapacity of the people of those States at that time to be exponated by a State government having any constitutional relation to or rights as against the national Government, for all connection with that government had been severed, excepting alone the indissoluble bond of national citizenship and consequent allegiance. Under such embarrassments and circumstances we were called to address ourselves to the duties imposed upon us by our position. The permanent peace of the country, the public safety, the reestablishment of our national authority, the material and permanent welfare of the insurgent communities, and all the inducements to the sway of law, order, civilization, and human progress demanding our immediate attention. Never were such respon sibilities imposed upon a deliberative body, and never was there such an occasion for the exercise of pure, patriotic, and enlightened statesmanship. But for this action of the Executive, then was the 1st opportunity since the organization of the Government, when the bright dreams and high purposes of its found ers, the absolute security of the blessings of liberty to us and our 'posterity, could possibly have been realized; and a failure of any dept of the Government at that juncture to cooperate in the attempt to secure that result to the utmost possible extent was a crime which cannot fail to invoke the severest condemnation of impartial history. But, sir, it is evident that this action of the Executive was deliberately intended to thwart, pervert, and prevent anticipated action of this Congress; to shorten the arm of its humanity, and weaken the sanctions of all possible requirements it might make of the insurgents before the people. It is evident that thereby he intended to place himself at the head of antagonisms in the public sentiment of the people of the South, which had arrayed that people, with such a deadly purpose and effect, against the life of the nation. It is evident that he there’ly intended to fan the fires of the spirit of the rebellion until he had warmed into life a political organization with which, with himself at the head, he might hereafter successfully contend for the control of the government. And this step was not hastily taken; this action was not resolved upon without a deliberate calculation of the forces and ener gies by which his purposes were to be accomplished. What if the course proposed involved a betrayal of party pledges, denial of professed political confidence, and an abandonment of all pretense of consistency. He well calculated that the cohesive power of the spoils of public plunder would be sufficient to make party of thieves even; that sycophancy would still fawn and flatter, and political success be sufficient to obliterate every remembrance of.inconsistency. He supposed that he had the gage of the passions and prejudices of the popular mind, and was prepared to feed those passions and inflame its delusions. He had weighed in the scale of his own integrity the honor, integrity, and constancy of the nation, and coldly, yet vainly, calculated the amount of patronage and appliances required to bribe. them to his ends. Thus bent upon his purposes, no concession by us, excepting those which surrendered our manhood, which abnegated the functions we hold, and left the country a prey to desperate political adventurers, could E. averted the storm which subsequently burst on the country. The country will bear witness to the fact that for months this Congress sat under the imputation of almost imbecile weakness because we hesitated to accept the issue which the Executive so defiantly and tauntingly hurled in ourteeth. We hesitated until the country almost commenced to doubt our fidelity to principle or our constancy to serve them. I am appealing now to facts within the consciousness of us all, how we hesitated and demurred for the manifestations of his pleasure with reference to every act we considered, no matter how necessary our immediate action or how vital to the country; how, day by day, we were startled by his inconstant and incoherent utterances, as with all the pomp of pontiff, he promulgated them for the public press or public ear, to awe the timid, to distract the weak, and poison the confiding heart of the people against us; how once and again, presuming upon his confidence and cooperation, even the presumption of confidence was repelled by vetoes couched in the lowest appeals to the vulgar prejudices of the country against us; and how unwilling still to let him go we palliated his short comings and excused his follies until the appearance of longer reposing confidence on our part was criminal, for the fact of his apostacy and betrayal had been roweled into the previously confiding heart of the country. But, sir, when we sit in the shadows of this rebellion, the greatest conflict of centuries; when we contemplate its scope, its aims, its purposes and origin, its cruel exactions of hu man suffering, its drafts upon the energies of this generation, and the relentless mortgage it has imposed upon the right hand of its posterity, and its necessary effect upon our future governmental policy; and contemplate also the fact that the issues it precipitates into the pol ities of the nation are the land marks of national progress, are the scales upon which we are given to read the elevations and depressions of humanity; when we contemplate that these issues were for the ultimate decision of the heart and brain of the nation, this action of the Executive, in thus arrogating to himself the sole prerogative of their adjustment or settlement, assumes a hideous magnitude of error, not to say criminality., Contemplated in its moral aspects it has all the profanity of a taunt against the purposes of the Almighty. It is the interposition of a man's hand against the light of Heaven, or His will, to check the irre sistible motion of the spheres. But, contemplated as political action, it had no legitimate object and was an unwarrantable provocation to the disturbance of the public mind. The people had become fully convinced that it was the prerogative of Congress to fix and settle the status of the insurgent States in the Union. It was a popular instinct of the people. It was their conviction, drawn from their knowledge of the precepts of the Constitution, from the teachings of history, and the overbearing demands of the public safety. Were the liberties of the people any less safe in the hands of Congress than in those of any other dept of the Government? Does history present a single encroachment upon the liberties of the people by the popular branch of a representative Government? Was it even possible, under our theory of government, that such encroachments should