158 



CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



stitution, limitations placed upon the power 

 of Congress for the purpose not only of pro- 

 tecting the States against the invasion of State 

 power, but for the purpose of protecting the 

 individual citizen against the violation of the 

 guarantees of personal liberty to be found in 

 the same Constitution? Is that disloyalty? 

 The honorable member will hardly say that it 

 is. It may be, and in his judgment, no doubt, 

 is an error of opinion ; it may be, and in his 

 judgment, no doubt, it is an error attended 

 with mischief to the country at large ; but dif- 

 ferences of opinion do not make him who holds 

 one loyal and him who holds the opposite opin- 

 ion disloyal. 



" Mr. President, if I may be permitted to il- 

 lustrate by referring to my own case, if I can 

 do so without any violation of good taste, as I 

 hope I may, am I disloyal because I differ with 

 the majority in this House ? Am I disloyal be- 

 cause I have differed, and no doubt shall con- 

 tinue to differ, with some of the doctrines of 

 the Executive of the United States? Am I 

 disloyal because I have occasionally differed, 

 and no doubt shall continue to differ, from 

 some of the opinions pronounced by the Su- 

 preme Court of the United States? I hope 

 not. In the exercise of my own honest judg- 

 ment, and having at heart the prosperity and 

 safety of my country, I did, from the com- 

 mencement of the rebellion, and before, de- 

 nounce it as resting upon a doctrine finding no 

 support in the Constitution of our country, but, 

 on the contrary, at war with many of its ex- 

 press provisions. I had, however, the charity 

 to believe, and I believe now, that the opposite 

 doctrine to my own was maintained with equal 

 sincerity by hundreds and thousands of citizens 

 to be found in every State of the Union. It 

 had for its support, or was supposed to have 

 had for its support, the name of Jefferson, the 

 apostle of liberty, according to our view of his 

 character, the author of the Declaration of In- 

 dependence. 



" The immediate cause of the apprehension 

 under which he labored was the passage of the 

 Alien and Sedition Laws. He found no author- 

 ity for such legislation in any power conferred 

 upon the Congress of the United States. He 

 believed that they trampled upon the guaran- 

 teed rights of the citizens and of the States, and 

 he, in advance, told the country, by the reso- 

 lutions to which I have referred, which came 

 from his pen, and which he knew would be 

 adopted by Kentucky, and which were adopted 

 by the unanimous voice of the Legislature of 

 that State, that the country would come into a 

 condition which would justify Kentucky or any 

 other State in the Union in abandoning what 

 he considered as a confederacy. On more oc- 

 casions than one I have, with the little ability 

 I may possess, controverted the doctrine. It 

 is, in my judgment, as antagonistic to the true 

 spirit of the Constitution of the United States 

 as it is fatal to the continuing existence of a 

 Government formed, as ours is, of States as 



well as of people ; but in 1799, if I had been 

 old enough then to form an opinion upon the 

 subject, I never should have dreamed of im- 

 puting to Jefferson disloyalty, in the sense in 

 which the honorable member from Indiana 

 evidently uses the term when he reads it in con- 

 nection with this clause. I never should have 

 thought, and certainly the Congress of the 

 United States at that time never dreamed, that 

 there existed in this clause, or in any other 

 clause of the Constitution, a power to interfere 

 with the government of Kentucky upon the 

 ground that her citizens were not, according 

 to their judgment, loyal to the Government of 

 the United States. 



" Look to my own State ; look to the State so 

 ably represented by my friend who now sits 

 next to me (Mr. Conkling), New York. Are 

 these States to be brought within the grasp of 

 that large mass of undefined powers which 

 are supposed to lurk within a clause that pro- 

 fesses to give no power, but to guarantee an 

 existing government? The honorable mem- 

 ber from Indiana says the Southern States can 

 be brought within that clause, because, in his 

 opinion, they are not loyal; because, in his 

 view, republican forms of government in those 

 States cannot be secured unless the Congress 

 of the United States shall form State govern- 

 ments and State constitutions for them, or pre- 

 scribe the conditions upon which they shall 

 come into the Union as States. 

 s " The honorable member from Indiana, not, 

 I am sure, meaning to cast any reflection upon 

 me in what he said in regard to my State, 

 stated in substance, in the speech to which I 

 am now replying, and in one made a few days 

 before upon the right of ray colleague to take 

 his seat in this body, that the government of 

 that State was now in the hands of persons who 

 sympathized with the late rebellion. It is not 

 for me to comment with any unkindness upon 

 the character of the men in whose hands the 

 destinies of the State are now placed. In my 

 judgment they are in the possession of the gov- 

 ernment rightfully, as far as the laws and con- 

 stitution of the State are concerned, and as far 

 as the Constitution of the United States is 

 concerned. That they erred in the past in 

 sympathizing with the South nobody is more 

 satisfied than I am ; and they are satisfied, more 

 than satisfied, that if wiser counsels had not 

 prevailed during the rebellion, by which the 

 State was retained within the orbit of her duty, 

 and she had attempted secession, she would 

 have been the battle-ground of the war, and 

 her own great city, in all human probability, 

 would have been laid in ashes ; every house, 

 now the abode of happiness and of freedom, 

 might have shared the same fate ; her children 

 would have fallen in the idle, and, as I believe, 

 unconstitutional attempt to destroy the Gov- 

 ernment to which she, as every State in the 

 Union, is indebted for all the power and all the 

 prosperity which she possesses. 



" But many of them, no doubt, thought dif- 



