“Charles Sumner,
“Senator of the United States.”[258]
Not content with these efforts, in an article more literary than political in its character, which found a place in the “Atlantic Monthly” for December, 1865, entitled, “Clemency and Common Sense: a Curiosity of Literature, with a Moral,” I again returned to this same question. I will quote only a brief passage.
“Again, we are told gravely that the national power which decreed Emancipation cannot maintain it by assuring universal enfranchisement, because an imperial government must be discountenanced,—as if the whole suggestion of ‘Imperialism’ or ‘Centralism’ were not out of place, until the national security is established, and our debts, whether to the national freedman or the national creditor, are placed where they cannot be repudiated. A phantom is created, and, to avoid this phantom, we drive towards concession and compromise, as from Charybdis to Scylla.”[259]
The session of Congress opened December 4, 1865, and you will find that on the first day I introduced two distinct measures of Reconstruction, with Equality before the Law as their corner-stone. The first was a bill in the following terms:—
“A Bill in part execution of the guaranty of a republican form of government in the Constitution of the United States.
“Whereas it is declared in the Constitution that the United States shall guaranty to every State in this Union a republican form of government; and whereas certain States have allowed their governments to be subverted by rebellion, so that the duty is now cast upon Congress of executing this guaranty: Now, therefore,
“Be it enacted, &c., That in all States lately declared to be in rebellion there shall be no oligarchy invested with peculiar privileges and powers, and there shall be no denial of rights, civil or political, on account of race or color; but all persons shall be equal before the law, whether in the court-room or at the ballot-box. And this statute, made in pursuance of the Constitution, shall be the supreme law of the land, anything in the Constitution or laws of any such State to the contrary notwithstanding.”[260]
The second was “A Bill to enforce the guaranty of a republican form of government in certain States whose governments have been usurped or overthrown.”[261] Read this bill, if you please, Sir. I challenge criticism of it at this date, in the light of all our present experience. It is in twelve sections, and you will find in it the very proposition which is now in question,—being the requirement of Equal Rights for All in the reconstruction of the Rebel States.
“Sec. 5. And be it further enacted, That the delegates”—
that is, the delegates to the Convention for the reëstablishment of a State government—