come except through the executive dept? The framers of the Constitution wisely anticipated the answer to these questions. The manner in which they interposed the checks and balances of that instrument, and the placing of the exercise of the powers of other depts of the Government under our ultimate control by providing for the impeachment of their officers, is an answer to any speculation on the subject; and the omine us retort of Sir Edward Coke to the arrogant message of Charles I to the House of Commons, at a time when they were considering the exercise of the king's prerogative and warning, the Commons against such a course, “that it is the duty of this House to moderate the king's prerogative nothing which reacheth to abuse that may not be treated here, ” may yet receive a far more significant utterance in our own history than when it was 1st chronicled in the history of English i. But one word as to the pretenses and guise under which the rebellion, discomfited in arms, precipitates itself into this Congress to rasp the scepter of the power of the nation; course, Mr. Chairman, high constitutional sanctions are easily found. Subterfuges and faise premises are easily invented. Why, they say that this rebellion, which in its political organization for 4 bloody years held almost undisputed sway over a quarter of the contin ent; which baffled the craft, of our cabinets, and defeated, resisted, and held back almost the omnipotency of our arms, whose armies during all that time represented more material martial force and power than those of Frederick the Great, Aoi or Caesar; whose cruisers on the high seas drove from the protection of our flag 800,000 tons of our shipping, sinking or burning as many more, more than the entire mercantile marine force of some of the 1st class Powers of Europe, or of any State of antiquity; and whose cruisers as lawful belligerents in the exercise of a legally accredited right anchored in the ports of every nation, but one of the globe; that all this has no significance above that of individual action, nothing above a riot, and that too, as the Governmentis administered, not worthy the consideration of a grand jury one hour; that all this, as the SecyState dwarfs and belittles it, has no name or meaning above “our recent southern political disturbances, ” only a rude announcement of a political difference. They would have us believe that, having wrung from our Government and from the civilized world the concession of belligerents in war, they are not subject to all their incidents and penalties. And we are told by the President and his artisans indeed the President has made a ormal announcement of the fact “that the moment peace was declared the insurgent States became rehabilitated at once and instantly restored to all their former positions and rights in the Union.” But this position concedes too much. In December, 1865, the President sent a special communication to this House in answer to a resolution as to “by what authority certain State criminals were held in confinement, ” in which communication he then declares that a state of war against the U.S. then existed in all these insurgent States. This, too, at a point of time months after these pretended State governments were organized, and they had elected Sens&Reps to this Congress. Thus the rights of these pretended State governments and their representatives are condemned by the concessions of the logic and law of the Executive. But in all reason if war, not insurrection, can have no effect upon the integrity of the State governments, why should the fact of peace be required in the work of their restoration? What is the necessity of any policy of “restoration” or “reconstruction” where there has been neither forfeiture nor destruction. such a position has all the illogical consequences of impossibility. This requirement of peace which the President considers as a condition precedent to restoration or reconstruction of these States has no basis in fact, and if conceded as necessary blasts his whole policy to the winds. But, sir, one more step in the presidential logic of reconstruction is that these insurgent States have complied with all required conditions, and therefore good faith and right entitle them at once to admission to Congress. Now, this placing of a single condition or lim itation upon the right of the insurgent States to assume their former condition or relation in the Union is a concession of the whole constitutional question; I care not whether that condition is ‘ or disloyalty, war or peace. If limitations or conditions exist by what power are they imposed? Are they imposed by the Constitution? Plainly not. They are imposed simply by the conqueror's might. They are imposed as a means of the public safety. concede one limitation or condition and why not all others compatible with that safety? Then who is to determine their adjustment, and who when they are satisfied? If this right is suspended for a single moment where is the power vested to revive it? Who holds this discretion to exercise? I care not if you hold to a permanent or “temporary suspension” of the right of functions of these States; the question is still the same, where is the power of reanimation? If the power is falsely or improperly exercised has the nation any appeal, and if so, to whom? In what constitutional forum is the ultimate decision? The power rests where the Constitution puts it, in the U.S.; not in any dept of that Government exclusively. Not in the Executive, for his power over the rebels was exhausted in the proclamation of amnesty and the signature of this pardon. That power was a simple suspension of the right of confiscation, extirpation, or to inflict the penalty of death. It related to certain functions of national as contra distinguished from State citizenship. But the disability of these States is not alone a disability as against the national Government, but on the contrary a primary and paramount disability is in the people of the State. The rebellion was not less a rebellion against the State than the national Government. The 1st fruits of the rebellion was the subversion of the State governments. This treason to the State governments affected the rights of State citizenship, and with the one folithe other. As treason against the General Governmentworked an incapacity of the citizen as against that government, so treason against the State by the same rule works an incapacity in the citizen of the State. Now, both this destruction of the State government and its citizenship were facts primarily recognized by President Johnson in his scheme of reconstruction. Thus by proclamation he declares that his appointment of his provisional governors is “to