198 



CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



disciplining the militia,' etc., to ' exercise ex- 

 clusive legislation in all cases' over this Dis- 

 trict, or such district as should be established 

 as the seat of Government, and to 'make all 

 laws which shall be necessary and proper for 

 carrying into execution the foregoing powers.' " 

 Mr. Cowan, of Pennsylvania, followed, say- 

 ing : " I am entirely opposed to the whole of 

 this first section ; and, in my judgment, it has 

 not a particle of constitutional warrant. As I 

 understand the chairman of the Committee on 

 the Judiciary, he takes his ground upon an 

 amendment to the Constitution of the United 

 States recently passed. The first section of that 

 amendment is in these words : 



Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except 

 as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall 

 have been duly convicted, shall exist within the 

 United States or any place subject to their jurisdic- 

 tion. 



" Now, Mr. President and gentlemen of the 

 Senate, in all good faith, what was the mean- 

 ing of that ? What was its intent ? Can there 

 be any doubt of it ? Is there a sane man within 

 the sound of my voice who does not know pre- 

 cisely what was intended by the American peo- 

 ple in adopting that amendment to the Consti- 

 tution? I may say there is no shirking this 

 thing ; there is no way of dodging it or avoid- 

 ing it. We must meet it ; and if we are men 

 we will meet it, and wo will meet it in the 

 spirit in which it was made. That amendment, 

 everybody knows and nobody dare deny, was 

 simply made to liberate the negro slave from 

 his master. That is all there is of it. Will the 

 chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary or 

 anybody else undertake to say that that was to 

 prevent the involuntary servitude of my child 

 to me, of my apprentice to me, or the quasi 

 servitude which the wife to some extent owes to 

 her husband? Certainly not. Nobody pre- 

 tends that it was to be wider iu its operation 

 than to cover the relation which existed be- 

 tween the master and his negro African slave. 



" Now, mark it, that particular relation, and 

 the breaking of it up, is the subject of that first 

 clause of the amendment, and it does not ex- 

 tend any further, and cannot by any possible 

 implication, contortion, or straining, be made 

 to go further among honest men. That was 

 followed by another clause, and a very proper 

 clause, which everybody at the time under- 

 stood, and which I have never known anybody 

 to be mistaken about until I came into the Sen- 

 ate of the United States this session. That 

 other clause was this : 



Congress shall have power to enforce this article 

 by appropriate legislation. 



"Enforce what? The breaking of the bond 

 by which the negro slave was held to his mas- 

 ter ; that is all. It was not intended to over- 

 turn this Government and to revolutionize all 

 the laws of the various States everywhere. It 

 was intended, in other words, and a lawyer 

 would have so construed it, to give to the negro 

 the privilege of the habeas corpus; that is, if 



anybody persisted in the face of the constitu- 

 tional amendment in holding him as a slave, 

 that he should have an appropriate remedy to 

 be delivered. That is all." 



Mr. Howard, of Mich, replied, saying : " I 

 happened to be a member of .the Judiciary 

 Committee at the time this amendment was 

 drafted and adopted, and reported to the Sen- 

 ate. I recollect very distinctly what were the 

 views entertained by members of that commit- 

 tee at the time it was under consideration be- 

 fore them. And notwithstanding the very ve- 

 hement style of the Senator from Pennsylvania, 

 in placing a narrow and utterly ineffectual con- 

 struction upon 't, I take this occasion to say 

 that it was in contemplation of its friends and 

 advocates to give to Congress precisely the 

 power over the subject of slavery and the freed- 

 men which is proposed to be exercised by the 

 bill now under our consideration. 



"It was easy to foresee, and of course we 

 foresaw, that in case this scheme of emancipa- 

 tion was carried out in the rebel States it would 

 encounter the most vehement resistance on the 

 part of the old slaveholders. It was easy to 

 look far enough into the future to perceive that 

 it would be a very unwelcome measure to them, 

 and that they would resort to every means in 

 their power to prevent what they called the 

 loss of their property under this amendment. 

 We could foresee easily enough that they would 

 use, if they should be permitted to do so by the 

 General Government, all the powers of the State 

 governments in restraining and circumscribing 

 the rights and privileges which are plainly given 

 by it to the emancipated negro. If I under- 

 stand correctly the interpretation given to the 

 article by the Senator from Delaware and the 

 Senator from Pennsylvania, it is this : that the 

 sole effect of it is to cut and sever the mere 

 legal ligament by which the person and the ser- 

 vice of the slave was attached to his master, 

 and that beyond this particular office the 

 amendment does not go ; that it can have no 

 effect whatever upon the condition of the 

 emancipated blacks in any other respect. In 

 other words, they hold that it relieves him 

 from his so-called legal obligation to render his 

 personal service to his master without compen- 

 sation ; and there leaves him, totally, irretriev- 

 ably, and without any power on the part of 

 Congress to look after his well-being from the 

 moment of this mockery of emancipation. Sir, 

 such was not the intention of the friends of this 

 amendment at the time of its initiation here and 

 at the time of its adoption ; and I undertake to 

 say that it is not the construction which is 

 given to it by the bar throughout the country, 

 and much less by the liberty-loving people. 



" But let us look more closely at this narrow 

 construction. Where does it leave us? We 

 are told that the amendment simply relieves 

 the slave from the obligation to render service 

 to his master. What is a slave in contemplation 

 of American law, in contemplation of the laws 

 of all the slave States? We know fall well 



