Chapter IX: The CIVIL Rights Bill in the Senate (2)

Mr. Davis closed his speech by saying: "Was it for these fruits and these laws that we went into this war? Was it for these fruits and these laws and these oppressions that two million and a quarter of men were ordered into the field? Was it that the American people might enjoy these as the fruits of the triumphant close of this war, that hundreds of thousands of them have been mutilated on the battle-field and by the diseases of the camp, and that a debt of four or five thousand million dollars has been left upon the country? If these are to be the results of the war, better that not a single man had been marshaled in the field nor a single star worn by one of our officers. These military gentlemen think they have a right to command and control every-where. They do it. They think they have a right to do it here, and we are sheep in the hands of our shearers. We are dumb."

Mr. Trumbull said: "I will occupy a few moments of the attention of the Senate, after this long harangue of the Senator from Kentucky, which he closed by declaring that we are dumb in the presence of military power. If he has satisfied the Senate that he is dumb, I presume he has satisfied the Senate of all the other positions he has taken; and the others are about as absurd as that declaration. He denounces this bill as 'outrageous,' 'most monstrous,' 'abominable,' 'oppressive,' 'iniquitous,' 'unconstitutional,' 'void.'

"Now, what is this bill that is obnoxious to such terrible epithets? It is a bill providing that all people shall have equal rights. Is not that abominable? Is not that iniquitous? Is not that monstrous? Is not that terrible on white men? [Laughter.] When was such legislation as this ever thought of for white men?

"Sir, this bill applies to white men as well as black men. 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? With what consistency and with what face can a Senator in his place here say to the Senate and the country, that this is a bill for the benefit of the black men exclusively, when there is no such distinction in it, and when the very object of the bill is to break down all discrimination between black men and white men?"

Mr. Guthrie, of Kentucky, said: "My doctrine is that slavery exists no longer in this country; that it is impossible to exist in the face of that provision; and with slavery fell the laws of all the States providing for slavery, every one of them. I do not see what benefit can arise from repealing them by this bill, because, if they are not repealed by the Constitution as amended, this bill could not repeal them. I hope that all the States in which slavery formerly existed will accept that constitutional provision in good faith. I myself accept it in good faith. Believing that all the laws authorizing slavery have fallen, I have advised the people of Kentucky, and I would advise all the States, to put these Africans upon the same footing that the whites are in relation to civil rights. They have all the rights that were formerly accorded to the free colored population in all the States just as fully this day as they will have after this bill has passed, and they will continue to have them.

"Now, to the States belong the government of their own population, and those within their borders, upon all subjects. We, in Kentucky, prescribe punishment for those who violate the laws; we prescribe it for the white population; we prescribe it for the free African population, and we prescribe it for the slave population. All the laws prescribing punishment for slaves fell with slavery, and they were subject afterward only to the penalties which were inflicted upon the free colored population, they then being free. Slaves, for many offenses, were punished far less than the free colored people. No slave was sent to the penitentiary and punished for stealing, or any thing of that kind, whereas a free person was. But all these States will now, of course, remodel their laws upon the subject of offenses. I would advise that there should be but one code for all persons, black as well as white; that there shall be one general rule for the punishment of crime in the different States. But, sir, the States must have time to act on the subject; and yet we are here preparing laws and penalties, and proposing to carry them into execution by military authority, before the States have had time to legislate, and even before some of their Legislatures have had time to convene.

"Kentucky has had her share of talking here, and, sir, she has had her share of suffering during the war. At one time she was invaded by three armies of the rebellion; all but seven or eight counties of the State, at one time, were occupied by its armies, and her whole territory devastated by guerrillas. We have suffered in this war. We have borne it as best we could. We feel it intensely that now, at the end of the war, we should be subjected to a military despotism, our houses liable to be entered at any time when our families are at rest, by military men who can arrest and send to prison without warrant, and we are obliged to go, and we are obliged to pay any fines they may impose. I do not believe that you will lose any thing if you pause before passing such legislation as this, and establishing these military despotisms, for we do not know where they are to end."

Mr. Hendricks, of Indiana, had proposed to strike out the last clause of the bill, which provided that "such part of the land and naval forces of the United States, or of the militia," as should be necessary, might be employed to prevent the violation, and enforce the due execution of this act. The Senator from Indiana opposed the bill on the ground that it employed the machinery of the Fugitive Slave Law, and that it was to be enforced by the military authority of the United States. He said:

"This bill is a wasp; its sting is in its tail. Sir, what is this bill? It provides, in the first place, that the civil rights of all men, without regard to color, shall be equal; and, in the second place, that if any man shall violate that principle by his conduct, he shall be responsible to the court; that he may be prosecuted criminally and punished for the crime, or he may be sued in a civil action and damages recovered by the party wronged. Is not that broad enough? Do Senators want to go further than this? To recognize the civil rights of the colored people as equal to the civil rights of the white people, I understand to be as far as Senators desire to go; in the language of the Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Sumner], to place all men upon an equality before the law; and that is proposed in regard to their civil rights."

