James A. Johnson in the House of Representatives,
Saturday, February 8, 1868.

"The majority here, in their insane attempts to perpetuate themselves in power, have ignored the Constitution altogether, and tried to cover the minority with disgrace for professing attachment to its provisions. All this, too, with a full understanding that without its plain letter and spirit we have no Government other than a despotism limitless as the boundless universe.

"Ignoring its existence entirely, their party has illegally, without accusation or trial, thrown our fellow-citizens into prison for expressing their opinions upon matters pertaining to their own right. They have made the writ of habeas corpus worse than a mockery.

"Free speech could not be indulged in by any unless they were base enough to sing praises to old John Brown. Our free presses were thrown out of four-story windows, while Radical major-generals stood at the street corners offering encouragement to the mobs by telling them that in their acts of violence and destruction they had only anticipated the official purpose of vandalism. They have exalted cowardice and treachery; they have sought to accomplish great national results by a deliberate, cold-blooded system of bribery and corruption; they deliberately, in time of profound peace, by military commission, sat in judgment upon the lives of the most unfortunate of our country, and as deliberately those unfortunates were put to death; and they have denied the right of representation to and questioned the existence of sovereign States of this Union when such States elected Democrats to office; they have loaded us with an unbearable system of taxation, and they have tried to reduce the white population of this country to a level with the African and other inferior races; they have pronounced the Democratic party dead, and arraigned the President for declaring the country could never be saved except through the instrumentality of that party; they have arraigned the President for declaring that peace existed in our war-stricken country; because they say Congress alone has power to declare war and conclude peace."

Reconstruction

Mr. Stevens, of Pennsylvania, from the "Reconstruction Committee" of the House of Representatives, having, December 18, reported a bill, first, to change the majority of all registered votes in the southern States into a majority of the actual voters on the day the constitutions were voted upon;  second, to give seven of the southern States ten more Representatives in Congress than under the apportionment of 1860;  and third, to elect the members of Congress the day on which the constitutions were voted upon --and the second proposition having been withdrawn on the earnest opposition of Mr. Bingham---

Mr. Brooks said:

Mr. Speaker, The question of reconstruction, like Banquo's ghost, can never be laid.  In the ominous ides of March, just before the opening of this, the Fortieth Congress, (not to go any further back,) we had a bill for reconstruction.  In July last, in the summer solstice, an extraordinary session of Congress was called, for the purpose of again "enacting" "reconstruction."  And now here, among the very earliest measures of the present session, we have brought before us the third bill to "reconstruct."

The Southern negro man to have more Representation than the Western White Man.

They who have reported this bill have already, at the very outstart, struck it a fatal blow by exhibiting a division in their own ranks as the result of which it became necessary for the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Thaddeus the bank-lawyer] to withdraw one of the most important parts --the section to increase the number of negro Representatives in Congress from the South.  In deference to the protest of a member of their own organization from a western State, the proposition to give ten additional Representatives to the slave holding States --I mean white slaveholding States, no longer negro slaveholding States--, been withdrawn, because such negro favoritism would have startled the great, white-growing West.  The State of California, which, though its population has immensely increased since the last census, has now only three Representatives on this floor, with a voting population of 120,000 --a representative population then of over 500,000.  The people of Iowa with a population of 674,000 by the last census of 1860, now have by State census 967,000.  The people of Michigan with a population according to the last census of only 600,000, now have probably 1,000,000.  The people of Kansas with a population by the last census of 106,000 now have 400,000.  The people of Minnesota with a population by the last census of 169,000 now have 400,000.

The Committee on Reconstruction, blind to all this white increase, reported an increase of ten Representatives in Congress for the negro States, but the increase whatsoever for these great white, growing communities of the West !  It would have been an irresistible argument, then, before the white people of the West to say, Congress has increased the negro representation of the South, while it has allowed nothing for the million and a half increased population of California, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Kansas."  The Reconstruction Committee reported in favor of all this, but the honorable gentleman from Ohio hit it on the head and affrighted the honorable gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Stevens] out of this iniquitous inequality, thus discriminating against the whites, the moment it was fairy shown up above water.  Overawed for once by opinion, he abandoned his negroes and stood by his own race and color.  The will was there to start the iniquity, but the pluck has failed him to carry it out.  The white people of this country thus, thank God, are at last recovering, in some small degree, their proper consideration, if not respectability, among certain members of the House.

To Enable the bare Majority of Minority Forever to Govern.