present such a republican form of State government as will entitle the State to the guarantees of the Constitution.” Were these States as States then entitled to the guarantees of the Constitution why then this action of the Executive? Hence also, it is to restore State citizenship he deems it necessary to limit, define, fix, control, and confer the elective franchise on those who are to participate in the Government; that peculiar endowment and right of citizenship from which under our form of government the State is supposed to emanate, to which it owes its origin, and without which it could not exist one hour. But all know that the Executive has as much power to fix the qualification or limit the right of a voter for a member of the English House of Commons as for the meanest elective office in the State of NCarolina. And this is the weakness of those State governments. They are creatures of usurpation. They were so condemned by the best legal mind of the South, and they have been so condemned upon an appeal to the highest tribunal known to our policy, the bar of the intelligent judgment of the American people. And they will forever sit under that condemnation until it can be found that the whole theory of the government has been perverted, and the national Executive can bestow State enfranchisement, can remove State disabilities, can restore the rights of State citizenships in a word, until centralization shall have become the theory, and the whole functions and powers of the State and national Governments shall have been lost in the brain and power of the national Executive. This necessarily anticipates the conclusion to which I come as to the legal condition of the insurgent States. I assume that until they are formally recognized and validated by congress they have no constitutional relation to the General Government. I deny that the Executive has any authority to reorganize a State or to initiate steps to that end; I insist that the attempt so to do is an act contrary to the theory of the Government, against its wisest provisions, and fraught with the greatest danger. As a practical question the concession of their validity is a repudiation of the whole results and benefits of the war; as a constitutional question such a precedent is pregnant with evils which cast their shadows of disaster down the whole course of our future history. For one I shall not enter upon such an experiment. I voted for the constitutional amendments of the last session because I thought them decla rations of sound, necessary, and as far as they went efficient constitutional requirements. It was my conviction at the time that our action in the premises ought to have been prefaced by a formal act or resolution of Congress declaring the action of the Executive touching the pretended organization of these States if not illegal, at least what he expressly declared it to be, “provisional or experimental” only, and “subject in its results to the approval of congress.”. This action ought now to be taken at once. The sanction of time matures the great est aggressions and wrongs into accredited rights. The President now pleads the fact that we did not declare him an usurper by the immediate overthrow of those State governments, as a justification for his usurpation and a vindication of his course. He tells us in his message that “Congress failed to provide any other plan of reconstruction.” This is his admission of our power in the premises. If the power exists, d. duty is imperative. With such a declaration emanating from this congress, evincing its cool, settled, determined purpose in regard to these State organizations, you have taken the 1st and most efficient step in the solution of the problem of reconstruction. My hour would not permit me at this time to discuss in detail all the requisite guaranties which I think the national safety demands of the insurgent States. The constitutional amendments submitted have already received the sanction of the people in a contest which has tried their honor, their integrity, and inflexible purpose more than any since the organization of the Government. That action is final; that decree is irrevocable. The people are too sensitive to their rights, too imperious in their high purposes, to be thwarted in the ultimate realization of the benefits they are calculated to bestow. Time has matured my conviction of their propriety. Events transpiring since their submission have convinced me of their necessity. ut the manner in which these proposed constitutional amendments have been received by the insurgent States has demonstrated the fact that they are superficial, and unattended by other requirements will rather prolong than eradicate the evils they were intended to correct. Prompted by and acting upon the unchecked and unrevoked authority of the Executive, they now repudiate our overtures and laugh our authority to scorn, and today the rebellion in its ostracism of all known friends of the Government, in its relentless proscription of all who have adhered to its fortunes, in its sentiment of caste, in its State and municipal legislation and administration, in its animus, in its purpose to dominate the government, in its all, excepting the overt act of war, is as potent in the South as at the hour of Sumter or at any time during the war. The war never had any political or moral justification other than as a means of bringin into control of those States those who were loy to the Government and a proper administration of its laws. Each dollar spent, each drop of blood spilt, each maimed or fallen hero in that struggle, were so many pledges to the world that the hour of the nation's victory should be the hour of the realization of the fact. Without this consummation the war be comes a murderous mockery, a wretched fail ure. But up to this hour how has this promise been kept? Witness the 1,000 corpses of loyal blacks lining the by ways and highways of those States, fiendishly, wantonly, and even sportively murdered, and whose blood rests on the skirts of that whole people, because neither public sentiment nor law has even attempted to bring a single perpetrator of these outrages to justice. Ask of the loyal whites, and they point you to the 100s thronging this Capi tol demanding of us even the boon of protection. They point you to the 1000s fleeing from their homes and exiles in the land they had sacrificed all to save. They point you"to even the grave despoiled of its trust by solemn legislative action; to the ashes of the soldier of the Republic dug from the soil he had redeemed by his death, to be consigned to the common receptacle of fiends and outlaws of society, that thereby they might dishonor the jand insult the nation