Mr. JOHNSON. I am not about to continue the debate, but merely to state why I think the precedent in the case of Missouri has no application to the one before us. That question had not been before the Senate at any antecedent period. It is true, as is stated by my friendfrom missouri, that at that time there were differences of opinion in the country whether negroes who had i.born free in any of the States of the Union, either because theirancestors were free, or because slavery had been abolished in the State where they were born, were citizens or not of the U.S. Massachusetts entertained a very decided opinion that they were citizens. Some of the very best men of the country entertained the same opinion, and that opinion was entertained Iby suppose a large majority of the members who constituted the Congress at the time the Missouri act was passed. If they were citizens, then clearly the provision of the State constitution which gave to the Legislature or proposed to give to the Legislature of Missouri the right by law to exclude them from coming into the State was in violation of the clause of the Constitution of the U.S. to which my friendfrom Missouri has referred. Since then, to be sure, theSCOTUS by a majority decided that they were not citizens within the meaning of the judicial clause of the Constitution of the U.S., and that they were therefore not competent to sue in the U.S. courts. But, as the Senate are not now to be told, there were very grave doubts whether that decision in that particular was a sound one or not. 2 of the ablest men who have ever been in that tribunal held that it was not sound the late Mr. Justice McLean and Mr. Justice Curtis. Mr. Justice Nelson expressed no opinion at all upon that point. At the time the constitution of missouri was before Congress on the question as to the admission of that State into the Union under that constitution, that was a very litigated question; but the result has been that the public judgment has pronounced, independent of our civil rights.P. the subsequent constitutional amendment, that black men are citizens. Acting upon that assumption, Congress claimed the right and I think they had it if the assumption was well taken to annex to their act admitting the State of Missouri into the Union a condition that that, provision, in the constitution of the State, which they believed to be repugnant to the Constitution of the U.S., should be considered there after as a nullity. My friend [Mr. HENDER son] tells me it would have been a nullity upon that assumption if Congress had admitted them without condition; but from obundant caution Congress thought proper to attach the condition. I think the caution was well taken. It is the duty of Congress, when they are called upon to act at all in their legislative capacity, to provide that no article in the Constitution of the U.S. upon which depend the rights of the citizens shall be violated at all; not to leave it as a matter of doubt to have the question hereafter decided by the Supreme Court, because so to leave it is to encourage litigation and to continue an angry state of feeling throughout the country upon a very vital question. The members of Congress at that time, I have no doubt, really thought (and as the result has since proved they were correct in thinking) that free black men were just as much citizens as free white men; and in order to guard against an interference with the rights which attached to them as citizens, Congress said to Missouri: “The provision which you have in your constitution shall not by you be used for the purpose of interfering with any of those rights.” That is not this case. In this case I suppose it can hardly be doubted that without attaching this condition the State of Nebraska and the State of Colorado, when they come to be admitted, will have the right to regulate the question of suffrage. They will have a right to say whether white men alone shall vote, what qualifications the white men who are to vote shall have, or whether the black men and not the white men shall vote; and so in relation to the qualifications of the blacks. What we are about to do, therefore, is to interfere with that right which has heretofore been considered as sacred the right of a State to regulate the question of suffrage. I agree with my friendfrom Indiana, that as that is a question which belongs to the States exclusively to decide, when they are asked to give that right away, to surrender it, the question should be submitted to them. For these reasons I think the precedent of the Missouri case has no application at all to the measures which are now before us.