Speech of Hon. John M. Broomall, of Pennsylvania,
On the Civil Rights Bill. House of Representatives, March 8, 1866.
Mr. Speaker, it is alleged that this species of legislation will widen the breach existing between the two sections of the country, will offend our southern brethren. Do not gentlemen know that those who are most earnestly asking this legislation are our southern brethren themselves.
They are imploring us to protect them against the conquered enemies of the country, who notwithstanding their surrender, have managed, through their skill or our weakness, to seize nearly all the conquered territory.
This is not the first instance in the world’s history in which all that had been gained by hard fighting was lost by bad diplomacy.
But they, whose feelings are entitled to so much consideration in the estimation of those who urge this argument, are not our southern brethren, but the southern brethren of our political opponents; the conquered rebels, pardoned and unpardoned; traitors priding themselves upon their treason.
These people are fastidious. The ordinary terms of the English language must be perverted to suit their tastes. Though they surrendered in open and public war, they are not to be treated as prisoners. Though beaten in the last ditch of the last fortification, they are not to be called a conquered people. The decision of the forum of their own choosing is to be explained away into meaningless formality for their benefit. Though guilty of treason, murder, arson, and all the crimes in the calendar, they are “our southern brethren.” The entire decalogue must be suspended lest it should offend these polished candidates for the contempt and execration of posterity.
Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, an executive construction must be given to the word “loyalty,” so that it shall embrace men who only are not hanged because they have been pardoned, and who only did not destroy the Government because they could not. Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, too, a distinguished public functionary, once the champion of the rights of man, a leader in the cause of human progress, a statesman whose keen foreknowledge could point out the “irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom,” cannot now see that treason and loyalty are uncompromising antagonisms.
It is charged against us that the wheels of Government are stopped by our refusal to admit the representatives of these southern communities. When we complain that Europe is underselling us in our markets, and demand protection for the American laborer, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that excessive importations are impoverishing the country, and rapidly bringing on financial ruin, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that an inflated currency is making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, keeping the prices of even the necessaries of life beyond the reach of widows and orphans who are living upon fixed incomes, the stereotyped answer comes, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we demand a tax upon cotton to defray the enormous outlay made in dethroning that usurping “king of the world,” still the answer comes, and the executive parrots everywhere repeat it, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.”
The mind of the man who can see in that prescription a remedy for all political and social diseases must be curiously constituted. Would these Senators and Representatives vote a tax upon cotton? Would they protect American industry by increasing duties? Would they prevent excessive importations? To believe this requires as unquestioning a faith as to believe in the sudden conversion of whole communities from treason to loyalty.
We are blocking the wheels of Government! Why, the Government has managed to get along for four years, not only without the aid of the Southern Senators and Representatives, but against their efforts to destroy it; and in the mean time has crushed a rebellion that would have destroyed any other Government under heaven. Surely the nation can do without the services of these men, at least during the time required to examine their claims and to protect by appropriate legislation our Southern brethren. None but a Democrat would think of consulting the wolf about what safeguard should be thrown around the flock.
Those who advocate the admission of the Senators and Representatives from the States lately reclaimed from the rebellion, as a means of protecting the loyal men in those States and as a substitute for the system of legislation of which this bill is part, well know that the majority in both Houses of Congress ardently desire the full recognition of those States, and only ask that the rights and interests of the truly loyal men in those States shall be first satisfactorily secured.
Much useless controversy has been had about the legal status of those States. There is no difference between the two parties of the country on that point. The actual point of difference is this: the Democrats affiliate with their old political friends in the South, the late rebels, the friends and followers of Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. The Union majority, on the other hand, naturally affiliate with the loyal men in the South, the men who have always supported the Government against Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. Each party wants the South reconstructed in the hands of its own “southern brethren.”
In short, the northern party corresponding with the loyal men of the South ask that the legitimate results of Grant’s victory shall be carried out, while the northern party corresponding with the rebels of the South ask that things should be considered as if Lee had been the conqueror, or at least as if there had been a drawn battle, without victory on either side.
This brings the rights of those in whose behalf the opponents of the bill under consideration are acting directly in question, and in order to limit down the field of controversy as far as possible, let us inquire how far all parties agree upon the legal status of the communities lately in rebellion. Now, the meanest of all controversies is that which comes from dialectics. Where the disputants attach different meanings to the same word their time is worse than thrown away. I have always looked upon the question whether the States are in or out of the Union as only worthy of the schoolmen of the middle ages, who could write volumes upon a mere verbal quibble. The disputants would agree if they were compelled to use the word “State” in the same sense. I will endeavor to avoid this trifling.
All parties agree that at the close of the rebellion the people of North Carolina, for example, had been “deprived of all civil government.” The President, in his proclamation of May 29, 1865, tells the people of North Carolina this in so many words, and he tells the people of the other rebel States the same thing in his several proclamations to them. This includes the Conservatives and Democrats, who, however they may disagree, at last agree in this, that the President shall do their thinking.
The Republicans subscribe to this doctrine, though they differ in their modes of expressing it. Some say that those States have ceased to possess any of the rights and powers of government as States of the Union. Others say, with the late lamented President, that “those States are out of practical relations with the Government.”
Others hold that the State organizations are out of the Union. And still others that the rebels are conquered, and therefore that their organizations are at the will of the conqueror.
The President has hit upon a mode of expression which embraces concisely all these ideas. He says that the people of those States were, by the progress of the rebellion and by its termination, “deprived of all civil government.”
One step further. All parties agree that the people of these States, being thus disorganized for all State purposes, are still at the election of the government, citizens of the United States, and as such, as far as they have not been disqualified by treason, ought to be allowed to form their own State governments, subject to the requirements of the Constitution of the United States.