for which they ied. History presents not a parallel to that reli ious,patriotic devotion to a Government exby those in the insurgent States who adhered to the Government during this struggle; a constancy attested by all the perils, yea, and the sacrifices of martyrdom; a constancy holding allegiance to the Government when its arm was too weak to reciprocate the duty of protection; a faith peering through every cloud of defeat and gloom which for those terrible years seemed almost to stifle in our own breasts each illusion of hope. Heroic men standing amidst the wreck, chaos, and desolation of in. dividual and national honor, of violated oaths and outraged laws, holding still their faith; Men who in that carnival of persecution and proscription, unchecked vengeance, with its untold ferocity, and all unmarked by any miti gatory feature, yielding none of their high purpose. These are virtues deserving to be can onized in the heart of the nation. Upon those virtues which no threats could awe, no perfidy barter, or bribery tempt, the unerring instincts of justice, the teachings of reason, the demands of peace and national safety, placed at once the reorganization of those States and the control of their destiny. The failure to do this was a crime which no words can palliate and no subterfuge excuse. The evils and disasters which this crime invoked you will find difficulty in the attempt to aggravate. There is not today an evil distracting our politics; there is no portentous cloud casting its impenetrable shadow into the future; there is not a murmuring discord of anarchy or an open threat of revolution grating upon the sensitive ear of the people which would or possibly could have been had this great crime been averted. Sir, your work of restoration will never commence until the Congress of the U.S. assumes to be one of the depts of the General Government. It will never commence until it dare assert the fact that when the constitution declares the U.S shall guaranty to each State a RFG that there are other powers within the Constitution to be consulted than the Executive. It will never commence until you have declared, in the language of the Supreme Court, that the Executive, as Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, “cannot exercise a civil function.” It will never commence until you have declared in the spirit of our institutions that the President in the exercise of the war power, in the creation or organization of these pretended State governments, has invaded the prerogative of this body, yea, the very prerogative of the people of those States, and set the most dangerous precedent in the whole of our constitutional history. It cannot be considered as commenced until you have laid these giant usurpations and wrongs at the feet of the loyal people of those communities for whose protection they were ostensibly created. And, sir, the work of restoration will have been accomplished when you declare, in the language of the supreme Court, that this body has the sole power to determine which is the lawful government set up in these States; that if conditions are to be required we are the constitutional body to interpose those conditions, and that those conditions shall be loyalty to your Government, full protection to property, and person of all within their borders, together with a full in vestment in all men alike of all ifo, franchises, and rights necessary to the most ample enjoyment of the blessings of liberty. No more fearful experiment can be tried by the nation than the investment of one race or class of community with despotic legal arro gance and power, while at the same time you clothe another with nothing but the servility of trembling dependence. We have learned at too bitter cost the effect on the political morals of the nation of a lack in community of all reciprocal benefits and interests and legal obligations between race and race, man and man. We have tried that system which bred nothing but contempt on one hand and servile awe on the other, and the contemplation of which made Jefferson tremble for his country at the possibility of a God. We have tried a system of government which abrogated that sublime info. attribute of law, and which through all time has not failed wherever found to challenge and secure all reasonable submission to its authority, and without which law cannot long have any sanction, the protection of helplessness, weakness, necessity, and dependence, and which gathers them into its sanctuary as the most sacred object of its hio. interest and most anxious solicitude. No nation but the most abject despotism can long survive a deprivation of any considerable class of its subjects from the full protection and benefits of its laws. Universal history attests this fact as one of the penalties of the exercise of exorbitant power. Moreover, he who has been accustomed, even to the smallest extent, to exercise an arbitrary and irresponsiblecontrol over the lowest of his fellow creatures, to meet with no check either of power or popular opinion, “to feed a degrad:ing pride by the habitual contemplation and contact of objects which the laws have aban doned” to his contempt and will, cannot fail to carry into all the walks of private life and public action a spirit at once noxious and dangerous to liberty. The lessons of this war were but to teach us the dangerous infection of degraded objects in the eyes of the law. Liberty, that divine summary of all good, like all its constituents and graces, happiness, virtue, and charity, in God's providence, must perish by hoarding and augment by diffusion; and we peril the peace of the nation, we dwarf its future greatness, we check its high career, if we exclude from its highest enjoyment anyone within our borders whom God has thought worthy of humanity. How is this view vindicated by the painful exhibitions we are daily called to witness? What other system than one similar to that to which I have just alluded could possibly have given to history those foulest blots upon its Roo.words, Pillow, Andersonville, and NewOrleans? What other system could have produced such diabolisms as day by day crowd the public prints and the ear of House with tales of horror, the very recital of which freezes the marrow to the bone, and drives the blood back curdled to its fountains? What other national Executive than one whose conscience was subverted by its influences, having power to prevent such crimes, could hand a defense less race over to such torture and wink at such outrages, while he strikes hands with their tormentors, conspirators against the nation's life? What other Executive than one whose daily contact with such scenes had stifled the ordinary impulses of humanity