William Horatio Barnes

“ As for me, I would rather face the music and meet the responsibility like a man, and send to the people of the State of Illinois the boon of universal suffrage, and of a full and complete emancipation, than meet the taunt of Northern demagogues that I would force suffrage upon North Carolina, and Tennessee, and Delaware, while I had not the courage to prescribe it for our own free States. Sir, it will be the crime of the century if now, having the power, as we clearly have, we lack the nerve to do the work that is given us to do. ”

“ We must go back to the spirit and purposes of the founders of our Government. We must accept the grand logic of the mighty revolution from which we are now emerging. We must repudiate, now and forever, these assaults upon the masses of the people and upon the fundamental principles of popular rights. I accept in their full force and effect the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and by constitutional amendment and law of Congress I would stamp them with irrevocable power upon the political escutcheon of the new and regenerated republic. ”

“ If I gather the force of that argument, it is this: we are to base no legislation and no action upon the idea that this race, recently slave, now free, is part and parcel of the American people, the object of our care, solicitude, and protection. They are passing away—dying; let them be represented as slaves now, and let them never enter into the basis hereafter of the representative system. Sir, that is the old argument—an argument worthy of another period than this. Our people have been an inexorable people, in some respects, in regard to the races that have been within their power. ”

“ Why, sir, it seemed as impossible for a man to swim the Atlantic with Mount Atlas upon his back, or make harmonious base to the thunders of heaven. But these men have achieved the world's wonder—coming out from the tortures of slavery, from the prison-house, untainted with dishonor or crime, and out of the war free, noble, brave, and more worthy of their friends, always true to the flag. ”

“ That bill makes the colored people of South Carolina serfs, a degraded class, the slaves of society. It is far better to be the slave of one man than to be the slave of arbitrary law. There is no doubt of the fact that in a great portion of those States the high hopes, the confidence, and the joy expressed last spring by the freedmen, have passed away; that silence and sorrow pervade that section of the country, and that they are becoming distrustful and discontented. God grant that the high-raised expectations of these loyal and deserted people may not be blasted. ”

“ It declares that all men in the United States shall be entitled to the same civil rights, the right to the fruit of their own labor, the right to make contracts, the right to buy and sell, and enjoy liberty and happiness; and that is abominable and iniquitous and unconstitutional! Could any thing be more monstrous or more abominable than for a member of the Senate to rise in his place and denounce with such epithets as these a bill, the only object of which is to secure equal rights to all the citizens of the country—a bill that protects a white man just as much as a black man? ”

“ Progress is to be made only by fidelity to the great cause by which we have stood during the past four years of bloody war. For twenty-five years we had a conflict of ideas, of words, of thoughts—words and thoughts stronger than cannon-balls. We have had four years of bloody conflict. Slavery, every thing that belongs or pertains to it, lies prostrate before us to-day, and the foot of a regenerated nation is upon it. There let it lie forever. I hope no words or thoughts of a reactionary character are to be uttered in either house of Congress. ”

“ Shall four million beings count four millions, in managing the affairs of the nation, who are pronounced by their fellow-beings unfit to participate in administering government in the States where they live, or in their counties, towns, or precincts; who are pronounced unworthy of the least and most paltry part in local political affairs? Shall one hundred and twenty-seven thousand white people in New York cast but one vote in this House, and have none but one voice here, while the same number of white people in Mississippi have three votes and three voices? ”

“ Are these people, knowing nothing of geography, knowing not where to go, having never in their lives been ten miles from the place where they were born, these old women and young children, these feeble persons who are turned off because they can no longer work, to be told to go and seek employment elsewhere? and is the Government of the United States, which has made them free, to stand by and do nothing to save and protect them? ”

“ Shall the death of slavery add two-fifths to the entire power which slavery had when slavery was living? Shall one white man have as much share in the Government as three other white men merely because he lives where blacks outnumber whites two to one? Shall this inequality exist, and exist only in favor of those who without cause drenched the land with blood and covered it with mourning? ”

“ It is a declaration made in the Constitution of the only great and free republic in the world, that it is permissible and right to deny to the races of men all their political rights, and that it is permissible to make them the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the mud-sills of society, provided only you do not ask to have these disfranchised races represented in that Government, provided you wholly ignore them in the State. The moral teaching of the clause offends the free and just spirit of the age, violates the foundation principles of our own Government, and is intrinsically wrong. ”

“ I am not ready to believe that those men who have laid down their lives in the battles of the late revolution, who came from their homes like the torrents that sweep over their native hills and mountains, those men who gathered round the sacred precincts of the tomb of Washington to uphold and perpetuate our proud heritage of liberty, intended to inflict upon the people of this District, or of this land, the monstrous doctrine of political equality of the negro race with the white at the ballot-box. ”

“ Sir, the men who formed this Government, who believed in the rights of human nature, and designed the Government to protect them, believed, I think, as I do, that when suffrage is made universal, you concentrate in the ballot-box a larger amount of wisdom than when you exclude a portion of the citizens from the right of suffrage.
"I grant, sir, that many of the colored men whom I would enfranchise are poor and ignorant, but we have made them so. We have oppressed them by our laws. We have stolen them from their cradles and consigned them to helpless slavery. ”

