gard this bill," he said, "as one of the most
dangerous that was ever introduced into the Senate of the United
States, or to which the attention of the American people was ever
invited. During the last four or five years, I have sat in this
chamber and witnessed the introduction of bills into this body which I
thought obnoxious to many very grave and serious constitutional
objections; but I have never, since I have been a member of the body,
seen a bill so fraught with danger, so full of mischief, as the bill
now under consideration.

"I shall not follow the honorable Senator into a consideration of the
manner in which slaves were treated in the Southern States, nor the
privileges that have been denied to them by the laws of the States. I
think the time for shedding tears over the poor slave has well nigh
passed in this country. The tears which the honest white people of
this country have been made to shed from the oppressive acts of this
Government, in its various departments, during the last four years,
call more loudly for my sympathies than those tears which have been
shedding and dropping and dropping for the last twenty years in
reference to the poor, oppressed slave--dropping from the eyes of
strong-minded women and weak-minded men, until, becoming a mighty
flood, they have swept away, in their resistless force, every trace of
constitutional liberty in this country.

"I suppose it is a foregone conclusion that this measure, as one of a
series of measures, is to be passed through this Congress regardless
of all consequences. But the day that the President of the United
States places his approval and signature to that Freedmen's Bureau
Bill, and to this bill, he will have signed two acts more dangerous to
the liberty of his countrymen, more disastrous to the citizens of this
country, than all the acts which have been passed from the foundation
of the Government to the present hour; and if we on this side of the
chamber manifest anxiety and interest in reference to these bills, and
the questions involved in them, it is because, having known this
population all our lives, knowing them in one hour of our infancy
better than you gentlemen have known them all your lives, we feel
compelled, by a sense of duty, earnestly and importunately, it may be,
to appeal to the judgment of the American Senate, and to reach, if
possible, the judgment of the great mass of the American people, and
invoke their attention to the awful