would dare to pal liate such crimes, and single handed attempt to, choke down the gushing protest of Christendom against them 7 And how quickly come the practical results of even our premeditated abandonment of the black man, and our ostracism of him from the benefits of the Government. At once came the call for a permanent increase of your standing army to treble its number prior to the war. Let us look at this as states men. In the face of what necessity was this increase made more than the full expenses of the Government prior to the war? What was the exigency demanding it? The nations of the earth trembled at the thought of your power, and there was no possible contingenc within the whole scope of conjecture which could possibly bring us into collision with them. Your SecyState had just declared the recently rebellious States perfectly restored to amicable relations to the General Government. Why must the nation be burdened with this expense? Why is the nation, which could not tolerate the humane and Christian expedient of the Freedman's Bureau, now to inflict upon the labor of the nation the incubus of a standing army? This demand, this recommendation, this action of the Government was only a substitution of force for humanity and justice. The pretended necessity involving it is conclusive against the policy producing it. Why is it that by the advice of the Lieutenant General military occupancy is to be continued over the insurgent States, and why does the Executive talk of a possible war of races as a justification, at the expense of the nation, of this maintenance of the national police there? Let us remember that in all our late struggle this race, with the remembrance of centuries of degradation and slavery, with a present consciousness of the fearful fact that they were then the objects of a system of human wrong which lead their persecutors around the whole circle of human vices, and of which they were the victims; with every provocation, every motive, and every justification for revenge more than ever stirred the passions of any people, and yet no single outrage has ever been laid to their charge. What is this night mare that seems to haunt the public quiet; what new crimes are these people the victims of; what right withheld; what threatened wrong depending that we can avert, that demands this new appliance of a standing army in our policy, more in its cost, more in its power than is required to keep a quarter of Asia at the foot of the British throne? I appeal to the conscience of the people to that of the nation and the world. The answer is here: it is the possibility of broken pledges of the nation of their equality before the law. It is the legitimate result of threatened crimes against them as a race, crimes organized under all the sanction and terrible enginery of pretended State laws, of off. penalties for nominal crimes, of class legislation, of codes of blood against them and them only, which no nation can enact without peril, and which no people should enact without paying the forfeit of blood. Let these insurgent State governments continue, let the African race be handed over to their tender mercies, let there be no interosition of the power of the nation in. their and this programme will require, not only 70,000, but 200,000 soldiers to police these States. We have given them a measure of liberty, and as sure as the unerring logic of the human heart we will be obliged to follow it to its logical consequence. We have given them citizenship; you will be compelled to give them its necessary concomitant protection. If you give him protection, his equality in all respects before the law will assert itself. Force may postpone, but it cannot prevent. The equalit of. men may come, as I trust God it will, peacefully, yet come it will inevitably if it costs the nation the reenactment of the bitterest experiences of centuries. With this, peace permanent and lasting will settle upon us; without this, as God rufes and vindicates humanity there can be no peace. With this, we shall have a manly submission to all reasonable authority; without this your power will be but a provocation to future resistance, to future rejection of its sanctions, and, as it may be, revolution and anarchy. Am I asked for the power to disturb these State governments and to require the terms which. indicated of those communities before they are allowed the resumption of their former rights in the U.ion? I might reply that the right to make war implies the right to make peace; it implies the right to the exercise of all powers necessary to that end. Peace, just and permanent, is the right of war, it is the end and only object of war, and to accomplish that end the right of war is to strike down all laws, constitutions, or conventionalities of men that interpose. But the President and these States have conceded our power in the ".the one by express reservation and the other by the acceptance of the terms of such reservation. Upon the organization of these States the President placed in our hands and subject to our control the limitations and conditions upon which they were organized, and upon which their existence respectively depends. He and they have made these State governments subject to our will. Indeed, at the time that was an express condition of his policy. These States accepted that policy: have they any right to ccmplain of its terms? In his instructions to Governor Sharkey the President expressly informs him that the government which might result from his appointment must be understood “as provisional only.” In his instructions to Governor Mar vin, of Florida, he insists that the restoration contemplated by his policy must be distinctly understood as being at all times subject to the control or “approval of Congress.”