History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States. William Horatio Barnes
equal?' or shall we unfurl in its stead that other banner, with a strange device, around which the dissolving remnants of the Democratic party in this hall are called upon to rally, inscribed with no great sentiment of justice or generosity, but bearing upon its folds the miserable appeal of the demagogue, 'This is a white man's Government?' When you inaugurate your newly-discovered political principle, do not forget to invite the colored troops; beat the assembly; call out the remnants of the one hundred and eighty thousand men who marched with steady step through the flames and carnage of war, and many of whom bear upon their bodies the honorable scars received in that unparalleled struggle and in your defense, and as you send your banner down the line, say to them, 'This is the reward of a generous country for the wounds you have received and the sufferings you have endured.'
"Shall we follow the great law to which I have referred—the law that liberty is progress—and conform our policy to the spirit of that great law? or shall we, governed by unreasonable and selfish prejudices, initiate a policy which will make this race our hereditary enemy, a mine beneath instead of a buttress to the edifice which you are endeavoring to repair? Sir, I do not hesitate to say that, in my opinion, it were better to follow where conscience and justice point, leaving results to a higher Power, than to shrink from an issue which it is the clear intention of Providence we shall face, or to be driven from our true course by the chimeras which the excited imaginations of political partisans have conjured up, or by the misty ghosts of long-buried errors."
Mr. Van Horn, of New York, while willing to accept the bill as originally presented, preferred it as modified by Mr. Hale's amendments. In his speech he charged those who had opposed the bill as laboring in the interest of slavery.
"They seem to have forgotten," he said, "in their advocacy of slavery, that we have passed through a fierce war, begun by slavery, waged against the Government by slavery, and solely in its interest to more thoroughly establish itself upon the Western Continent, and crush out the best interests of freedom and humanity; and that this war, guided on our part by the omnipotent arm of the Invisible, made bare in our behalf, has resulted in a most complete overthrow of this great wrong; and by the almost omnipotent voice of the republic, as now expressed in its fundamental law, it has no right to live, much less entitled to the right of burial, and should have no mourners in the land or going about the streets. Such speeches as those of the gentlemen from New Jersey, [Mr. Rogers,] and from Pennsylvania, [Mr. Boyer,] and my colleague and friend, [Mr. Chanler,] who represents, with myself, in part, the Empire State, carry us back to the days and scenes before the war, when slavery ruled supreme, not only throughout the land, by and through its hold upon power, which the people in an evil hour had given it, but here in these halls of legislation, where liberty and its high and noble ends ought to have been secured by just and equal laws, and the great and paramount object of our system of government carried out and fully developed. They seem to forget that liberty and good government have been on trial during these five years last past of war and blood, and that they have succeeded in the mighty struggle. They forget that Providence, in a thousand ways, during this fierce conflict, has given us evidence of his favor, and led us out of the land of bondage into a purer and higher state of freedom, where slavery, as an institution among us, is no more. Why do they labor so long and so ardently to resurrect again into life this foul and loathsome thing? Why can not they forget their former love and attachments in this direction, and no longer cling with such undying grasp to this dead carcass, which, by its corruptions and rottenness, has well nigh heretofore poisoned them to the death? Why not awake to the new order of things, and accept the results which God has worked out in our recent struggle, and not raise the weak arm of flesh to render null and void what has thus been done, and thus attempt to turn back the flow of life which is overspreading all, and penetrating every part of the body politic with its noble purposes and exalted hopes?"
Thursday, January 18, was the last day of the discussion of this important measure in the House of Representatives. When the subject was in order, Mr. Clarke, of Kansas, "as the only Representative upon the floor of a State whose whole history had been a continual protest against political injustice and wrong," after having advocated the bill by arguments drawn from the history of the country and the record of the negro race, remarked as follows: "This cry of poverty and ignorance is not new. I remember that those who first followed the Son of man, the Savior of the world, were not the learned rabbis, not the enlightened scholar, not the rich man or the pious Pharisee. They were the poor and needy, the peasant and the fisherman. I remember, also, that the more learned the slaveholder, the greater the rebel. I remember that no black skin covered so false a heart or misdirected brain, that when the radiant banner of our nationality was near or before him, he did not understand its meaning, and remained loyal to its demands. The man capable of taking care of himself, of wife and children, and, in addition to his unrequited toil, to hold up his oppressor, must have intelligence enough, in the long run, to wield the highest means of protection we can give.
"But, sir, it is for our benefit, as well as for the benefit of the proscribed class, that I vote for and support impartial manhood suffrage in this District. We can not afford, as a nation, to keep any class ignorant or oppress the weak. We must establish here republican government. That which wrongs one man, in the end recoils on the many. Sir, if we accept, as the Republican party of the Union, our true position and our duty, we shall nobly win. If we are false and recreant, we shall miserably fail. Let us have faith in the people and the grand logic of a mighty revolution, and dare to do right. Class legislation will be the inevitable result of class power; and what would follow, so far as the colored race are concerned, let the recent tragedy of Jamaica answer.
[Illustration: Hon. Sidney Clarke.]
"The principles involved in the arguments put forth on the other side of the House are not alone destructive to the rights of the defenseless, intelligent, and patriotic colored men of this District, but they militate with a double effect and stronger purpose against the poor whites of the North and of the South, against the German, the Irishman, and the poor and oppressed of every race, who come to our shores to escape the oppression of despotic governments, and to seek the protection of a Government the true theory of which reposes in every citizen a portion of its sovereign power. Against this attempt to deny or abridge in any way the rights of the weak, the poor, and the defenseless, and to transfer the governing power of the nation to the favored classes, to the rich and the powerful, and thus change the very purpose and principles of our republican system, I protest in the name of constitutional freedom, and in behalf of equal rights and equal laws.
"I protest against this stealthy innovation upon popular rights, in the name of the toiling millions of the land; and I warn the House and the country of the untold mischief and disaster which must come to distract and divide the republic in the future, if we follow the pernicious and destructive doctrines founded upon either the prejudices of class, caste, wealth, or power. I protest in the name of a constituency whose early history was a sublime and persistent struggle against the prejudices of pampered and arrogant ruffianism at home, and the worse than ruffian spirit of the Administrations of Pierce and Buchanan, and the Democratic traitors who at that time constituted a majority of this House, and were engaged in preparing the nation for its harvest of blood. We must go back to the spirit and purposes of the founders of our Government. We must accept the grand logic of the mighty revolution from which we are now emerging. We must repudiate, now and forever, these assaults upon the masses of the people and upon the fundamental principles of popular rights. I accept in their full force and effect the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and by constitutional amendment and law of Congress I would stamp them with irrevocable power upon the political escutcheon of the new and regenerated republic. I would avoid the mistakes of the past, and I would spurn that cringing timidity by which, through all history, liberty has been sacrificed and humanity betrayed.
"Sir, I hesitate not to say that if we do not gather up, in the process of national reconstruction, the enduring safeguards of future peace, we shall be false to our history and unmindful of the grand responsibilities now devolving upon us. The establishment of impartial suffrage in this District will be a fitting commencement of the work. It will be hailed by the friends of freedom every-where as a return to a policy of national justice too long delayed. In behalf of the State I have the honor to represent, and upon whose soil this contest for a larger liberty and a nobler nationality was first submitted to the arbitrament of arms, I hail