Sir, the first proposition now before the House is to change the organic law, as it is called, of reconstruction, to abandon the established principles of the March and July acts of Congress, that the majority of registered voters shall vote for a constitution, by limiting the vote now to voters only on the day of election.  The object of this change is not all apparent, a concealed object being to disfranchise more and more of the white population, and to enable a bare majority of an actual minority to frame the organic law of the State.  It was not enough under the two last reconstruction bills that they disfranchised thousands, aye, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of white voters, while they enfranchised the whole black population, who were as deep in practical rebellion as their masters, for this bill now disfranchises thousands and tens of thousands more.  It invites now and enables all the negro-constitution mongers of the South to disfranchise whites enough in every southern State to secure the government thereof to the negroes.

The Constitution of Alabama

The first framed by the negro conventions, unfolds the meaning of this act, and shows how Anglo-Saxon white States are to be converted into African States, the declared intent and meaning of that so-called constitution being to disfranchise every white man in the South who has any respect left for his own noble Anglo-Saxon race, and who will not forswear himself forever to secure in perpetuity the superiority and reign of negro blood.

The negro test-oath of Alabama.

Under that constitution of Alabama every voter is compelled to swear that he will never, under any circumstances, have it so amended as to prohibit negroes from voting.  No one is allowed to be a voter who will not commit himself forever to the principle that negroes shall be the rulers of the State.  The provision I allude to is embodied in the new constitution, article seventh, section fourth, in the test-oath there:

"That I accept the civil and political equality of all men"

Negro men, nothing is said of women !

"and agree not to attempt to deprive any person or persons of any race or color, on account of previous condition, of any political or civil right, privilege, or immunity enjoyed by any other class of men."

Before any person can vote, then, in the State of Alabama under that constitution, he is bound to devote himself by oath, for all time to negroes and to negro voting, to fellow negro soldiers, to negro jurymen, to negro and white mongrel schools and school-houses, to mongrel cars, to mongrel taverns, to a complete mongrel social existence from the cradle to the grave.  No man can vote unless he takes that unnatural, that horrid oath, and thus forswears his own white race and color.  I appeal to the States of Minnesota, to Wisconsin, to Kansas, to the great Northwest, that have just been voting negro suffrage down --to Ohio, to Pennsylvania, to every northern State which has refused suffrage to the negroes among them, who are ten times more intelligent than the besotted, just-freed negro slaves of the southern country, who scarcely know their own names as they vote, and I ask them all, "Will you trust to such negroes in eleven States the right to govern the whole country, through their Representatives upon this floor, for all time to come, now and forever, while you refuse the right to vote to your own people of African descent, ten times more intelligent than these just-freed slaves of the South ?"

Even White Radical Alabamians to be Outvoted by negroes

Apart from all this, too, the constitution of Alabama has been deliberately so framed as to disfranchise or misrepresent a large portion of the white people of the northern part of that State.  The State has fifty-nine counties and is apportioned off in this new constitution into one hundred Representatives, and that Alabama convention has deliberately affixed an apportionment in and upon the constitution so that 136,395 persons in southern negro Alabama are entitled to fifteen Representatives, while 391,444 persons in northern white Alabama, nearly three times the number in the negro counties, are given but thirty-five, when an equitable apportionment would have been forty-two --nearly forty-three-- Representatives.  So that by the very apportionment organic law of the State, the white people of northern Alabama are crushed out by the negro vote of the southern part.

You have not been content, then, in your two previous reconstruction acts in so arranging eight million southern white men as to enable four million negroes there to govern them;  but here in such constitutions as that of Alabama you are cheating your own white Radicals and subjecting them to irrecoverable negro dominion.  Sir, the object of all your three bills, their real intent and meaning, is for all time so to organize this Government that four million negroes in the southern States shall hold a balance of power in the whole United States, there enslaving eight million white people to counteract the politically divided voting population of the twenty-four millions of the North, and thus to govern the whole.

Is this, or is it not, a White Man's Government ?

My objection to this bill rises far higher than any mere details;  it is to the whole principle throughout from beginning to end.  My theory, my principle, and I believe the principle of the Democratic party, is one before which all other issues --tariffs, currency, taxes, armies, navies, all mere questions of the hour--dwindle into comparative insignificance.  They are but passing questions, which live to-day and die tomorrow.  The only real living issue towers above all these --and that is, Is this, or is it not, a white man's Government ?

You have deliberately framed a bill to overthrow this white man's Government of our fathers and to erect an African Government in its stead;  and it is because you have done this that I resist and protest against it, again and again, and from the beginning to the end.

The negro is Not the Equal of the White Man.

