the statement that America
is the asylum for the oppressed. Averring that the problem was
national in scope, he asserted the constitutional authority of
Congress to solve it. Denying the contentions of Alexander H.
Stephens, of Georgia, Rapier deplored the apparent inability of that
gentleman to comprehend the new order ushered in since the formerly
sat in Congress. Stephens, he said, maintained the ideals of the old
South. Thus, despite the decision of the war that national rights are
paramount to those of the States, Stephens urged that it is the
prerogative of the States to confer civil rights upon the Negro, and
contended that such action should be left to the States. He thereby
offered no constitutional objection to the bestowal of civil rights
upon the Negro, but advanced a principle, the acceptance of which
would forever preclude his enjoying them. To this proposition Rapier
could not assent. That the Negro was considered to possess no rights
under the Constitution, he maintained, was fully demonstrated by
Kentucky and other Southern States, in which they were denied the
privilege of testifying in court against a white man, were refused the
right to education by the destruction of their schools and the
visitation of violence upon their teachers, and were prevented by the
Ku Klux Klan from exercising their right of suffrage. Such actions, he
insisted, were in conflict with the contention that the States would
eventually confer upon Negroes civil rights. In conclusion he declared
that the Negro had earned all the rights that he then exercised as
well as those enjoyed by other citizens, that the current conditions
constituted a stricture on the fair name of America, and that the
solution of the problem lay in the immediate passage by Congress of
the Civil Rights Bill then being considered.[57]

Not unlike his colleagues, Richard H. Cain, a representative from
South Carolina to the Forty-third and Forty-fifth Congresses, gave to
the matter of civil rights much of his time and energy. Replying in
part to Vance of North Carolina, Cain denied that the Civil Rights
Bill, if passed, would be without the limits of the Constitution or
that it would enforce "social equality," maintaining that the
regulation of that condition was without the province of legislation.
Cain asserted that the Negroes of South Carolina did not enjoy, in
public places, all the "rights, privileges and immunities" accorded to
other citizens and show