“ I look upon the Freedman's Bureau Bill as simply a temporary protection to the freedmen in the Southern States. We are bound by every consideration of honor, by every obligation that can rest on any people, to protect the freedmen from the rebels of the Southern States; ay, sir, and to protect them from the loyal men of the Southern States. We know that, on account of the prejudices instilled by the system of slavery pervading all parts of the Southern States, the Southern people will not do justice to the freedmen of those States. ”

“ I would only say, with regard to this question of race, that I assert there is no record of the black race having proved its capacity for self-government as a race; that they have never struck a blow for freedom, and maintained their freedom and independence as individuals when free. I appeal to history, and to the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Bingham] , and I speak as a student of history, and the representative of a race whose proudest boast is that their capacity for self-government is the only charter of their liberty. I assail no race; I assail no man. ”

“ We must there build high the monumental marble for men like Barksdale, whom I have seen in this hall draw their bowie-knives on the Representatives of the people; men who died upon the battle-field of Gettysburg in arms against the Government, and where they now lie buried in ditches, 'unwept, unhonored, and unsung!' They are, I suppose, to be raised and put into the fore-front ranks of the nation, and we are to call them through all time as the dead of the nation! Sir, was there ever blasphemy before like this? ”

“ Here are the laws of Texas, of Mississippi, of Virginia, to which I have referred; and laws equally oppressive exist in some of the other States. Is there no necessity to protect a freedman when he is liable to be whipped if caught away from home? no necessity to protect a freedman in his rights when he is not permitted to hold or lease a piece of ground in a State? no necessity to protect a freedman in his rights, who will be reduced to a slavery worse than that from which he has been emancipated if a law is permitted to be carried into effect? ”

“ Within the last hundred years, in no country where the common law obtains, I venture to say, has any implication of a grant of power ever been held to be raised by such a law, and especially an implied power, to do an act expressly prohibited by the same law. The guarantee of your Constitution, that the people shall elect their Representatives in the several States, can not be set aside or impaired by inserting in your Constitution, as a penalty for disregarding it, the provision that the majority of a State that denies the equal rights of the minority shall suffer a loss of political power. ”

“ With a credit that surpasses that of the United States, with a history that is surpassed by no State in the Union, with wealth that is almost fabulous in proportion to its population, with a prosperity almost unknown in the history of the world, that State stands before us to-day in all her dignity, strength, wealth, intelligence, and virtue. And if we, by adopting similar principles in other States, can secure such results, we certainly have an inducement to consider well how far this condition is to be attributed to her diffused education, and to the provisions of her constitution. ”

“ Garfield said: "So slavery sat in our national Capitol. Its huge bulk filled the temple of our liberty, touching it from side to side. Mr. Lincoln, on the 1st of January, 1863, struck it on the cheek, and the faithless and unbelieving among us expected to see the fabric of our institutions dissolve into chaos because their idol had fallen. He struck it again; Congress and the States repeated the blow, and its unsightly carcass lies rotting in our streets. The sun shines in the heavens brighter than before. ”

“ The tears which the honest white people of this country have been made to shed from the oppressive acts of this Government, in its various departments, during the last four years, call more loudly for my sympathies than those tears which have been shedding and dropping and dropping for the last twenty years in reference to the poor, oppressed slave—dropping from the eyes of strong-minded women and weak-minded men, until, becoming a mighty flood, they have swept away, in their resistless force, every trace of constitutional liberty in this country. ”

“ I regret it, because I think that intelligence ought always, either as to the black or the white man, to be made a test of suffrage. And I glory in the principles that have been established by Massachusetts, which prescribes, not that a man should have money in his purse, but that he should have in his head a cultivated brain, the ability to read the Constitution of his country, and intelligence to understand his rights as a citizen. ”

“ What is it that so excites and inflames the mind of the Senator from Kentucky that he talks about the degradation that is to be put upon her, the plunder of her people, the injustice that is to be done her inhabitants? Why, sir, a bill to help the people of Kentucky to take care of the destitute negroes, made free without any property whatever, without the means of support, left to starve and to die unless somebody cares for them; and we propose in the Congress of the United States to help to do it. ”

“ In early childhood I read the words of the Father of his country, in which he exhorted the people to cling to the union of these States as the palladium of liberty, and my young heart bounded with joy in reading the burning words of lofty patriotism. I was taught in infancy to admire, as far as the infant mind could admire, our free system of government, Federal and State; and I heard the old men say that the wit of man never devised a better or more lovely system of government. ”

“ Shall national power be at once conferred on those who have striven, by all means open to them, to destroy the nation's life? Shall our enemies and the enemies of the Government, as soon as they have been defeated in war, help to direct and to control the public policy of the Government—and that, too, while those men, hostile themselves, keep from all exercise of political power the only true and loyal friends whom we have had, during these four years of war, within these Southern States? ”

“ Sir, what is the present position and status of the rebel States? In my judgment they are simply conquered communities, subjugated by the arms of the United States; communities in which the right of self-government does not now exist. Why? Because they have been for the last four years hostile, to the most surprising unanimity hostile, to the authority of the United States, and have, during that period, been waging a bloody war against that authority. ”