176 



CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



white man can vote who will not forever forswear his 

 own race and color, and perjure himself by swearing, 

 in defiance of the law of God, that the negro is his 

 equal and forever to be his equal at the ballot-box, in 

 the jury-box, with the cartridge-box ; in the school, 

 in the college, in house and home, and by the fire- 

 side; in short, in every way, everywhere (art. 7, 

 sec. 4). 



Now, in these and the other Southern States, in the 

 midst of war, President Lincoln, in his proclamation, 

 December 8, 1863, offered amnesty and pardon to 

 rebels then in arms, if they would lay down their 

 arms and take an oath of fidelity, while now, not a 

 Union man in Arkansas or Alabama can vote unless 

 in the first place he swears allegiance to the majesty 

 of this Congress, and in the next swears off his 

 Americanism and Africanizes himself. Hitherto 

 constitutions with us have been the outgrowth of 

 popular life, springing from the exuberance of our 

 enterprise and energy in the settlement of the forests 

 or prairies of our country ; but here, before us now, 

 are nine constitutions, with one if not three more 

 yet to come from Texas, which have all been imposed 

 upon the people by five military satraps or pentarchs, 

 in a manner never before known under our law, but 

 borrowed at best from imperial Roman military colo- 

 nization^ or from the worst precedents of the French 

 Revolution. France is then recorded to have had 

 five constitutions in three vears, so frequently made 

 and so frequently changed that they were ironically 

 classed by the French people with the periodical 

 literature of the day. Louisiana, a colony of that 

 France, has had four constitutions in four years, and 

 a constitution there has now become periodical litera- 

 ture, as in France, in the agonies and throes of the 

 great Revolution. Laws, mere statute laws, which 

 can never be created by conventions, are appended, 

 more or less, to all these constitutions, and bayonet- 

 created, one-branch governments, with no Execu- 

 tive, no senate, no house of representativeSj no judi- 

 ciary, have ordained irrepealable, irreversible laws 

 in the very organism of the State, such as cannot be 

 thus created by the Executive, the senate, and the 

 house of representatives of legitimate governments 

 when acting in unison and all combined. All this 

 has been done, without regard to preceding consti- 

 tutions or precedents, or to the common law of the 

 States or the law of nations. 



The military, which, under legitimate institutions, 

 can only be used in time of peace to conserve or pre- 

 serve the State, have here been used to destroy States. 

 The General of the Army, who represents the sword, 

 and only the sword of the Republic, has been ex- 

 alted by acts of Congress above the constitutional 

 Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, in 

 order to execute those military decrees, and as the 

 surer way to root out every vestige left of constitu- 

 tional law or liberty. The same General of the Army, 

 in order to prolong or perpetuate his military dom- 

 ination North and West as well as South, has been 

 selected in party convention at Chicago to head the 

 electoral vote for the presidency in ten of our States 

 which are as much under his feet as Turkey is under 

 the Sultan or Poland under the Czar of Russia. But, 

 as if only to add insult to the injury of this military 

 outrage upon popular government in these ten 

 States, either by act of Congress or by these Con- 

 gress-soldier-made State constitutions, at least two 

 hundred and fifty thousand whites have been dis- 

 franchised, while seven hundred and fifty thousand 

 negroes, inexperienced in all law-making, and more 

 ignorant than our children, have been enfranchised 

 in their stead, and have thus been created absolute 

 masters and sovereigns over the whole white popu- 

 lation of the South. 



Because of all this, and in opposition to all this, 

 we, Representatives of the people from the free 

 States, in behalf of our constituents and of thou- 

 sands and tens of thousands of others who would be 

 here represented if the popular power without could 



now constitutionally act here within, earnestly and 

 solemnly protest against this violence upon our Con- 

 stitution and upon our people, and do hereby coun- 

 sel and advise all friends of popular government to 

 submit to this force and fraud only until at the bal- 

 lot-box, operating through the elections, this great 

 wrong can be put right. There is no law in the land 

 supreme over the constitutional law. There is no 

 government but constitutional government ; and 

 hence all bayonet-made, all Congress-imposed con- 

 stitutions are of no weight, authority, or sanction, 

 save that enforced by arms, an element of power 

 unknown to Americans in peace, and never recog- 

 nized but as it acts in and under the supreme civil 

 law, the Constitution, and the statutes enacted in 

 pursuance thereof. We protest, then, in behalf of 

 the free people of the North and the West, against 

 the right of this military oligarchy established in 

 Arkansas, or elsewhere in the now reenslaved States 

 of the South, to impose upon us, through Congress, 

 tax^s or customs or other laws to maintain this 

 oligarchy or its Freedmen's Bureau. We protest 

 against going into the now proposed copartnership 

 of military dictators and negroes in the _ administra- 

 tion of this Government. We demand, in the name 

 of the fathers of the Constitution and for the sake 

 of posterity, not its reconstruction, but the restora- 

 tion of that sacred instrument which has been to us 

 all a pillar of fire from 1787 on to its present over- 

 throw; and in all solemnity before God and man, 

 under a full sense of the responsibility of all we 

 utter, we do hereby affix our names to this protest 

 against the admission of these three persons claim- 

 ing to be members of Congress from Arkansas. 



James Brooks, James B. Beck, P. Van Trump, 

 Chas. A. Eldridge, Samuel J. Randall, W. Mungen, 

 Stephen Taber, Asa P. Grover, L. S. Trimble, Geo. 

 M. Adams, A. J. Glossbrenner^ Stevenson Archer, 

 John A. Nicholson, John Momssey, Thos. Laurens 

 Jones, W. E. Niblack, Julius Hotchkiss, William H. 

 Barnum, John W. Chanler, S. B. Axtell, S. S. Mar- 

 shall, W. S. Holman, Chas. Haight, Chas. Sitgreaves, 

 J. Proctor Knott, J. S. Golladay, J. M. Humphrey, 

 Fernando Wood, J. Lawrence Getz, F. Stone.M. C< 

 Kerr, John Fox, Jas. A. Johnson, JohnV. L. Pruyn, 

 W. E. Robinson, B. M. Boyer, Geo. W. Woodward, 

 Chas. E. Phelps, A. G. Burr, D. M. Van Auken, J. 

 R. McCormick, Demas Barnes, James M. Cavanauo-h. 

 Lewis W. Ross, H. McCulloch. 



In the House, on May 14th, the bill to admit 

 the States of North Carolina, South Carolina, 

 Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama to represen- 

 tation in Congress being under consideration, 

 Mr. Stevens, of Pennsylvania, said : " What is 

 the particular question we are considering? 

 Five or six States have had submitted to them 

 the question of forming constitutions for their 

 own government. They have voluntarily 

 formed such constitutions, under the direction 

 of the Government of the United States. They 

 have sent those constitutions here, backed, in 

 every instance, even in that of Alabama, by a 

 majority of all the voters within the State. 

 And when I say ' all the voters ' I mean all the 

 voters, black and white, whether they come 

 from New York or South Carolina or elsewhere. 

 They have sent us their constitutions. Those 

 constitutions have been printed and laid before 

 us. We have looked at them ; we have pro- 

 nounced them republican in form ; and all we 

 propose to require is that they shall remain so 

 forever. Subject to this requirement, we are 

 willing to admit them into the Union. 



"I know that, by delaying thus far the ad- 



