You stand in the Senate almost the lone man to vindicate the absolute Right.

I do not like to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely rounded periods, and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of Liberty, who never perilled life, liberty, or property.

While I say that I am a friend of the colored man, I do not want to adopt a policy that I believe will end in a contest between the races, which, if persisted in, will result in the extermination of one or the other.

I am still for the preservation of these States, for the preservation of this Union, and in favor of this great Government accomplishing its destiny.

Are those who want to destroy our institutions and change the character of the Government not satisfied with the blood that has been shed?

Here was no concession to State Rights, but a recognition of the power of the people, from whom the Constitution proceeded.

The States are acknowledged; but they are all treated as component parts of the Union in which they are absorbed under the National Constitution, which is the supreme law.

There is but one sovereignty, and that is the sovereignty of the people of the United States.

And now, at the end of an unparalleled war to abase State Rights, we are asked to naturalize in the Constitution a new provision confirming to the States an odious pretension, shocking to the moral sense.

Proceeding with the dissection, I now exhibit the proposition, not only as a concession to State Rights, which is admitted by a Louisiana supporter, but, if unhappily adopted, as the constitutional recognition of an Oligarchy, Aristocracy…

What, Sir, is this rancid pretension, if it be not an oligarchy, aristocracy, caste, and monopoly founded on color, under sanction of the Constitution?

It is all these together, having beyond question the distinctive features of each and the distinctive discredit of each,--therefore odious in government, odious in religion, odious in economy, and altogether constituting an outrageous…

But now you propose to give this criminal fact the support of the Constitution, and lift it into perpetual vigor.

By your concession it tyrannized before, and now by your concession it will tyrannize again.

The citizens it once trampled on as slaves it will continue to trample on as outcasts, and it will set up your permission emblazoned in the Constitution itself.

Proceeding with this proposition, I exhibit it as petrifying in the Constitution the wretched pretension of a white man’s government.

What is the concession that the elective franchise may be denied or abridged “on account of race or color” but an insertion of the word “white” in the National Constitution?

In that text, as it still stands, from beginning to end, from the preamble to the signature of George Washington, or the last word of the last Amendment, there is no recognition of “color.” For the sake of decency, keep it so.

Proceeding still further with the proposition, I exhibit it as assuming, what is false in Constitutional Law, that color can be a qualification for an elector.

But this word must be interpreted in the light of the Constitution, which knows no “color,” and again in the light of the Declaration of Independence, which knows no “color,” and yet again in the light of common sense, which refuses to…

According to these definitions “qualification” means “fitness” or “accomplishment,” and according to examples from classical writers it means qualities like “piety” and “virtue,” or like “mind.” Obviously it cannot embrace color, which is…

An insurmountable condition is not a qualification, but a disfranchisement.

As well say that the quality of the hair or the length of the foot should be a “qualification,” as the color of the skin.

The whole pretension is one of the false glosses fastened upon the National Constitution by Slavery, which must now be sloughed off.

Congress is free to act generously, nobly, truly, according to the highest idea of a republic, discountenancing all inequality of rights and the tyranny of taxation without representation.