ts you attempt to free the slaves. You will not have them
among you. You leave them where they are. Then what is to be the
result?--I presume that local State governments will be preserved. If
they are, if the people have a right to make their own laws, and to
govern themselves, they will not only reenslave every person that you
attempt to set free, but they will reenslave the whole race."

Nor has the horrid menace of reenslavement proceeded from the Senator
from Delaware alone. It has been uttered even by Mr. Willey, the mild
Senator from Virginia, speaking in the name of State Rights. Newspapers
have taken up and repeated the revolting strain. That is to say, no
matter what may be done for Emancipation, whether by Proclamation of the
President, or by Congress even, the State, on resuming its place in the
Union, will, in the exercise of its sovereign power, reenslave every
colored person within its jurisdiction; and this is the menace from
Delaware, and even from regenerated Western Virginia! I am obliged to
Senators for their frankness. If I needed any additional motive for the
urgency with which I assert the power of Congress, I should find it in
the pretensions thus savagely proclaimed. In the name of Heaven, let us
spare no effort to save the country from this shame, and an oppressed
people from this additional outrage!

"Once free, always free." This is a rule of law, and an instinct of
humanity. It is a self-evident axiom, which only tyrants and
slave-traders have denied. The brutal pretension thus flamingly
advanced, to reenslave those who have been set free, puts us all on our
guard. There must be no chance or loop-hole for such an intolerable,
Heaven-defying iniquity. Alas! there have been crimes in human history;
but I know of none blacker than this. There have been acts of baseness;
but I know of none more utterly vile. Against the possibility of such a
sacrifice we must take a bond which cannot be set aside,--and this can
be found only in the powers of Congress.

Congress has already done much. Besides its noble Act of Emancipation,
it has provided that every person guilty of treason, or of inciting or
assisting the Rebellion, "shall be disqualified to hold any office under
the United States." And by another act, it has provided that every
person elected or appointed to any office of honor or profit under the
Government of the United States shall, before entering upon its duties,
_take an oath_ "that he