In reference to the reënactment of the odious features of the Fugitive Slave Law in this bill, Mr. Hendricks said: "I recollect how the blood of the people was made to run cold within them when it was said that the white man was required to run after the fugitive slave; that the law of 1850 made you and me, my brother Senators, slave-catchers; that the _posse comitatus_ could be called to execute a writ of the law, for the recovery of a runaway slave, under the provisions of the Constitution of the United States; and the whole country was agitated because of it. Now slavery is gone; the negro is to be established upon a platform of civil equality with the white man. That is the proposition. But we do not stop there; we are to reënact a law that nearly all of you said was wicked and wrong; and for what purpose? Not to pursue the negro any longer; not for the purpose of catching him; not for the purpose of catching the great criminals of the land; but for the purpose of placing it in the power of any deputy marshal in any county of the country to call upon you and me, and all the body of the people, to pursue some white man who is running for his liberty, because some negro has charged him with denying to him equal civil rights with the white man. I thought, sir, that that frame-work was enough; I thought, when you placed under the command of the marshal, in every county of the land, all the body of the people, and put every one upon the track of the fleeing white man, that that was enough; but it is not. For the purpose of the enforcement of this law, the President is authorized to appoint somebody who is to have the command of the military and naval forces of the United States--for what purpose? To prevent a violation of this law, and to execute it.

"You clothe the marshals under this bill with all the powers that were given to the marshals under the Fugitive Slave Law. That was regarded as too arbitrary in its provisions, and you repealed it. You said it should not stand upon the statute-book any longer; that no man, white or black, should be pursued under the provisions of that law. Now, you reënact it, and you claim it as a merit and an ornament to the legislation of the country; and you add an army of officers and clothe them with the power to call upon any body and every body to pursue the running white man. That is not enough, but you must have the military to be called in, at the pleasure of whom? Such a person as the President may authorize to call out the military forces. Where it shall be, and to whom this power shall be given, we do not know."

Mr. Lane, of Indiana, replied to the argument of his colleague. He said: "It is true that many of the provisions of this bill, changed in their purpose and object, are almost identical with the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law, and they are denounced by my colleague in their present application; but I have not heard any denunciation from my colleague, or from any of those associated with him, of the provisions of that Fugitive Slave Law which was enacted in the interest of slavery, and for purposes of oppression, and which was an unworthy, cowardly, disgraceful concession to Southern opinion by Northern politicians. I have suffered no suitable opportunity to escape me to denounce the monstrous character of that Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. All these provisions were odious and disgraceful in my opinion, when applied in the interest of slavery, when the object was to strike down the rights of man. But here the purpose is changed. These provisions are in the interest of freemen and of freedom, and what was odious in the one case becomes highly meritorious in the other. It is an instance of poetic justice and of apt retribution that God has caused the wrath of man to praise Him. I stand by every provision of this bill, drawn as it is from that most iniquitous fountain, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

"Then my colleague asks, Why do you invoke the power of the military to enforce these laws? And he says that constables, and sheriffs, and marshals, when they have process to serve, have a right to call upon the _posse comitatus_, the body of the whole people, to enforce their writs. Here is a justice of the peace in South Carolina or Georgia, or a county court, or a circuit court, that is called upon to execute this law. They appoint their own marshal, their deputy marshal, or their constable, and he calls upon the _posse comitatus_. Neither the judge, nor the jury, nor the officer, as we believe, is willing to execute the law. He may call upon the people, the body of the whole people, a body of rebels steeped in treason and rebellion to their lips, and they are to execute it; and the gentleman seems wonderfully astonished that we should call upon the military power. We should not legislate at all if we believed the State courts could or would honestly carry out the provisions of the constitutional amendment; but because we believe they will not do that, we give the Federal officers jurisdiction.

"But what harm is to result from it? Who is to be oppressed? What white man fleeing, in the language of my colleague, pursued by these harpies of the law, is in danger of having his rights stricken down? What does the bill provide? It places all men upon an equality, and unless the white man violates the law, he is in no danger. It takes no rights from any white man. It simply places others on the same platform upon which he stands; and if he would invoke the power of local prejudice to override the laws of the country, this is no Government unless the military may be called in to enforce the order of the civil courts and obedience to the laws of the country."