. The proclamations upon which all other of these States were attempted to be reorganized were iden tical, and such was the conceded policy of the President's policy at the inception of these governments. Now, by what show of consist ency do the President and the friends of these States now insist upon the inviolability of these State governments and that they are above any action we in our wisdom may see fit to take with reference to them? By whom has one conceded power been circumscribed? What power or fact now intervenes that was not then as potent as now 7. the President, pleading for the inviola bility of these State governments, now insists that Congress is estopped against the imposition of any terms upon these States. He says that they “have exercised the highest functions of States, that of participating in the alteration of the Constitution of the General Government.” The argument is, “they accepted the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, therefore they have necessarily all the powers and rights of all other States.” But was the part taken by those States State legislation or federal dictation? Was that action the action of the people or the pursuasion of Federal bayo nets? Was the action of any legal efficacy? Was slavery even in existence to abolish? Was the sham of the passage of that amendment by those States legislation or a bargain for pardon of those who played the part of passing it? This pretended action of the States was a burlesque on the name of legislation. The State governments pretending to pass or ratify the amendment were purely the creatures of the Federal Government. Those pretended Legislatures were not known to the constitution or laws of those States, but were bodies born of Federal power and installed over those States at the point of the bayonets.of the national Army, to play, the part to be assigned to them by the caprices of the central power and policy of the national Executive at Washington. This pretended ratification or acceptance of the constitutional amendment was the simple playing of that part of the programme. But how quickly this claim of the Executive dissolves at the touch of the test of his own logic. He and his partisans now insist that it is as essential that all the States should be represented in Congress to the proper submission of an amendment of the Constitution as to participate in their passage or acceptance. Yet all know this amendment, thus accepted by those States, was submitted, they not participat.ing in the act. Thus the Executive urges upon us the indorsement of a nugatory act of the General Government as the validating act of these States. Why, we ask, does the Executive insist upon the fact that we are estopped denying the validity of these governments. From the fact that they have ratified this amendment unlawfully and unconstitutionally submitted, as he claims. But, sir, he tells us that the executive and judicial depts have been singularly coin cident in recognizing these States, and therefore again we are estopped from denying their constitutional validity. The answer to that is, that the determination of the question as to whether a pretended State government is a lawful constitutional form of f is a legislative act expressly so declared by the Supreme Court, and a question which neither the xecutive nor the Supreme Court have any right to anticipate the action of Congress with reference thereto. But, sir, are we to be seriously told that because the Supreme Court recognizes the ge ographical State of SCarolina as the boun dary of a judicial district or State, that therefore this or that form of State government set up within that State is a valid constitutional form of government? That there is no difference between a judicial and a political State, or between a geographical State and an actual constitutional form of State government under our Constitution? Upon such platitudes and assumptions as these the President in his recent message rises to be thementor of this Congress. With an air of protestation against our supposed claim to impose all conditions in our judgment neces. sary to the public safety upon these insurgent communities, he solemnly proots “against any change by usurpation.” But, sir, before the President enters his protest against our action as “usurpation” he would do well to square his own action by the maxim of his own arrogant warning to us, a coequal and coordinate dept of the Government. In less than 2 brief years of office he has exercised more questionable powers, assumed more doubtful constitutional functions, obliterated more constitutional barriers, and interposed more corrupt schemes to the expression of the popular sentiment or will of the people than.]". Executives since the existence of the Government. And such has been the verdict of the people upon his Administration. such was the arraignment of his Administration before the people in. the last elections, and their judgment of condemnation against lin. But while for one year the Administration have arraigned us for “usurpation, ” from the fact that we have not conceded the legitimacy of the presidential of: of these insurgent State governments, how has the Administration conducted toward them? Upon his theory of the rights of these State governments, at whose door really lies the charge of usurpation toward them? This Congress, in the neglect of its duty, as I have claimed, has not yet done one positive act affecting the integrity of these governments. But in what single act of the Executive has he practically conceded their full rights as States? Has he in any instance treated these several States as anything more than military dependencies? For many months after these States were in full blast, after they had elected Sens&Reps to this body, he held their archives in the iron chests of his military governors, and governed and ruled them by proclamations and military orders, ful minated by him from this city with all the imperious efficiency of the royal rescripts of an Alexander or Napoleon. He suffers and provides for the convocation of their Legislatures; the time designated is fixed, not in accordance with the constitution or laws of the State, but fixed with reference to the procuration of certain legislation before the assembling of Congress, and with a view to prevent its anticipated action. But when thus assembled, their military governors advise him that it is doubtful whether they will concede the required legislation; he is advised that the “temper of the body is bad;” in. fact, are contumacious; but as a corrective the withholding of their pardons is suggested; it is done, and the legislation is obtained. The Legislatures of these pretended sovereign States enter upon the experiment of legislation; they pass enactments; but under the persuasive suggestion of arrest, trial, condemnation, and hanging of all executive, judicial, or ministe rial officers of those States attempting their enforcement, the President gives, to those States, to this House, and the world a practical exemplification of the powers and rights of a “sovereign State” fully reconstructed under his policy. Sir, the whole course of the President touching these States, taken with his claims to their right to be recognized by congress, is a perfect marvel and infatuation of inconsistency. But has he recognized these insurgent State governments as full constitutional States? how has he done it? By the appointment of provisional governors, he says. . was done, e says, to restore the suspended functions of the State government. But are not the functions of the State government and the functionary inseparable? Were