The negro is not the equal of the white man, much less his master, as your bill makes him;  and this I can demonstrate anatomically, physiologically, and psychologically, too, if necessary.  Volumes of scientific authority establish the fact;  I might "pile Pelion on Ossa" to demonstrate it, if this were a hall of science for such discussions, or if there were time for such discussions here.  All that I have opportunity to do here is, in the fewest words possible, to set forth scientific facts.  The negro man differs more from the white man than a white man from a white woman, and the difference is essential, organic, throughout, from the crown of the head to the very sole of the feet.  The negro is a different creature, with a different brain and different structural organization and in every respect inferior to the white governing man.

The Hair or Wool of the Negro.

The very hair which crowns his head is not hair, but it is wool, wool, and wool only. [Laughter.]  He who will take the trouble to examine it through the microscope, micrometer, and microtome will see that its structure is that of wool and not of hair.  The hair of a white man is cylindrical;  the section under the microscope appears perfectly circular, and provided with a medullary canal, while the wool of the negro is flattened, so that its section exhibits an elongated ellipsis, in the axis of which no medullary canal is seen.  It is this lateral compression which effects the peculiar frizzling of the hair, owing to its not taking place exactly in the direction of the longitudinal axis of the hair, but ascending in spirals, so that the hair resembles a spiral spring, which always returns to its shape when drawn out. (See M. Pruner Bey, De la Chevelure comme Caracteristique des Races Humanes, Carl Voght, et alios.)

The Skull, the Brain, the Neck, the Foot, etc.

The difference is not only in the hair but it is in the whole anatomical structure of the head, inside and outside.  The negro's face projects like a muzzle, and the teeth are obliquely inserted, so that their edges meet as at projecting angles.  The development of the jaw (prognathism) is in direct relation or proportion to the intellectual capacity of a people, the proguathous being confined to the lowest races of men, among them the negro.  Their cranial capacity is different.  The volume of all American or English head is in cubic centimetres 1572-95, while that of the negro born in Africa is only 1371-42, and the place occupied in relation to cranial capacity and cerebral weight corresponds with the degree of intellectual capacity and civilization.  The weight of the white man's brain is greater than that of the negro.  The convolutions of the brain are different.  The anterior and frontal lobes of the white man show a far better mental development.  All these assertions are maintainable by high German, French, and English, as well as American authority;  but this is not the place nor the hour for metaphysical or psychological discussion.  Every feature of the white man and the negro differs.  The nose is different.  The nostrils of a Caucasian form two nearly rectangular triangles, the hypothennses of which are turned outward, while the septum of the nose forms a perpendicular line common to the two triangles.  On taking a similar view of the negro the nostrils present only a transverse aperture, or the figure of a horizontal eight united in the middle by the nasal septum.  The form and size of the mouth, the shape of the lips and cheeks are very different.  The apish chin of the negro differs very essentially from that of the white man.  The facial angle of the distinguished writer, Camper, amounts in the negro to 70.75 degrees --it may sink to 65-- while in the Caucasian it is rarely below 80, and frequently a few degrees higher.  The negro's skull is thicker than the white man's, the cervical muscles more powerful, and hence the negro carries his burden on his head, and, like a ram in a fight, uses his skull.  The negro's shoulder differs from the white man's.  The negro's hand is larger, his fingers long and thin, palms flat, thumb balls scarcely prominent.  "All the characters of his hand," says Carl Voght, "decidedly approach those of the simian hand."  The leg, the calves of the leg, all differ from the white man's.  "The femoral bones, as well as the fibula, seem curved outward, so that the knees are more apart from each other than in the white."  The pelvis is organically different.  "The foot of the negro," says Burmeister, "is in every thing ugly --flat, of a projecting heel, a thick, flabby cushion in the inner cavity, with wide, spreading toes.  The middle part of the foot does not touch the ground."  Voght, the German physiologist, calls it "the foot of the gorilla, or, if you please, the posterior hand."  I cite these facts to show that it is not the skin alone that parts the white from the negro race, not the dermis or epidermis, or pigment there in.  I could not respect myself if I judged a race inferior to my own because of its color only, for color maybe but an incident or accident of life.  We have brunettes as well as blonds, and both among the most beautiful of our race.  The Egyptian is not white, scarcely is the Italian or the Spaniard, in whose veins courses Moorish blood.  The negro is no more of a colored man than Caucasians are colored men.  I never use the absurd words "colored men."  The negro is a negro, and only a negro --of a type, a race of men as different from ours as the Hottentot or the Bushman.  God has created us anatomically and physiologically different in almost all respects, so far as we can judge, never intending us to be equal or kindred men, and though of one blood, He has determined the bounds of their habitations, and never assuredly determined that an inferior race from Africa should govern, as set forth in this bill, here, in America, a superior race of men.