Mr. Wilson, of Massachusetts, said, in answer to some objections to the bill urged by Mr. Guthrie: "The Senator tells us that the emancipated men ought to have their civil rights, that the black codes fell with slavery; but the Senator forgets that at least six of the reörganized States in their new Legislatures have passed laws wholly incompatible with the freedom of these freedmen; and so atrocious are the provisions of these laws, and so persistently are they carried into effect by the local authorities, that General Thomas, in Mississippi, General Swayne, in Alabama, General Sickles, in South Carolina, and General Terry, in Virginia, have issued positive orders, forbidding the execution of the black laws that have just been passed.

"So unjust, so wicked, so incompatible are these new black laws of the rebel States, made in defiance of the expressed will of the nation, that Lieutenant-general Grant has been forced to issue that order, which sets aside the black laws of all these rebellious States against the freedmen, and allows no law to be enforced against them that is not enforced equally against white men. This order, issued by General Grant, will be respected, obeyed, and enforced in the rebel States with the military power of the nation. Southern legislators and people must learn, if they are compelled to learn by the bayonets of the Army of the United States, that the civil rights of the freedmen must be and shall be respected; that these freedmen are as free as their late masters; that they shall live under the same laws, be tried for their violation in the same manner, and if found guilty, punished in the same manner and degree.

"This measure is called for, because these reconstructed Legislatures, in defiance of the rights of the freedmen, and the will of the nation, embodied in the amendment to the Constitution, have enacted laws nearly as iniquitous as the old slave codes that darkened the legislation of other days. The needs of more than four million colored men imperatively call for its enactment. The Constitution authorizes and the national will demands it. By a series of legislative acts, by executive proclamations, by military orders, and by the adoption of the amendment to the Constitution by the people of the United States, the gigantic system of human slavery that darkened the land, controlled the policy, and swayed the destinies of the republic has forever perished. Step by step we have marched right on from one victory to another, with the music of broken fetters ringing in our ears. None of the series of acts in this beneficent legislation of Congress, none of the proclamations of the Executive, none of these military orders, protecting rights secured by law, will ever be revoked or amended by the voice of the American people. There is now

"'No slave beneath that starry flag,
The emblem of the free.'

"By the will of the nation freedom and free institutions for all, chains and fetters for none, are forever incorporated in the fundamental law of regenerated and united America. Slave codes and auction blocks, chains and fetters and blood-hounds, are things of the past, and the chattel stands forth a man, with the rights and the powers of the freemen. For the better security of these new-born civil rights we are now about to pass the greatest and the grandest act in this series of acts that have emancipated a race and disinthralled a nation. It will pass, it will go upon the statute-book of the republic by the voice of the American people, and there it will remain. From the verdict of Congress in favor of this great measure, no appeal will ever be entertained by the people of the United States."

Mr. Cowan spoke again, and denounced the section of the bill which provided for its enforcement by the military. He said: "There it is; words can not make it plainer; reason can not elucidate it; no language can strengthen it or weaken it, one way or the other. There is the question whether a military man, educated in a military school, accustomed to supreme command, unaccustomed to the administration of civil law among a free people, is to be intrusted with these appellate jurisdiction over the courts of the country; whether he can in any way, whether he ought in any way, to be intrusted with such a power. I, for my part, will never agree to it; and I should feel myself recreant to every duty that I owed to myself, to my country, to my country's history, and I may say to the race which has been for hundreds and thousands of years endeavoring to attain to something like constitutional liberty, if I did not resist this and all similar projects."

Mr. Trumbull answered some objections to the bill. "The Senator from Indiana [Mr. Hendricks] objects to the bill because he says that the same provisions which were enacted in the old Fugitive Slave Law are incorporated into this, and that it has been heralded to the country that it was a great achievement to do this; and he insists that if those provisions of law were odious and wicked and wrong which provided for punishing men for aiding the slave to escape, therefore they must be wicked and wrong now when they are employed for the punishing a man who undertakes to put a person into slavery. Sir, that does not follow at all. A law may be iniquitous and unjust and wrong which undertakes to punish another for doing an innocent act, which would be righteous and just and proper to punish a man for doing a wicked act. We have upon our statute-books a law punishing a man who commits murder, because the commission of murder is a high crime, and the party who does it forfeits his right to live; but would it be just to apply the law which punishes a person for committing murder to an innocent person who had killed another accidentally, without malice? That is the difference. It is the difference between right and wrong, between good and evil. True, the features of the Fugitive Slave Law were abominable when they were used for the purpose of punishing, not negroes, as the Senator from Indiana says, but white men. The Fugitive Slave Law was enacted for the purpose of punishing white men who aided to give the natural gift of liberty to those who were enslaved. Now, sir, we propose to use the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Law for the purpose of punishing those who deny freedom, not those who seek to aid persons to escape to freedom. The difference was too clearly pointed out by the colleague of the Senator [Mr. Lane] to justify me in taking further time in alluding to it.

