MR. PRESIDENT,--I begin by expressing my acknowledgments to the Senator from Maine, who yields the floor to-day, and also my sincere regret that anything should interfere with the opening of this debate by him. It is his right, and I enter upon it now only by his indulgence.
I am not insensible to the responsibility assumed in setting myself against a proposition already adopted in the other House, and having the recommendation of a Committee to which the country looks with such just expectation, and to which, let me say, I look with so much trust. But, after careful reflection, I do not feel that I can do otherwise. Knowing, as I do, the eminent character of the Committee, its intelligence, its patriotism, and the moral instincts by which it is moved, I am at a loss to understand the origin of an attempt which seems to me nothing else than another compromise of Human Rights, as if the country had not already paid enough in costly treasure and more costly blood for such compromises in the past. I had hoped the day of compromise with wrong had gone forever. Ample experience shows that it is the least practical mode of settling questions involving moral principle. A moral principle cannot be compromised.
Here are important words of the Amendment:--
“_Provided_, That, whenever the elective franchise shall be denied or abridged in any State on account of race or color, all persons therein of such race or color shall be excluded from the basis of representation.”
I may be mistaken, Sir, but I think it difficult to read this proposition without being painfully impressed by the discord and defilement it will introduce into the National Constitution, having among specific objects the guaranty of a republican form of government. The discord appears on the face. The defilement is none the less apparent. Go back, if you please, to the adoption of the Constitution, and you will gratefully acknowledge that the finest saying of the times was when Madison, evidently inspired by the Declaration of Independence, and determined to keep the Constitution in harmony with it, insisted, in well-known words, that it was “WRONG to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men.”[40] Of all that has come to us from that historic Convention, where Washington sat as President, and Franklin and Hamilton sat as members, there is nothing with so much of imperishable charm. It was wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that man could hold property in man. In this spirit the Constitution was framed. This offensive idea was not admitted. The text, at least, was kept blameless. And now, after generations have passed, surrounded by the light of Christian truth and in the full blaze of Human Freedom, it is proposed to admit in the Constitution a twin idea of Inequality in Rights, and thus openly set at nought the first principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the guaranty of a republican government itself, while you blot out a whole race politically. For some time we have been carefully expunging from the statute-book the word “white,” and now it is proposed to insert in the Constitution itself a distinction of color. An amendment, according to the dictionaries, is “an improvement,” “a change for the better.” Surely the present proposition is an amendment which, like the crab, goes backward.