Constitution of Louisiana

“ The revision or the proposed constitution and any alternative propositions agreed upon by the convention shall be submitted to the people for their ratification or rejection. If the proposal is approved by a majority of the electors voting thereon, the governor shall proclaim it to be the Constitution of Louisiana.
§3. Laws Effectuating Amendments Section 3. Whenever the legislature shall submit amendments to this constitution, it may at the same session enact laws to carry them into effect, to become operative when the proposed amendments have been ratified. ”

“ Now who believes, who dare assert, that it was the intention of the people, when they adopted this Constitution, to assign, eventually, to New Orleans and Louisiana, a portion of their political power; and to invest all the people those extensive regions might hereafter contain, with an authority over themselves and their descendants? When you throw the weight of Louisiana into the scale, you destroy the political equipoise contemplated at the time of forming the contract. Can any man venture to affirm that the people did intend such a comprehension as you now, by construction, give it? ”

“ Can Louisiana be brought into proper practical relation with the Union sooner by sustaining or by discarding her new State government? Some twelve thousand voters in the heretofore Slave State of Louisiana have sworn allegiance to the Union, assumed to be the rightful political power of the State, held elections, organized a State government, adopted a Free State constitution, giving the benefit of public schools equally to black and white, and empowering the Legislature to confer the elective franchise upon the colored man. ”

“ A very fair proportion of the people of Louisiana have inaugurated a new State government, making an excellent new constitution—better for the poor black man than we have in Illinois. This was done under military protection, directed by me, in the belief, still sincerely entertained, that with such a nucleus around which to build we could get the State into position again sooner than otherwise. In this belief a general promise of protection and support, applicable alike to Louisiana and other States, was given in the last annual message. ”

“ The United States, by the constitution, are bound to guarantee to every state in the Union a republican form of government; and the inhabitants of Louisiana are entitled, when a state, to this guarantee. Each state has a right to two senators, and two representatives according to a certain enumeration of population, pointed out in the constitution. The inhabitants of Louisiana, upon their admission into the Union, are also entitled to these privileges. ”

“ I know of no words of any language adequate to convey to you the gratitude I feel in my inmost soul towards you for your efforts and final success in defeating the bill for the readmission of Louisiana as a State into the Union, with the present flagrantly unjust and proscriptive laws and Constitution. The white people of this country have been so accustomed to regard and treat us as their natural inferiors, that we dread the very thought of submitting to them the adjustment of our rights after their own are made secure. ”

“ What we do want is the conclusive evidence that respectable citizens of Louisiana are willing to be members of Congress and to swear support to the Constitution and that other respectable citizens there are willing to vote for them and send them. ”

“ The colored man, too, in seeing all united for him, is inspired with vigilance, and energy, and daring, to the same end. Grant that he desires the elective franchise, will he not attain it sooner by saving the already advanced steps toward it than by running backward over them? Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.
Again, if we reject Louisiana we also reject one vote in favor of the proposed amendment to the national Constitution. ”

“ Sir, it has been said that California has set us a very good example, by providing by her constitution that no two subjects are to be united in the same bill. Louisiana has done the same thing in her constitution. Ask the senator from Louisiana, or ask an honorable member of that legislature, who has just arrived here from Baton Rouge, and they will tell you to what vast inconvenience legislative action is exposed, in consequence of this constitutional restriction. What are incongruous subjects, what are distinct subjects, is a matter not always absolutely certain. ”

“ It is barely possible that the people of Louisiana may, at some future period in their history, amend her constitution, so as to permit the city of New Orleans to levy taxes sufficient to meet its indebtedness, as established by the judicial tribunals of that state. ”

“ ART. 110. The press shall be free. Every citizen may freely speak, write or publish his sentiments on all subjects; being responsible for an abuse of this liberty.
ART. 111. Emigration from the State shall not be prohibited.
ART. 112. The General Assembly, which shall meet after the first election of Representatives under this Constitution, shall, within the first month after the commencement of the session, designate and fix the seat of Government, at some place not less than sixty miles from the City of New Orleans, by the nearest traveling route ”

“ Louisiana sought to enter the Union in 1811, and then for the first time occurred an agitation in Congress over the admission of a slave State. Opposition to it was not, however, grounded so much upon the existence of slavery as upon the alleged violation of the Constitution in forming a State from territory not included in the original government of the Union. Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts made a violent speech against it, declaring that if Louisiana were admitted, "the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved; that the States which compose it are free from their moral obligations ”

“ Now, if Texas has no right, by its officers, to establish regulations that unreasonably or unnecessarily burden commerce between that state and Louisiana, and if the state of Louisiana is entitled, under the Constitution, to have the validity of such regulations tested in a judicial tribunal, then this court should put the defendants to their answer, and the cause should proceed to a final decree upon its merits. ”

“ Louisiana did not long delay in returning to the Union. On the same day on which she voted for the constitution which restored her to the Union, H. C. Warmoth was elected governor, and Oscar J. Dunn, a colored man, Lieutenant-Governor. Pinchback was then a State senator. [113] When the State legislature met in New Orleans in 1868, more than half of the members were colored men. Dunn was President of the Senate, and the temporary chairman of the lower house was R. H. Isabelle, a colored man. The first act of the new legislature was to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. ”

“ It provides for equality and uniformity of taxation throughout the State. . . . The framers of the Constitution had before them the condition of the municipalities of New Orleans, with their debts, their abuses, and their wants; and their corporate existence is recognized and continued, as to certain public rights, by an express provision. The jurisprudence under which the present system of taxation had grown up was before them, and the power of remedying the evils of misgovernment was left in statu quo, with the legislature ”