ship. I want to know
if she is a citizen. Can she not sue and be sued, contract, and
exercise the rights of a citizen?"

"So can a free negro," said Mr. Davis.

"Then, if a free negro can do all that," said Mr. Clark; "why is he
not a citizen?"

"Because he is no part of the governing power; that is the reason,"
Mr. Davis replied.

"I deny that," said Mr. Clark, "because in some of the States he is a
part of the governing power. The Senator only begs the question; it
only comes back to this, that a nigger is a nigger." [Laughter.]

"That is the whole of it," said Mr. Davis.

[Illustration: Hon. Reverdy Johnson.]

"That is the whole of the gentleman's logic," said Mr. Clark.

In answer to the statement insisted on by Mr. Davis, "You can not make
a citizen of any body that is not a foreigner," Mr. Johnson said:

"That would be an extraordinary condition for the country to be in.
Here are four million negroes. They are not foreigners, because they
were born in the United States. They have no foreign allegiance to
renounce, because they owed no foreign allegiance. Their allegiance,
whatever it was, was an allegiance to the Government of the United
States alone. They can not come, therefore, under the naturalizing
clause; they can not come, of course, under the statutes passed in
pursuance of the power conferred upon Congress by that clause; but
does it follow from that that you can not make them citizens; that the
Congress of the United States, vested with the whole legislative power
belonging to the Government, having within the limits of the United
States four million people anxious to become citizens, and when you
are anxious to make them citizens, have no power to make them
citizens? It seems to me that to state the question is to answer it.

"The honorable member reads the Constitution as if it said that none
but white men should become citizens of the United States; but it says
no such thing, and never intended, in my judgment, to say any such
thing. If it had designed to exclude from all participation in the
rights of citizenship certain men on account of color, and to have
confined, at all times thereafter, citizenship to the white race, it
is but fair to presume, looking to the character of the men who framed
the Constitution, that they would have put that object beyond all
possible doubt; they would have said that no man should be a citizen
of the United States except a white man, or rather would have