Mr. Dixon, of Connecticut, deprecated the adoption of the resolutions. The bill recently passed “purported to be final.… It provided certain terms, harsh and severe in the extreme, upon which the States formerly in rebellion should be restored to the Union.” He then remarked: “These resolutions come from the right quarter. Whatever may be my opinion of his [Mr. SUMNER’S] political views, I will say for that Senator, that for the last two years he has been prophetic; what he has announced, what he has declared, what he has said must be law, has become law upon many subjects.… Let us know what is coming; let us see the worst.… While I was very glad to find--if I understood them correctly--that the Senator from Maine [Mr. FESSENDEN] and some other Senators about me did not coincide with the views of the Senator from Massachusetts, I could not forget that two years ago I heard a Senator on this floor say that upon another subject there was not a single Senator here who agreed with the Senator from Massachusetts; and yet upon that very subject I believe every Senator on the majority side of the Senate now, if not at heart concurring with him, acts and votes with him.”
Mr. Sherman, of Ohio, opposed the resolutions. It seemed to him “not exactly fair or just or ingenuous to the Southern people to add new terms, or require of them additional guaranties, as conditions to the admission of representation.”
Mr. Reverdy Johnson, of Maryland, voted for the recent bill because he thought he saw in opinions of Mr. Sumner, “and a few others who concur with him, that, if the measure then before the Senate was not adopted, harsher, much harsher, measures would in the end be exacted of the South.”
Mr. Frelinghuysen, of New Jersey, thought the resolutions “unfair to Congress and unfair to the country.”
The objects which I seek in Reconstruction are regarded in very different lights by myself and by Senators who have spoken. The Senator from New Jersey, the Senator from Maryland, and the Senator from Ohio all regard these requirements as in the nature of burdens or penalties. Education is a burden or penalty; a homestead is a burden or penalty. It is a new burden or penalty which I am seeking--so these distinguished Senators argue--to impose upon the South. Are they right, or am I right? Education can never be burden or penalty. Justice in the way of a homestead can never be burden or penalty. Each is a sacred duty which the nation owes to those who rightfully look to us for protection.