Amalgamation or Miscegenation in a Government co-partnership is Government Destruction.

After entering so briefly and necessarily so imperfectly upon the anatomical and physical distinctions that part us from the negro --a discussion which might be extended to any length-- I now ask the attention of the House, in as few words as possible, to certain historical facts;  for this experiment of negro equality is no novelty in history.  We are not the first negrophilists who have trodden over the old ground of amalgamation and miscegenation, and hence we have nothing new to offer in it, or to expect from it.  The experiment was tried hundreds of years ago, and it has been tried in our own time and in our own generation, too.  I will not allude to Hayti, where the negro is so wise that he will not admit the white man into the government of that country or even allow him to hold real estate there.  I will not allude to Jamaica, where the negroes have managed their local Government so badly that the British authorities at home have taken the power of self government from them, and redeposited it in the Crown, through a British governor and council;  but I will go a little further and show from the great history of the world that the negro has not the capacity of self-government or of any species of popular government, and that wherever or whenever the superior race has shared government with him destruction has been the lot of both.

The Mulatto with White Blood in his Veins.

I speak not now of the mulatto, because the mulatto with white blood in his veins often has the intelligence and capacity of a white man.  But for violating a law of God, that all are to be punished who indulge in a criminal admixture of races, so that beyond the third or fourth generation there can he no further mulatto progeny, I would admit the mulatto to the right of suffrage, if I could do it without violating that law or without establishing a principle which would be fatal to my own race.  I recognize the mulatto's intelligence and capacity with our white blood flowing in his veins, and I know that he is often the equal and sometimes the superior of some white men.

The Congo Negro, etc.

But the Congo negro, the Dahomey negro, the Guinea negro, the negro of the southern States, is no brother of ours, and God never made him for our brother.  I do not say that he is only a higher species of the anthropoid apes, as some say, but I do say that the orangoutang is as intelligent as many of the Bushmen of southern Africa, and that the chimpanzee and the gorilla in their forms of creation wonderfully represent the ignorant and brutalized negro;  and I will add that if we are to degrade this great Government of ours into a southern negro Congo Government, it is as well to take into the partnership the orang, the chimpanzee, and the gorilla as to go into this partnership with the sons of Congo, Soudan, and Dahomey, the native lands of them all, apes and men.

I do not mean in what I have said to refer to the mulatto, or quadroon, or octoroon, whose intelligence I respect by virtue of the white blood that runs in their veins, but to the pure Congo negro.  I admit him to be a "man," but he is not a "brother" if he is a man, and I will never consent to divide self-government with him, or to degrade our own noble, historical race to his low level.

The negro Unchanged and Unchangable.

The negro is the same, and has been the same, for four thousand years.  While all other races --our own race-- emerging from barbarism, have been constantly improving, the negro in Africa is to be seen now just as he was in the earliest periods of Egyptian record.  In the frescoes or amid the tombs of Egypt, four thousand years old in all probability, the negro there exhibits the same pictured life he lives in now.  His tough skull and strong muscles of the neck are carrying the same burden that he carries to this day.  He was then the servant of the Egyptian man, the yellow man of Egypt, just as he is the servant of the Caucasian now.  As Virgil described the race some two thousand years ago, when he wrote of an "Aunt Chloe" of his day, even so is the negro now:

I quote Cowper's translation, and I trust you, sir, will the more enjoy it as coming from an old abolition friend, who would have not a slave to till his grounds:

That is the description given by Virgil two thousand years ago;  and that is the appearance of the negro of this day.  In his own native land he has not improved, and he never will improve, save as he comes in close contact with civilization, and is forced to exercise his naturally imitative powers.

Civilization and Christianity have not Changed him.

Four thousand years ago he was exactly what he is now, anno Domini 1867, and what he ever will be, save as he comes in contact with the civilization of a superior race.  The Egyptians whose genius created the pyramids, the sphynx, the obelisk;  the Carthagenian whose soldiers under Hannibal surmounted the then horrid Alps, rolled over the Campagna of Rome, and the plains of Capua;  the Roman, whose arms and whose arts embraced the whole world --all have brought their civilization and their arts before the negro race, but all in vain.  The Church had holy foundations in Carthage, in Cyrene, in Alexandria, throughout all Egypt, and far, far up the Nile, and ascetics from upper Egypt, clothed in the wild raiment of the Baptist, wandered forth in sheepskins and goatskins, and dwelt in deserts and on mountains, in dens and caves, to bring the negro to Christ, but all, all in vain.  Pagan, savage, cannibal even, the negro in his own native home for thousands of years has defied all civilization, all Christianity;  and only when in close individual contact with the superior race is the negro improved or improvable.  He clings to his gregrees, jujus, fetichisrn with as much pertinacity as he did hundreds of years ago.  But a wonderful imitative genius is that of the negro !  It displays itself surprisingly in music and in a variety of our culinary arts.  When associated with the white man the negro, through his faculties of imitation, becomes in many occupations almost the equal of the white man.  But when left to his own guidance, as in Hayti, in Jamaica, or in upper Egypt, he returns to his barbaric tastes, his gregrees, his jujus, the fetich, &c.

