CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



201 



and the necessity of providing against a recur- 

 rence of the violence which has hitherto dis- 

 graced the nation. 



" Withdraw from the President of the United 

 States the power to suspend the writ of habeas 

 corpus in those States where this organization 

 exists, and no man can answer for the scenes 

 that will follow and the retaliation that may 

 ensue. Keep it there, and the very existence 

 of the power will render its exercise unneces- 

 sary. 



" This is the question which we are to de- 

 termine. Are we, taking up these provisions 

 in their order, to say that men who have not 

 been secure in their persons, in their houses, 

 or in their papers ; that men who have been 

 deprived of life and liberty without due pro- 

 cess of law ; that men whose houses have been 

 subject to unreasonable searches and sieges; 

 that criminals even have been hanged without 

 trial in the face of a writ of habeas corpus is- 

 sued to secure them a trial ; that men upon 

 whom cruel and unusual punishments have 

 been inflicted by the mob instead of by judicial 

 tribunals; and that men entitled to citizen- 

 ship, freedom, and the ballot, have all of them 

 denied by this conspiracy shall Ave say that 

 these men shall continue to be subject to these 

 outrages ? Or shall we vest in the President 

 that power which we believe we can vest in 

 him, and which we believe will be effective to 

 protect and defend these rights and to bring to 

 justice their guilty combinations against them." 



Mr. Pratt, of Indiana, said: " Mr. President, 

 the bill under consideration has been intro- 

 duced by the chairman of the joint committee 

 of Congress raised at the last session to inquire 

 into the alleged outrages in the Southern 

 States, and by the authority of that committee. 

 It simply continues in the President of the 

 United States the power of suspending the 

 privilege of the writ of habeas corpus to the 

 end of the next session of Congress, as that 

 power was given by the act of April 20, 1871, 

 entitled * An act to enforce the provisions of 

 the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution 

 of the United States.' The power which the 

 bill confers is no other or different in the cir- 

 cumstances of its exercise from that which has 

 been so beneficently employed by him in nine 

 counties in the State of South Carolina. For- 

 tunately for the country, he has found it neces- 

 sary to use his discretion in but a single State, 

 and in but a small portion of that. 



''Looking at the good results which have 

 been accomplished in that most disturbed dis- 

 trict of the entire South, who can doubt that 

 Congress acted wisely and in the interest of 

 humanity and justice in investing the Presi- 

 dent with this power ? Nobody has suffered, 

 so far as I am aware, who was not engaged in 

 the conspiracy, or against whom reasonable 

 grounds of suspicion did not exist. Hundreds 

 of persons whose guilty consciences informed 

 against them, seeing that the Government was 

 in earnest in its purpose to put a stop to law- 



lessness and violence, have fled to parts un- 

 known. Law has been reinstated, and protec- 

 tion given to life and property by the passage 

 of that act. 



" I know, sir, full well how jealous the peo- 

 ple of this country are of their liberties. They 

 regard this writ as their greatest safeguard. 

 They are not forgetful of its history and of the 

 struggles of the people of England to ingraft 

 it upon Magna Charta. The fathers of this 

 Republic wisely provided, when they came to 

 form the national Constitution, that its privi- 

 lege should not be suspended unless when in 

 cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety 

 might require it. For myself I believe the 

 power is inherent in the office of the President 

 without act of Congress. An invasion may 

 occur or a rebellion spring up when Congress 

 is not in session, and when its suspension may 

 be necessary before this body could be con- 

 vened. 



"But it is unnecessary to argue that ques- 

 tion or refer to precedents. The only ques- 

 tion now is, whether there is such a condition 

 of things in any part of the South as makes it 

 prudent to continue in force for a limited time 

 this provision in the act of April 20, 1871. 

 The object of this writ, as we all understand, 

 is to enable any person, deprived of his liberty, 

 to bring his case before a judge that the cause 

 and validity of his detention may be inquired 

 into. No one disputes the value of the writ, 

 nor that it is the bulwark of personal liberty, 

 nor that its privilege should never be suspend- 

 ed except in great emergencies. No free 

 State can exist without it. Yet, while all this 

 is true, there are of necessity limitations to its 

 use.. A man convicted of crime has no right 

 to invoke it in his cell in the penitentiary, or 

 while standing under the gallows ; nor in 

 times of war is its use practicable, when civil 

 law is suspended and military organizations 

 are abroad controlling private action, and the 

 voice of the judge is drowned in the clash of 

 arms. And so, too, when there exists a wide- 

 spread conspiracy to deprive any portion or 

 class of the people of their rights under the 

 law, by intimidation, violence, and outrage ; 

 to overthrow the laws which guard the life 

 and liberty of the citizen; when the local 

 "courts are utterly powerless to deal with the 

 criminals ; where the conspiracy manifests it- 

 self by bands of armed men too numerous and 

 powerful for the civil officers to deal with 

 them ; when arrests with a view to trial and 

 punishment would be made nugatory through 

 the complicity or fears of the constituted au- 

 thorities of the State, there exists the same 

 necessity for a suspension of the privilege 

 of the writ as in case of invasion and rebel- 

 lion. 



"Mr. President, the question is, shall the 

 grant of this power of suspension be contin- 

 ued, not indefinitely, but until the 4th of 

 March next? The answer to this question 

 must depend upon another question, whether 