Still one step further. All parties agree that this cannot be done by mere unauthorized congregations of the people, but that the time, place and manner must be prescribed by some department of the Government, according to the argument of Mr. Webster and the spirit of the decision of the Supreme Court in Luther vs. Borden, 7 Howard, page 1.
Yet another step in the series of propositions. All parties agree that as Congress was not in session at the close of the rebellion, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was bound to take possession of the conquered country and establish such government as was necessary.
Thus far all is harmonious; but now the divergence begins. At the commencement of the present session of Congress three-fourths of both Houses held that when the people of the States are “deprived of all civil government,” and when, therefore, it becomes necessary to prescribe the time, place, and manner in and by which they shall organize themselves again into States while the President may take temporary measures, yet only the law-making power of the Government is competent to the full accomplishment of the task. In other words, that only Congress can enable citizens of the United States to create States. I have said that at the commencement of the session three-fourths of both houses held this opinion. The proportion is smaller now, and by a judicious use of executive patronage it may become still smaller; but the truth of the proposition will not be affected if every Representative and Senator should be manipulated into denying it.
On the other hand, the remaining fourth, composed of the supple Democracy and its accessions, maintain that this State-creating power is vested in the President alone, and that he has already exercised it.
The holy horror with which our opponents affect to contemplate the doctrine of destruction of States is that much political hypocrisy. Every man who asks the recognition of the existing local governments in the South thereby commits himself to that doctrine. The only possible claim that can be set up in favor of the existing governments is based upon the theory that the old ones have been destroyed. The present organizations sprang up at the bidding of the President after the conquest among a people who, he said, had been “deprived of all civil government.”
If the President’s “experiment” had resulted in organizing the southern communities in loyal hands, the majority in Congress would have found no difficulty in indorsing it and giving it the necessary efficiency by legislative enactment.
In this case, too, the President never would have denied the power of Congress in the premises. He never would have set up the theory that the citizens of the United States, through their representatives, are not to be consulted when those who have once broken faith with them ask to have the compact renewed.
Our opponents have no love for the President. They called him a usurper and a tyrant in Tennessee. They ridiculed him as a negro “Moses.” They tried to kill him, and failing that, they accused him of being privy to the murder of his predecessor. But when his “experiment” at reconstruction was found to result in favor of their friends, the rebels, then they hung themselves about his neck like so many mill-stones, and tried to damn him to eternal infamy by indorsing his policy. Will they succeed? Will he shake them off, or go down with them?
But let us suffer these discordant elements to settle their own terms of combinations as best they may. The final result cannot be doubtful.
If ten righteous men were needed to save Sodom, even Andrew Johnson will find it impossible to save the Democratic party.
Our path of duty is plain before us. Let us pass this bill and such others as may be necessary to secure protection to the loyal men of the South. If our political opponents thwart our purposes in this, let us go to the country upon that issue.
I am by no means an advocate of extensive punishment, either in the way of hanging or confiscation, though some of both might be salutary. I do not ask that full retribution be enforced against those who have so grievously sinned. I am willing to make forgiveness the rule and punishment the exception; yet I have my ultimatum. I might excuse the pardon of the traitors Lee and Davis, even after the hanging of Wirz, who but obeyed their orders, orders which he would have been shot for disobeying. I might excuse the sparing of the master after killing the dog whose bite but carried with it the venom engendered in the master’s soul. I might look calmly upon a constituency ground down by taxation, and tell the complainants that they have neither remedy nor hope of vengeance upon the authors of their wrongs. I might agree to turn unpityingly from the mother whose son fell in the Wilderness, and the widow whose husband was starved at Andersonville, and tell them that in the nature of things retributive justice is denied them, and that the murderers of their kindred may yet sit in the councils of their country; yet even I have my ultimatum. I might consent that the glorious deeds of the last five years should be blotted from the country’s history; that the trophies won on a hundred battle-fields, the sublime visible evidence of the heroic devotion of America’s citizen soldiery, should be burned on the altar of reconciliation. I might consent that the cemetery at Gettysburg should be razed to the ground; that its soil should be submitted to the plow, and that the lamentation of the bereaved should give place to the lowing of cattle. But there is a point beyond which I shall neither be forced nor persuaded. I will never consent that the government shall desert its allies in the South and surrender their rights and interests to the enemy, and in this I will make no distinction of caste or color either among friends or foes.
The people of the South were not all traitors. Among them were knees that never bowed to the Baal of secession, lips that never kissed his image. Among the fastness of the mountains, in the rural districts, far from the contagion of political centres, the fires of patriotism still burned, sometimes in the higher walks of life, oftener in obscure hamlets, and still oftener under skins as black as the hearts of those who claimed to own them.
These people devoted all they had to their country. The homes of some have been confiscated, and they are now fugitives from the scenes that gladdened their childhood. Some were cast into dungeons for refusing to fire upon their country’s flag, and still others bear the marks of stripes inflicted for giving bread and water to the weary soldier of the Republic, and aiding the fugitive to escape the penalty of the disloyalty to treason. If the God of nations listened to the prayers that ascended from so many altars during those eventful years, it was to the prayers of these people.
Sir, we talked of patriotism in our happy northern homes, and claimed credit for the part we acted; but if the history of these people shall ever be written, it will make us blush that we ever professed to love our country.
The government now stands guard over the lives and fortunes of these people. They are imploring us not to yield them up without condition to those into whose hands recent events have committed the destinies of the unfortunate South. A nation which could thus withdraw its protection from such allies, at such a time, without their full and free consent, could neither hope for the approval of mankind nor the blessing of heaven.