"But the Senator objects to this bill because it authorizes the calling in of the military; and he asserts that it is the only law in which the military is brought in to enforce it. The Senator from Pennsylvania [Mr. Cowan] follows this up with a half hour's speech, denouncing this law as obnoxious to the objection that it is a military law, that it is taking the trial of persons for offenses out of the hands of the courts and placing them under the military--a monstrous proposition, he says. Is that so? What is the law?

"It is a court bill; it is to be executed through the courts, and in no other way. But does the Senator mean to say it is a military bill because the military may be called in, in aid of the execution of the law through the courts? Does the Senator from Pennsylvania--I should like his attention, and that of the Senator from Indiana, too--deny the authority to call in the military in aid of the execution of the law through the courts?

"Let me read a clause from the Constitution, which seems to have been forgotten by the Senator from Pennsylvania and the Senator from Indiana. The Senator from Pennsylvania, who has denounced this law, has been living under just such a law for thirty years, and it seems never found it out. What says the Constitution? 'Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union.'

"Then, can not the militia prevent persons from violating the law? They are authorized by the Constitution to be called out for, the purpose of executing the law, and here we have a law that is to be carried into execution, and when you find persons combined together to prevent its execution, you can not do any thing with them! Suppose that the county authorities in Muscogee County, Georgia, combine together to deny civil rights to every colored man in that county. For the purpose of preventing it, before they have done any act, I say the militia may be called out to prevent them from committing an act. We are not required to wait until the act is committed before any thing can be done. That was the doctrine which led to this rebellion, that we had no authority to do any thing till the conflict of arms came. I believed then, in 1860, that we had authority; and if it had been properly exercised, if the men who were threatening rebellion, who were in this chamber defying the authority of the Government, had been arrested for treason--of which, in my judgment, by setting on foot armed expeditions against the country, they were guilty--and if they had been tried and punished and executed for the crime, I doubt whether this great rebellion would ever have taken place.

"There is another statute to which I beg leave to call the attention of the Senator from Pennsylvania, and under which he has lived for thirty years without ever having known it; and his rights have been fully protected. I wish to call attention to a section from which the tenth section of the bill under consideration, at which the Senator from Indiana is so horrified, is copied word for word, and letter for letter. The act of March 10, 1836, 'supplementary to an act entitled "An act in addition to the act for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States, and to repeal the acts therein mentioned," approved 20th of April, 1818,' contains the very section that is in this bill, word for word. It did not horrify the country; it did not destroy all the liberties of the people; it did not consolidate all the powers of the Constitution in the Federal Government; it did not overthrow the courts, and it has existed now for thirty years!"

The question was first taken on the amendment offered by Mr. Hendricks, to strike out the tenth section of the bill. The vote resulted yeas, twelve; nays, thirty-four.

At this stage of the proceedings, Mr. Saulsbury moved to amend the bill by adding in the first section of the bill after the words "civil rights," the words, "except the right to vote in the States." He desired that if the Senate did not wish to confer the right of suffrage by this bill, they should say so. The question being taken on Mr. Saulsbury's amendment, the vote resulted seven in the affirmative and thirty-nine in the negative.

The vote was finally taken on the passage of the bill, which resulted thirty-three in the affirmative and twelve in the negative. The following Senators voted in favor of the bill:

Messrs. Anthony, Brown, Chandler, Clark, Connor, Cragin,
Dixon, Fessenden, Foot, Foster, Harris, Henderson, Howard,
Howe, Kirkwood, Henry S. Lane, James H. Lane, Morgan,
Morrill, Nye, Poland, Pomeroy, Ramsey, Sherman, Sprague,
Stewart, Sumner, Trumbull, Wade, Willey, Williams, Wilson,
and Yates--33.

The following voted against the bill, namely:

Messrs. Buckalew, Cowan, Davis, Guthrie, Hendricks,
McDougall, Nesmith, Norton, Riddle, Saulsbury, Stockton, and
Van Winkle--12.

Five Senators were absent, to wit:

Messrs. Creswell, Doolittle, Grimes, Johnson, and Wright--5.