alty to your flag. . . . In
all the revolted states, upon the testimony of your ablest generals,
there is no safety to the property or lives of loyal men. Is this
what the loyal North has been fighting for? Thousands of loyal white
men, driven like partridges over the mountains, homeless, houseless,
penniless, to-day throng this capital. They fill the hotels, they
crowd the avenues, they gather in these marble corridors, they look
down from these galleries, and with supplicating eye ask protection
from the flag that hangs above the Speaker's chair--a flag which thus
far has unfurled its stripes, but concealed the promise of its stars."

--Mr. Le Blond of Ohio declared that "the provisions of this bill
strike down every important provision in the Constitution. You have
already inaugurated enough here to destroy any government that was
ever founded. . . . Now, Mr. Speaker, I do not predict any thing. I
do not declare war, but as one American citizen I do prefer war to
cowardly submission to a total destruction of the fundamental
principles of our Government."

--He was followed by his colleague, Mr. Finck, who declared that "no
member on this floor who understands the Constitution of the United
States, and who is friend of our Government, will pretend to urge that
we have any Constitutional power to pass this bill. . . . I declare it
as my solemn conviction that no government can long continue to be
free when one-third of its people and one-third of the States are
controlled by military power."

--Mr. Bingham of Ohio, speaking for a more conservative type of
republicanism than Mr. Stevens represented, begged gentlemen to "make
haste slowly in the exercise of this highest possible power conferred
by the Constitution upon the Congress of the United States. For
myself, sir, I am not going to yield to the proposition of the
chairman of the committee, for a single moment, that one rood of the
territory within the line of the ten states enumerated in this bill is
conquered territory. The Government of the United States does not
conquer any territory that is under the jurisdiction of the Constitution."

--Mr. William Lawrence of Ohio said, "For myself I am ready to set
aside by law all these illegal governments. They have rejected all
fair terms of reconstruction. They have rejected the Constitutional
amendments we have tendered them. They are engines of oppression
against all loyal men. They are not republican in