amendment upon Congress and the country.

The resolution passed the House as it was reported by the committee.
When it was taken up in the Senate Mr. Sumner, who was opposed to the
resolution, assailed it with an amendment that would have been fatal if
his lead had been followed by the two Houses. He proposed to insert
after the words "to vote" the words "or hold office." At that time he
was a recognized leader upon all matters relating to the negro race,
and his standing with that race was such that the Republican senators
from the slave States were obedient to his wishes. His amendment was
adopted by the Senate. In presence of the fact that Mr. Sumner was
opposed to any amendment of the Constitution upon the subject and he
proposed to rely upon a statute, it is difficult to explain his conduct
upon any other theory than that he intended to defeat the measure
either in Congress or in the States. He had claimed when the
Fourteenth Amendment was pending that a joint resolution would furnish
an adequate remedy and protection. His proposition was in these
words: "There shall be no oligarchy, aristocracy, caste or monopoly
invested with peculiar privileges and powers and there shall be no
denial of rights, civil or political, on account of color or race
anywhere within the limits of the United States or the jurisdiction
thereof: but all persons therein shall be equal before the law, whether
in the court room or at the ballot-box. And this statute made in
pursuance of the Constitution shall be the supreme law of the land,
anything in the constitution or laws of any State notwithstanding."
This resolution is a sad impeachment of Mr. Sumner's quality as a
lawyer and it is an equally sad impeachment of his sense or of his
integrity as a man that he was willing to risk the rights of five
million persons upon a statute whose language was rhetorical and
indefinite, a statute which might be repealed and which was quite
certain to be pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Upon the return of the resolution and amendment to the House, my own
position was an embarrassing one. I was counted as a radical and in
favor of securing to the negro race every right to which the white race
was entitled. My opposition to the Senate amendment seemed to place
me in a light inconsistent with my former professions. However, I met
the difficulty by an argument in which I maintained that the right
to vote carried with it the rig