"It is the intention of this bill to secure those rights. The laws in the slaveholding States have made a distinction against persons of African descent on account of their color, whether free or slave. I have before me the statutes of Mississippi. They provide that if any colored person, any free negro or mulatto, shall come into that State for the purpose of residing there, he shall be sold into slavery for life. If any person of African descent residing in that State travels from one county to another without having a pass or a certificate of his freedom, he is liable to be committed to jail, and to be dealt with as a person who is in the State without authority. Other provisions of the statute prohibit any negro or mulatto from having firearms; and one provision of the statute declares that for 'exercising the functions of a minister of the Gospel, free negroes and mulattoes, on conviction, may be punished by any number of lashes not exceeding thirty-nine, on the bare back, and shall pay the costs." Other provisions of the statute of Mississippi prohibit a free negro or mulatto from keeping a house of entertainment, and subject him to trial before two justices of the peace and five slaveholders for violating the provisions of this law. The statutes of South Carolina make it a highly penal offense for any person, white or colored, to teach slaves; and similar provisions are to be found running through all the statutes of the late slaveholding States.
"When the constitutional amendment was adopted and slavery abolished, all these statutes became null and void, because they were all passed in aid of slavery, for the purpose of maintaining and supporting it. Since the abolition of slavery, the Legislatures which have assembled in the insurrectionary States have passed laws relating to the freedmen, and in nearly all the States they have discriminated against them. They deny them certain rights, subject them to severe penalties, and still impose upon them the very restrictions which were imposed upon them in consequence of the existence of slavery, and before it was abolished. The purpose of the bill under consideration is to destroy all these discriminations, and to carry into effect the constitutional amendment."
After having stated somewhat at length the grounds upon which he placed this bill, Mr. Trumbull closed by saying: "Most of the provisions of this bill are copied from the late Fugitive Slave Act, adopted in 1850 for the purpose of returning fugitives from slavery into slavery again. The act that was passed at that time for the purpose of punishing persons who should aid negroes to escape to freedom is now to be applied by the provisions of this bill to the punishment of those who shall undertake to keep them in slavery. Surely we have the authority to enact a law as efficient in the interests of freedom, now that freedom prevails throughout the country, as we had in the interest of slavery when it prevailed in a portion of the country."
Mr. Saulsbury took an entirely different view of the subject under consideration: "I regard this bill," he said, "as one of the most dangerous that was ever introduced into the Senate of the United States, or to which the attention of the American people was ever invited. During the last four or five years, I have sat in this chamber and witnessed the introduction of bills into this body which I thought obnoxious to many very grave and serious constitutional objections; but I have never, since I have been a member of the body, seen a bill so fraught with danger, so full of mischief, as the bill now under consideration.
"I shall not follow the honorable Senator into a consideration of the manner in which slaves were treated in the Southern States, nor the privileges that have been denied to them by the laws of the States. I think the time for shedding tears over the poor slave has well nigh passed in this country. 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 suppose it is a foregone conclusion that this measure, as one of a series of measures, is to be passed through this Congress regardless of all consequences. But the day that the President of the United States places his approval and signature to that Freedmen's Bureau Bill, and to this bill, he will have signed two acts more dangerous to the liberty of his countrymen, more disastrous to the citizens of this country, than all the acts which have been passed from the foundation of the Government to the present hour; and if we on this side of the chamber manifest anxiety and interest in reference to these bills, and the questions involved in them, it is because, having known this population all our lives, knowing them in one hour of our infancy better than you gentlemen have known them all your lives, we feel compelled, by a sense of duty, earnestly and importunately, it may be, to appeal to the judgment of the American Senate, and to reach, if possible, the judgment of the great mass of the American people, and invoke their attention to the awful consequences involved in measures of this character. Sir, stop, stop! the mangled, bleeding body of the Constitution of your country lies in your path; you are treading upon its bleeding body when you pass these laws."
After having argued at considerable length that this bill would be a
most unconstitutional interference on the part of the Federal
Government with "the powers of the States under the Federal
Constitution," the Senator from Delaware thus concluded:
"Sir, from early boyhood I was taught to love and revere the Federal Union and those who made 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. When I arrived at that age when I could study and reflect for myself, the teachings of childhood were approved by the judgment of the man.
"I have seen how under this Union we had become great in the eyes of all nations; and I see now, notwithstanding the horrible afflictions of war, if we can have wisdom in council and sincere purpose to subserve the good of the whole people of the United States, though much that was dear to us has been blasted as by the pestilence that walketh in darkness and the destruction that wasteth at noonday, how we might, in the providence of God, resume our former position among the nations of the earth, and command the respect of the whole civilized world. But, sir, to-day, in viewing and in considering this bill, the thought has occurred to me, how happy were the founders of our Federal system of government, that they had been taken from the council chambers of this nation and from among their fellow-men before bills of this character were seriously presented for legislative consideration. Happily for them, they sleep their last sleep, and—
"'How sleep the brave who sink to rest,
By all their country's wishes blest!
When Spring, with dewy fingers cold,
Returns to deck their hallowed mold,
She there shall dress a sweeter sod
Than Fancy's feet have ever trod.