to go, and we are obliged to pay any fines they may
impose. I do not believe that you will lose any thing if you pause
before passing such legislation as this, and establishing these
military despotisms, for we do not know where they are to end."

Mr. Hendricks, of Indiana, had proposed to strike out the last clause
of the bill, which provided that "such part of the land and naval
forces of the United States, or of the militia," as should be
necessary, might be employed to prevent the violation, and enforce the
due execution of this act. The Senator from Indiana opposed the bill
on the ground that it employed the machinery of the Fugitive Slave
Law, and that it was to be enforced by the military authority of the
United States. He said:

"This bill is a wasp; its sting is in its tail. Sir, what is this
bill? It provides, in the first place, that the civil rights of all
men, without regard to color, shall be equal; and, in the second
place, that if any man shall violate that principle by his conduct, he
shall be responsible to the court; that he may be prosecuted
criminally and punished for the crime, or he may be sued in a civil
action and damages recovered by the party wronged. Is not that broad
enough? Do Senators want to go further than this? To recognize the
civil rights of the colored people as equal to the civil rights of the
white people, I understand to be as far as Senators desire to go; in
the language of the Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Sumner], to place
all men upon an equality before the law; and that is proposed in
regard to their civil rights."

In reference to the reenactment of the odious features of the Fugitive
Slave Law in this bill, Mr. Hendricks said: "I recollect how the blood
of the people was made to run cold within them when it was said that
the white man was required to run after the fugitive slave; that the
law of 1850 made you and me, my brother Senators, slave-catchers; that
the _posse comitatus_ could be called to execute a writ of the law,
for the recovery of a runaway slave, under the provisions of the
Constitution of the United States; and the whole country was agitated
because of it. Now slavery is gone; the negro is to be established
upon a platform of civil equality with the white man. That is the
proposition. But we do not stop there; we are to reenact a law that
nearly all of you said was wicked and wrong; and for what purpose? Not
to pursue the negro any longer; not for the p