CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



217 



of either by advice or protest, warfare, or proc- 

 lamation, dealing with the States. 



" That from the foundation of the Govern- 

 ment, over this class of subjects because the 

 whole spirit of this discussion turns upon the 

 question whether the national authority has a 

 right to deal with its citizens as citizens, and 

 not with States, or whether it must be left to 

 the States alone to act upon her citizens in 

 enforcing the national Constitution embra- 

 cing almost one half of all the business relations 

 of men in the country, embracing a thousand 

 different operations and a thousand different 

 situations of society, the United States have 

 had and administered a criminal code to pro- 

 tect the powers and to execute the duties which 

 the Constitution has confided to them. And in 

 doing this, they have not either 'invaded' or 

 ' entered ' any State, but they have exercised 

 the constitutional omnipresence of sovereignty, 

 and carried forward the beneficent sway of 

 justice among the people, for the people, and 

 by the people. 



" The Government has had a criminal code 

 that acted directly upon the people, upon whom 

 alone it could act. That has not been an in- 

 vasion of the rights of the States ; on the con- 

 trary, it has been in aid of the good order and 

 stability of the society of the States, and at the 

 same time the States by their own laws, and 

 in their own methods, and through their own 

 courts, have punished the same classes of of- 

 fences; and the Supreme Court of the United 

 States has more than once been called upon to 

 decide whether a State could, in view of the 

 fact that the United States had a code against 

 a particular crime, also make the same act a 

 crime ; and it has always been decided that the 

 sovereignty of the two governments was in 

 these respects independent and concurrent ; 

 that they both could act over the subjects that 

 were committed to them, and therefore that a 

 citizen might properly be punished for violat- 

 ing a State law and a United States law in 

 doing the same act. 



"Now, sir, I think I have demonstrated, 

 though I have taken, perhaps, too much time 

 to do it, that over all the rights, and over all 

 the duties, and over all the guarantees that the 

 Constitution of the United States enumerates, 

 the power of the United States, by legislation, 

 by punishment, by any of the methods which 

 legislation may resort to, to enforce constitu- 

 tional duties and obligations may and must act 

 directly upon the citizen ; and that it is entire- 

 ly immaterial whether the State may or can do 

 the same thing for the same act or not ; and, 

 therefore, that it is no objection to the consti- 

 tutional exercise of power by Congress that the 

 States themselves, in the case of these disor- 

 ders in the South, may, if they will, punish the 

 same things according to their own laws. This 

 has been carried so far in the statutes of the 

 United States passed by the founders of the 

 Government, that in cases of admiralty and 

 maritime jurisdiction (which would seem by 



the Constitution to have been exclusively con- 

 fided to the national authority and the national 

 courts), the ancient statutes, conferring juris- 

 diction and setting up courts to practise that 

 law, expressly provided that the acts of Con- 

 gress and the authority of the courts under 

 them should not be construed to exclude the 

 common law or prohibit the courts of the States 

 to grant relief in all those cases in which the 

 common law was competent to afford it. So 

 that to-day, although the courts of the United 

 States in one form of procedure procedure 

 in rem have exclusive jurisdiction over mari- 

 time matters, the common -law courts of every 

 State have ample jurisdiction of the same mat- 

 ters, by suits inpersonam between parties ; and 

 yet we are told that this attempt of the United 

 States to punish crimes of this character is a 

 new thing ; that we are changing the charac- 

 ter of the Government by endeavoring to re- 

 press tumults and insurrections which are lev- 

 elled against citizens in order to deprive them 

 of that equal protection and that right to seek 

 justice which the Constitution, froz. the na- 

 ture of it, guarantees to them, and which it in 

 express words gives to them. 



" Now, sir, let us see what rights these new 

 amendments have given to citizens ; and I am 

 sorry to have troubled the Senate so long in 

 discussing this general principle; but, inasmuch 

 as the whole constitutionality of our legislation 

 has been made to turn, as I have said, upon the 

 denial of our right to exercise direct powers 

 over the citizens as such, I have felt justified 

 in demonstrating, as I think I have, from his- 

 tory, from the Constitution, from the statutes, 

 and from the decisions, that this pretence is a 

 sheer delusion. 



"Now, what do these amendments provide? 



" The thirteenth amendment provided that 

 tli ere should be neither slavery nor involuntary 

 servitude except for crime. That was & pro- 

 hibition. It did not name a State at all. Un- 

 der the old decisions, to which I have referred, 

 protecting life, liberty, and property, against 

 invasion without due process of law, Demo- 

 cratic Senators and my friend from Illinois 

 might have contended that this was only a pro- 

 hibition against slavery under the authority 

 of the United States, and that any State could 

 now deprive a citizen of his liberty for the rea- 

 son that the thirteenth amendment only oper- 

 ated as against the Government of the United 

 States as it was held under the old one which 

 I have read. 



"But that has not been contended, and 

 everybody knows that it would be scouted, for 

 there is added if there could have been any 

 doubt about it before the provision that 

 'Congress shall have power to enforce this 

 article by appropriate legislation.' Therefore, 

 when the prohibition against slavery was en- 

 acted, and the power was expressly put into 

 the hands of Congress to carry out that enact- 

 ment, to see that it was made effectual, was it 

 not the right and the duty of Congress, too, to 



