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CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



involved in that amendment was that, in re- 

 gard to the right to sue the Government for 

 damages and for property taken, there should 

 be no difference between loyal men and those 

 engaged in the rebellion, and the Senator from 

 California proposed to put them on the same 

 level in the Court of Claims. Upon the prin- 

 ciple of universal amnesty he was logical, and 

 his amendment received the vote of every 

 Democratic Senator present. 



" Mr. President, I had intended to say some- 

 thing about the amendment offered by the 

 Senator from Massachusetts (Mr. Sumner). I 

 desire to say that I shall vote for that amend- 

 ment. I agree with him justice before gen- 

 erosity, justice before spurious magnanim- 

 ity." 



Mr. Thurman said : "If the Senator consid- 

 ers the bill which came from the House a bill 

 not too narrow and not too broad, but pre- 

 cisely the right kind of a bill, containing the 

 proper exceptions, and going far enough in its 

 exceptions, then I put it to him, why have 

 we had this impassioned denunciation of am- 

 nesty this morning ? Where was there any 

 thing to denounce ? There has been no amend- 

 ment offered to this bill yet to strike oat a sin- 

 gle one of its exceptions. The bill is here as it 

 came from the House of Representatives ; it is 

 before us as it came from the House of Repre- 

 sentatives. There has been no amendment 

 offered to strike out a single one of the excep- 

 tions as yet. "When that amendment shall be 

 offered, it will be proper to consider the par- 

 ticular merits of that exception, and say wheth- 

 er it shall be stricken out or not. But the 

 friends of this bill have again and again pro- 

 posed to the Senate they proposed it long ago, 

 they proposed it weeks ago to take this bill 

 and pass it in totidem verbis as it came from 

 the House of Representatives ; and where has 

 been the trouble about it? If the friends of 

 this bill, although they were dissatisfied with 

 some of these exceptions, although they would 

 rather have seen them stricken out, or most of 

 them stricken out, yet were willing, for the 

 purpose of harmony, and for the purpose of a 

 speedy passage of the bill, to take it just as it 

 came from the House of Representatives, and 

 to enact it into a law, where was the necessity 

 for impassioned declamation this morning on 

 the subject of amnesty? 



*' I can only account for it in one way. It 

 has come to be the custom, I am inclined to 

 think, for the Senator from Indiana, at the be- 

 ginning of each political campaign, to make a 

 speech which the lesser lights of the Republi- 

 can party and the Republican press generally 

 announce as the key-note of that campaign ; 

 and it seems that he is looked to to sound the 

 key-note of each campaign that that function 

 has been devolved upon him or assumed by 

 him until it has passed into a part of the com- 

 mon law of the radical party. And now, at 

 the beginning of this great campaign of 1872, 

 the Senator has sounded his note again, and I 



only regret that, in all the years that he has 

 been studying this music, he has found no new 

 tune, nor even a single new note. It is the 

 same old note again ; it is the same old tune 

 again ; it is the same old horrors of the rebel- 

 lion ; it is the same old wickedness of the in- 

 stigators of that rebellion ; it is the same old 

 terrible suffering that that rebellion entailed 

 on the country ; and it is the same frightful 

 array of ghosts, found nowhere except in the 

 Senator's imagination, of what is to result to 

 this country should the Democratic party ever 

 get into power. It is the same old cry of pay- 

 ment of the rebel debt; payment of pensions 

 to rebel soldiers ; reinstitution of slavery ; re- 

 fusal to pay our own debt ; refusal to pay pen- 

 sions to our own soldiers; and so on to the 

 end of the tune. These are charges that cer- 

 tainly the Senator believes, or he would not 

 make them ; for no one is authorized to charge 

 a Senator, especially when speaking from his 

 place in this Chamber, with asserting what he 

 does not believe. There are charges which un- 

 doubtedly the Senator believes ; apprehensions 

 which his lively imagination conjures up in his 

 fertile brain, but which I venture to say no 

 other human being, in the whole length and 

 breadth of the Republic, in his senses, and in- 

 telligent enough to form an opinion, does be- 

 lieve for one single instant. 



" Why, how is it ? Payment of the rebel 

 debt ? How is it to be paid in the face of your 

 fourteenth amendment, which prohibits even 

 a State from making any payment of it? Pay- 

 ment of pensions to rebel soldiers ! Positively 

 prohibited by your fourteenth amendment. 

 Repudiation of your own debt ! Its payment 

 is solemnly guaranteed by your own Constitu- 

 tion. Reinstitution of slavery ! It is positively 

 prohibited by your Constitution and by the 

 constitution of every State in the Union. And 

 yet a Senator, a distinguished Senator, a Sena- 

 tor who is looked upon, perhaps, as the leader 

 of his party and the particular mouth-piece of 

 the Administration, has the boldness to get up 

 in the American Senate, before it and the 

 American people, and, sounding the key-note 

 of the campaign, to hold up these preposterous 

 pictures to frighten the credulous out of their 

 propriety! Sir, it may do very well on the 

 stump in some swamp of Indiana; it may do 

 very well before an ignorant audience who do 

 not know or have not ability enough to com- 

 prehend what is reasonable and what is not, 

 and who are accustomed to take the assertions 

 of the Senator from Indiana as a part of the 

 law of this land, as sacred and as truthful as 

 Holy Writ ; but with men accustomed to re- 

 flect and dealing fairly with a subject, it is not 

 too much to say and I speak without disre- 

 spect to the Senator that all the apprehen- 

 sions he has expressed are simply preposterous 

 nay, more, simply ridiculous. 



^ Sir, I am at a loss to understand this Ad- 

 ministration and its supporters. The Presi- 

 dent recommends amnesty, and the leader of 