these provisional governors State functionaries? Were they to exercise any known constitutional functions, either of the State or national governments? Most assuredly not. They were neither creat ures upon whose shoulders a lawful State government could be cast, from whose loins one could spring, nor through whose line of descent one could succeed. They are simply monsters in the whole constitutional policy and family of the Government. Sir, upon what theory are your provisional governments established, and what is a “provisional government?” What is it, sir, but a government extemporised by the force of mere necessity alone? What is its basis in the State except the extinction of all former State government? such was the solemn, but now for gotten proclamation of the Executive in this case. It is not a constitutional government, nor the legitimate outgrowth of such government. It is the fruit of revolution; it is the necessity of the State not yet crystalized into law; it is the revivification and return of reason to the body politic as it startles from the embrace of anarchy; civil disability, and civil death. It is a provisional government, because no other government exists; it is a provisional government, because there is neither the power nor right of the government it deposes to provide for or perpetuate its successor. And upon any other assumption a provisional government is treason, is revolution, and anarchy in the State. These are some of the reflections inducing my mind to the belief that it is not only the prerogative, but the duty of Congress to assume control of this matter of the reconstruction of these insurgent communities. The organization of the State governments was never claimed to have been upon any other than this express condition. The people of these States fully understood the matter, and until the Executive had placed himself, in violation of his pledges, in open hostility to the exercise of this power by Congress, would never have denied its right, nor opposed its assertion. Whether these State governments should be allowed to continue, with the further imposition of all terms consistent with the absolute safety of the nation, and with the provision and assurance by congress that they shall be accepted and validated upon their acceptance in good faith, or whether the loyal people of those States should be allowed icauthorized by Congress to establish a government, which government should be recognized by Congress as the legal State government of those States, are means looking to the same ends, each involving the exercise of undoubted powers of Congress, and upon the adoption of either one or the other I should have no difference with the majority of this House when the same was determined upon. But, in the language of my colleague, I would require these guarantees of the national safety.firmly embedded in the bulwarks of the Constitution. I would require them to fix forever the high endowment of national citizenship as the right of all; and place beyond peril the liberty and equal civil rights of i. I would have them?ja. in unequivocal language the nation's supremacy and duty on all questions and subjects affecting either, and I would gird the national Government with authority sufficient to crush every assumption of power or right to impair the one or jeopardize the enjoyment of the other. How, sir, can we do otherwise unless we abandon the Government? There never was any alternative in this matter. Our hesitancy has been and is our weakness. The necessity of the nation demands it. The people have rejected the policy of the Executive. These States make no overtures, and they have up to this spurned any attempt on our part to offer any. The power of this Congress, backed by the loyal people, is the only power they will respect or is left for the nation to exercise in our future reconstruction. Of course we shall meet the opposition of the President, of the rebels, and the Democratic party. e have not the right nor wish to expect otherwise. Up to this time they have arrayed themselves in impotent opposition to every measure contemplated calculated to give humanitya higher elevation or to secure for it any permanent benefit as a reward for all its sacrifices and struggles in the war. And, sir, I consider this to be one of the most lamentable exhibitionsionfgpolitical degeneracy. What measure look to either of these ends has received the sanction of either the Democracy or the president? Which one has not invoked their bitter and most implacable opposition? It seems to me that their whole course up to this hour has been but a merciless attempt at the crucifixion of humanity. It has been up to this time but a little less than a jargon of constitutional protests against its every effort to assert itself, and that, too, at the expense of every possible claim of political consistency. The Democratic party in their national convention at Chicago o “Resolved, That the interference of the military authorities of the U.S. in the elections of the States was a shameful violation of the Constitution, and a repetition of such acts would be held as revolutionary and resisted by all the powers under their control.” At the same time their prominent leading men in Congress and elsewhere insisted that the people.insurgent States without enabling acts of Congress could not assume their former rights of representation in Congress. But now the President steps in, and as a pure military measurestamps out the defacto State government in those States by the same military power, inaugurates new ones in their stead by that power, molds and controls and superintends all the minutest details of their governments, and denies to Congress any voice in the matter. One would naturally suppose that here is the very provocation to awaken the jealousy of the Democracy, our constitutional guardians, and stir their blood to the revolution they threat ened. But all at once they lose all their ab horrence of military rule, or to the exercise of the worst and most arbitrary feature of its power. Now, the very governments which they threat tened to resist by revolution they propose to inaugurate by the same means, and their press at the North now discuss and seriously entertain the question of deposing Congress at the point of the bayonet that they may accomplish that end. Why is it, and what are the motives for this unaccountable and degrading inconsistency. I submit it is here. These governments are now the means of Democratic and rebel power. These State governments are the needed instruments of political ostracism and disfranchisement of the only loyal element of the South. Because they now need these military pretended State governments as