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is monstrous. It has no foundation in the Constitution. It subjects all the States to the will of Congress; it places their institutions at the feet of Congress. It creates in Congress an absolute, unqualified despotism. It asserts the power of Congress in changing the State governments to be "plenary, supreme, unlimited," แ 'subject only to revision by the people of the United States." The rights of the people of the State are nothing; their will is nothing. Congress first decides; the people of the whole Union revise. My own State of Ohio is liable at any moment to be called in question for her constitution. She does not permit negroes to vote. If this doctrine be true, Congress may decide that this exclusion is anti-republican, and by force of arms abrogate that constitution and set up another, permitting negroes to vote. From that decision of Congress there is no appeal to the people of Ohio, but only to the people of New York and Massachusetts and Wisconsin, at the election of representatives, and, if a majority cannot be elected to reverse the decision, the people of Ohio must submit. Woe be to the day when that doctrine shall be established, for from its centralized despotism we will appeal to the sword!

Sir, the rights of the States were the foundation corners of the confederation. The Constitution recognized them, maintained them, provided for their perpetuation. Our fathers thought them the safeguard of our liberties. They have proved so. They have reconciled liberty with empire; they have reconciled the freedom of the individual with the increase of our magnificent domain. They are the test, the touchstone, the security of our liberties. This bill, and the avowed doctrine of its supporters, sweeps them all instantly away. It substitutes despotism for self-government-despotism the more severe because vested in a numerous Congress elected by a people who may not feel the exercise of its power. It subverts the government, destroys the confederation, and erects a tyranny on the ruins of republican governments. It creates unity-it destroys liberty; it maintains integrity of territory, but destroys the rights of the citizen.

JOHN SHERMAN,

OF OHIO.

(BORN 1823.)

ON PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S POLICY; UNITED STATES SENATE, FEBRUARY 23, 1866.

I WILL ask Senators this plain question, whether we have a right now, having failed to do our constitutional duty, to arraign Andrew Johnson for following out a plan which, in his judgment, he deemed the best, and especially when that plan was the plan adopted by Mr. Lincoln, and which had at least the apparent ratification of the people of the United States in the election of Lincoln and Johnson. * * * In the absence of law, I ask you whether President Lincoln and President Johnson did not do substantially right when they adopted a plan of their own and endeavored to carry it into execution? Although we may now find. fault with the terms and conditions that were imposed by them upon the Southern States, yet

we must remember that the source of all power in this country, the people of the United States, in the election of these two men substantially sanctioned the plan of Mr. Lincoln. Why, sir, at the very time that Andrew Johnson was nominated for the Vice-Presidency, he was in Tennessee as military governor, executing the very plan that he subsequently attempted to carry out, and he was elected Vice-President of the United States when he was in the practical execution of that plan. * * *

I propose now to recall, very briefly, the steps adopted by President Johnson in his plan of reconstruction. * * His first act was to retain in his confidence and his councils every member of the cabinet of Abraham Lincoln; and, so far as we know, every measure adopted by Andrew Johnson has had the approval and sanction of that cabinet.

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Not only that, but he adopted the policy of Abraham Lincoln in hæc verba. * * * Not only that, but in carrying out his plans of reconstruction, he adopted all the main features of the only bill passed by Congress, the Wade and Davis bill. * * * Now I ask you what were the conditions imposed on these people? First, the adoption of the (XIIIth)

constitutional amendment. He was not willing to leave the matter to their amnesty oath, or to the proclamation of President Lincoln, but he demanded of them the incorporation in their State constitutions of a prohibition of slavery, so as to secure beyond peradventure the abolition of slavery for ever and ever throughout the United States. This he required in every order issued to the South, and demanded it as a first and preliminary condition to any effort toward reconstruction. Next he demanded a repudiation of the rebel debt, and a guaranty put into the constitutions of the respective States that they never would, under any circumstances, pay any portion of the rebel debt. Next he secured the enforcement of the test oath, so that every officer in the Southern States, under the act of Congress, was compelled to take that oath; or, if he could not find officers there to do it, he sent officers from the Northern States to do it, so that this law, the most objectionable of any to the Southern people, was enforced in all instances at the South. * * Next

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he enforced in every case full and ample protection to the freedmen of the Southern States. As I said before, no case was ever brought to his knowledge, so far as I can

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