Mr. COWAN. Mr. President, I shall be obliged to a ologize for not being able to attain to that sublime height of bragging which has characterized the honorable Senfrom Massachusetts, but I will endeavor to state if I can a few plain facts for his consideration and that of the Senate. Of course, I have nothing to say with regard to myself. My course here has been open, and I trust without any concealment. It was never very difficult for the Senator to understand exactly whercI was. I believe, however, I may say that, in advance of him, I was the 1st man to say upon this floor that, in going down South to suppress the rebellion, it was perfectly properthat washonld treat the negro precisely as any other manifhs was an enemy shoot him; if he was afriend, use him; and that was as far as I intended to o. 1 But the Senator asserts ere in the face of the Senate, and in the face of the American people that he and his compeers, folsooth, the AntiS a very Society. have destroyed slavery; that it is their work; thatit is the result of their 25 years of toil and struggle: that it is the result of their agitation and their speechifying and their extensive knowledge of the negro and the negro character, and herelates some incidents. I am not very much in the habit ofrelati ng incidents, but I willstate one for the benefit of the honorable Senator. Somebody was talking about him and his society the other day, and stated that they had “ negro on the brain.” Some one who was by said “Well, that may be; but they have not much brain on the negro, ” [Laughter] and that, I think, Mr. President, is about the truth ofit. a“, Who destroyed slavery, Mr. President? Had the AntiSlavery Society any agency in it? Did the AntiSlavery Society or its representatives upon this floor at the outset of this war declare that they were going to destroy slave? No, sir; but crouching behind their shicks at that time they resolved unanimously here that they were not going to destroy slavery, that. they Were going to make war to support the constitution and the laws. How long ago was that? 2 days after the battle of Bull Run, and the starch was all out of the AntiSlavery Society; it had not a boast; it had not a threat; but, as I said before, creeping dovm behind its shield, it said to the country, along with us who were honest in our utterances in that resolution, that it made war for the constitution and the laws. I ask you, Mr. President, if the secessionists of the South, in their great madness, in their rage, only akin to this northern rage, its antip odes, had not made war on the Government of the U.S., woulil slavery have been destroyed? Would all the battle of the Anti Slavery Society and all its tracts and all its preachings and all its sermonizings in the world via ever achieved that great result if it I had not been for the folly and madness of the secessionists of the South who went to war? Let the honorable Senator stand square up and look that fact in the face. He had walL at his elbow. Who fought the war? Does the Anti Slavery Society say that if the Army of the U.S. h not achieved victory after victory had not suppressed the rebellion, slavery would not have been abolished? Who then was it that abolished slavery? The gentlemen who talked or the gentlemen who acted? The senators who wie ded ton ue and pen, or the hard headed and hardhantfied soldiers who wielded the saber and bayonet? Let the country answer. I would like the honorable Senator to go out and tell our warworn soldiers who won this victo. An a word now as to his course and mine upon this floor. I tell him today that he and his set were reallyI do not Say they intended itthc alliesof the rebellion; they were its main support and strength; and when JeffersonDavis comes to make his dying confession, if I should chance to be at his elbow, I should want him, in that last moment, when the truth comes to be told, to tell who it was that gathered the whole South to a man around the standard of rebellion; who it was that down there infused the bitterness into that iight which characterized it from end to end; whoit was that enabled that weak people to make such a tremendous Struggle as that the world never saw the like of it, an I will tell you who he will say it was. He will tell you that when he starte he had not half the people about him; he willtell you that the secessionists of the South who went into that rebellion were not half of the people. Who, then, drove the other half to him? The self same AntiSlavery Society that, when we had the cannon roaring and the saber clashing and the bayonet thrusting, and the work oing on, could not keep its tongue, and must e making the people of the South believe that the war, in stead of bein for the constitution and the laws, waste ah slavery, What then? If we had friends at the outstart of the struggle, we lost them then. Now, Mr. President, I ask again, who fought this battle? I tell him that it was the Army of the U.S. that killed the Percy. It was the Army of the U.S. that met this Hotspurof the rebellion, while the AntiSlavery Society was down upon the field of battle looking out from under its shield and claiming the constitution and the laws. But now, sir, now after the victory is achieved, after the battle is won, you will never meet a member of the AntiSlavery Society who has not this dead Hot spur upon his back, carrying him out and pretending that he killed him. [Laughter] ud almost every one of them is saying, “If your father will do me any honor so; if not, let him kill the next Percy himself. Hook to be either early or duke, I can assure you.” That is the Inn uage of this party after the battle is over an the victory won. By the by, they do not ive us the same assurance that fat John did, or said he, ” If I do grow great, Ill grow less; for Ill iurge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nob einan should do. ”, But, Mr. President, instead of when growing great, growing less, the are swollen to such enormous dimensions under the pressure of this thing which they suppose they have achieved that they are now well nigh to bursting. The honorable Senator says they are going on; yes, and let everybody get out of the road. That may do for people who can be frightened; but that party has not been given to frightening anybody heretofore, that I am aware of. It is exceedingly fertile in abuse; it never undertakes to meet a mans argument except by ridicule and by sneers, and by all that kind of machinery which a weak man always uses against a stronger. The honorable Senator may go on in his course, and we will go on in our course. We think that instead of his having had to carry us through the rebellion we have had to carry him that if there was any load we had it to beer. I do not undertake to say that the honorable senator did not iateud we enough; but he has put himself out of the pale of receiving the benefit of that a 010 which might be madein his