the impassable gulf over which the national government cannot pass, as they otherwise would, to rescue the loyal white and black man of those States from the rack and torture to which the baffled seething passions of the rebellion have consigned them. The expedient of the Freedmen's Bureau was to be resorted to. It was a measure following in the furrows of war with the seeds of permanent peace. It proposed to take a race of 4 million people representing the laboring producing 5. of the insurgent States, “houseless, homeless wanderers on the earth, ” with no possible knowledge of their rights, in a society inimical to every influence that could possibly elevate or protect them, and for a temporary season protect their person, their lives, and the property acquired by their honest toil. The Bureau directed and administered as humanity and justice demanded, the labor of those communities would have doubled their products, produced nearly a balance of foreign trade in our favor, reduced the volume of our currency an incalculable amount, and converted those States now only a tax upon the beneficiaries of the nation into communities contributing toward the expense of the Government,thereby relieved the loyal North from almost the entire burdens of the war. But these military State governments, then supported and trembling upon the military arm of the nation, in fact too weak without this measure to afford protection to this class, and too infamous not to attempt it, we were told by the Democracy was the wall of adamant through which the full constitutional power of the nation could not penetrate to accomplish that end. More than ten years since the Sultan of the Turkish empire issued and put into effect the following decree throughout his dominions: “Every distinction or designation tending to any make class whatever of the subjects of my empire in ferior to another class, on account of their religion, language, or race, shall be forever effaced from the administrative protocol. The laws shall be put in force against the use of any injurious or offensive terms either among private individuals or on part of the authorities.” such was the concession of the civil rights to all within the dominion of the Turkish empire; concessions from a power gray and old in despotism and not under the inspirations of Christianity; they were political sentiments which shocked neither the moral nor political sense of the most abject despotism of Europe. But the Congress of the U.S. in the progress of events is brought to the consideration of a bill which contemplated the guarantee of the same rights to all, and what an exhibit do we witness? Day by day, and month by month an enlightened American Congress hesitate and debate the practical question, which is the prophet of humanity, Christ or Mahomet, whether human rights are assure of protection under our own boasted government as under that Ottoman dynasty which for cen turies has been the outlaw of almost all civilized nations of the globe; more than this, the question is seriously debated as to the power of the nation to confer an equality of civil rights on all its subjects. The bill finally passes, but it passes against the united vote of the Democratic party. The measure passes from this body to the representative head of the Republic and of American civilization, to the Chamber of the national Executive, and for his approval. But it comes back to us, with the stamp of the dark ages upon it in the shape of a veto, having no other legitimate bearing on our national polity than the official promulgation of the fact that hu manity has no rights that the Government is i.respect. But, thank God, it is not left to the Executive, the Democratic party, nor their rebel sympathizers to attaint the charter that liberty and humanity have, not only in the power but the purposes of the nation. A per verse Executive may refuse to execute this faw, it may be smothered or crushed beneath the merciless platitudes of the Supreme Court; party organizations may be indifferent or hostile; men may combinue to prevent its assertion, but the man, the party, the dept of Government, standing in the way of the ultimate realization of the equality of all men before the law, will be ground to powder. Sir, I notice a oanxiety in the public mind as to the possible action of the Supreme Court, touching the “civil rights bill.” But, sir, I have learned to place but little reliance upon the dogmas of that court as an element of power, in to the nation upon any question the rights of humanity or the advancement of the race. As it has been administered that court has been but the chain which bound humanity helpless to the rock, of pretended constitutional immutability, that its vitals might be gnawed by the cankering vices of other generations or consumed by the devour. ING flames of our own. It gave us the Dred Scott decision, but the chain it sought to rivet more surely and firmly on the limbs of the slave were melted in the war it invoked. And now, if the Supreme Court should take the action on this bill which some anticipate, cal culating upon the moral elements and forces which move the world, I had rather have the single black soldier of the Republic, spurned as he will be from the sanctuary of the Supreme Court as he applies to it for protection, as an element of power, than all the adjudications of that court touching the rights of man or the power of the nation upon them since the organization of the Government. I do not believe that that court will be hasty to array itself against the spirit of the age, the tendency of modern, thought, and the irresistible momen tum with which they have to this moment up rooted each opposing obstacle. Mr. Speaker, our action is not alone for this hour, but for all time. Our legislation addresses itself not only to the good of this generation, but of all generations of men. The stake is not alone the awful stake of the permanent peace, prosperity, and welfare of 30 million human beings, but the progress of civilization, constitutional liberty, constitutional form of government, the destiny of a conti nent, the hope of liberal governments on earth. The lines of national policy and action we now draw cast their deepening shadows of national night along the whole course of our future empire until the mind shudders and starts back at the contemplation of its gloom; or they reveal the full bow of the nation's promise, its arch encompassing all mankind, and the fruition of its now painfully struggling hopes, of liberty, equality, and justice to all. such a future I believe we control, and such a future is alone worthy of the present realizations, the heroic sacrifices, the immortal memories of the Republic.