favor, by assaiing the intentions ofothers. Who made him a judge and a ruler over Israel? Who authorized him to say that I despised the laboring man? I think I could prove by good witnesses that I have done such days of hard work as that Senator would have hardly survived and when he talks about me or the gentlemen with whom I associate here as not being the friends of the poor and the friends of the humble he s aks without the book. By what right does 10 arraign me as not desiring the prosperity and the greatness of this country? Is it not my country as well as his? Have I not as many interests at stake as he has, or any other man? Sir, when a speech requires such makeweights as that to extend it over a period of 15 minutes, it had better not be made at all. Here after, when a question is before this body, and is to be met, I hope the question will be argued, and the question alone. I have raised a simple question of constitutional law; and the Senator says that the constitution has been dinned in his ears for 5 years. Yes, Mr. President, and you might din it in for 20, and I doubt whether he would appreciate a single principle which is involved in it. Is the constitution to be nothing? Is the oath we have taken to support itto be nothing? Is constitutional learning to be sneered out of this Chamber? Is a conscientious desire on the part of a Senator to do his duty as a man should do it, and to carry out in spirit and in truth that. duty which has been intrusted to him by. his constituents, here to be made a subject of reproach upon this floor and is a man not to be supposed to be orthodox, not to be supposed to be patriotic, unless he believes in all the vagaries and all the whims and the ethnology of the honorable Senfrom Massachusetts who has traveled, I so pose, over 150,000 miles, and has made some 12 or 1500 abolition speeches? I cannot tell how much a man would know after he had made 12 or 1500 speeches on one side, at one end of a house, where there was nobody to reply to him; I think he would become so confirmed in his crotchets and so full of his absurdities by that time that it would be utterly impossible to teach him an thing afterward. Vho arrogated to themse ves superior knowl ede of the negroes? We did not; but I have and do again arrogate for the men of the South who live among them, who live with them, a knowledge of the negroes and of negro character superior to that of a man who lives in a NewEngland State, and sees a negro once perhaps in 3 weeks or a month. 1 should think it most extraordinary if such were not the case;Mr. President, I come back again now to the question before the Senate. It is siren!“ this, whether, in the 1st place, we have authority to create this bureau With this jurisdiction at all; and the question that arises upon demandment which I have moved is whether we have a right to extend it into the loyal States. It may be said, I know, that it is to be extended there simply for the relief of the freedmen. I say that the freedmen of Pennsylvania ask no relief from the Freedmens Bureau. Pennsylvania relieves her own destitute and her own oor. She is not a pensioner upon the U.S. Government for any favors of that kind. I say, too, that if it is to extend beyond relief, and to administer municipal law there for the benefit of the freedmen, Pennsylvania administers her own municipal law, enforces her own police regulations between those who inhabit her bor ders, and she does not desire any such contrivance as this, but would rather repudiate it and spew it out of her mouth. Mr. President, I am aware, and I have long been aware, that it is of no use here with certain Senators to appeal to the constitution. I know that it is of no use to appeal to the past construction which has been put upon that in strument. I know thnt there are Senators who think certain things ought to be done, and no matter what barrier stands in the way they think they are doing God service when the overlcap it. When war was raging over 1/2 of the Republic, when it required all the ener s of the loyal portion of teUnion to sustain that war and to support the soldiers in the field, I have often kept silent, and have not, as often as I would otherwise have done, raised my voice against these violations of the constitution. how I propose to give a notice as wellus the honoraile Senfrom Massachusetts, and it is that from henceforth I will resist as long as I can, in my humble way, every measure, no matter what it may be, that I believe to be a violation of the fundamental law of this nation, and which to me is sacred as the will of the American people. Sir, what is that Constitution but the exponent, the embodiment, of the will of the american people? Think of it, sir; packed into this small volume [exhibiting a copy of the constitution] is the will of 30 million people; not the will of a party, not the will of a faction, but the will of all parties, the unanimous will of the American peole. Who dares violate a provision of it1 Who dares thrust in his will instead of that will? Who so arrogant as to assume that they will substitute their will for this great will, which is to be our guide and our rule of action in this body? Gentlemen talk of the right, and of god being with the right, and all that kind of thin; and yet they forget this sacred truth, that T1810 is our letter of attorney, here is our warrant for what we do, here is our authority in the premises, and the man who goes:1. ate beyond it, the man who violates it, is guilty before that God, to whom the gentleman appeals with such facility, of erjury. he gentleman assumes that God is on their side, and that God is with them. So might a man assume that God was with him when he acquiesced in anything that took place in the universe. I suppose the gentleman will hardly deny that whatever does take place in the Universe, takes place in accordance with the will of God, as a whole. He is omnipotent, and it must be so. Whoever acquiesces in the decrees of destiny can very well boast that God is with him of course; but shortsighted, finite mortals as we are, not knowing what destiny is to be in the future, are not authorized in making any such boasts. Mr. President, I hope that the operation of this bill may be circumscribed, if it is to become a law, to the States lately in rebellion, as those are the only States over whom we can have a shadow of pretense for exercising this right, which must be a belligerent right, if it is any right at all. I can conceive how men might suppose that, owing to the fact of the previous be ligerency, this bill would be demandedby a certain state of things there; I can conceive how anyone might e misled into that error; but I cannot see how anybody can imagine that there is a right existing in this Government to extend the operation of such a bill over States which never were in rebellion, and which never did occupy an attitude of belligerency toward the U.S.