No negro Poets, Architects, no great Mechanics, etc.

Where, oh tell me where, sir, has the pure-blooded negro, unassisted by the white man, exhibited any of the triumphs of genius ?  Where have we found that race producing a Homer, a Phidias, a Praxiteles, a Socrates, a Demosthenes, a Virgil, or a Milton, or a Shakespeare ?  Where has it produced any great architect like Michael Angelo ?  Where any great poet, where any heroic soldier like Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon ?  Where any wonderful mechanic ?  What negro of pure blood ever started a steam-engine or a spinning jenny, a screw, a lever, the wheel, or the pulley ?  What negro has invented a telegraph or discovered a star, a satellite, or an asteroid ?  What negro ever constructed a palatial edifice like this in which we are assembled, these corinthian columns, these frescoed walls ?  Negro history makes no mark in the great world's progress.  That history is all a blank, blank, blank, sir.  The negro can never rise above a certain range of intelligence.  The children of the negro, up to ten or fifteen years of age, may be as bright and as intelligent as white children.  They acquire knowledge as rapidly;  but after that early age the negro youth does not advance as does the white youth.  While the white man is increasing in knowledge till the day of his death the negro reaches before the age of maturity a point beyond which he cannot well advance in anything save in the arts of mere imitation.

The Lessons of Life -- the Arabs First.

Now, Mr. Speaker, I am about to show further that wherever there has been an admixture of a superior race with the negro, the utter deterioration and degeneracy, if not the destruction, of the dominant race has been the result.  Look at the history of the Middle Ages, when the men of our race were involved in mental darkness, when even the priests could not read or write, and when books mere not printed.  At that time the Arabs had almost all the knowledge and learning in the world.  Under the banner of their prophet they started from the holy city of Mecca and swept along the whole northern coast of the Mediterranean, by Alexandria, Carthage, and beyond the pillars of Hercules;  aye, carrying over the Sierra Nevada of Spain into the beautiful valley of the Grenadian La Vega their wonderful arts, as well as their victorious arms.  They constructed the magnificent Alhambra;  they created the Alcazars of Seville and Cordova.  Our countryman, Irving, in glowing prose, with thoughts that breathe and words that burn, has pictured their marches and conquests, and their arts as well as their arms.  The whole Christian world shrank and trembled before the mighty genius of this Arab race while it was overrunning Spain and threatening Europe with downfall.  But in an evil hour they who had planted the noblest banners of poetry and of prose, of philosophy, and of history, in the front rank of the learning of the world;  they who had invented the science of notation, and taught us decimals;  they who had created algebra and given it the Arabic name;  they who had measured the heavens in their astronomy, and given the very names we now use to the stars and constellations that sparkle in the sky;  they who bequeathed to us the Arabic-named Al-manac, (the Diary,) the little work now indispensable in every man's house --alas, they mingled the blood of their heroic race with the Nubian, the negro, with the inferior and degraded races of Africa all about them, and they rapidly fell from their exalted position into the degraded pool of races with whom they had commingled.  These once heroic Arabs were driven from Grenada, and lingering awhile upon the coast of the Mediterranean, they refled into Africa, dishonored, degraded, destroyed, by forgetting their Arab nobility and becoming Nubians, negroes, and other inferior races of Africa.

The Ottoman Turks Next.

Years afterward there sallied forth from Asia, that great storehouse of nations, the Ottoman Turks, under the banner of the prophet, and their crescent, swept over almost the same breadth of territory that the Arabs had gone over before them.  If they paused at the pillars of Hercules in the West, their cimeters flashed in the East under the walls of Vienna, and swept off every living man that showed himself on the open plains of Austria or Bohemia.  But alas! they entered upon the same degraded crime of amalgamation and miscegenation, and they soon emasculated these once heroic Turks, the approach of whose crescent had made the Christian tremble in every court of Europe;  and upon every navigable internal sea.  In their harems the thick-lipped, woolly-headed negro woman was mixed up with the beautiful Circassian and Georgian, and children of all hues and colors and races were the product of this hateful miscegenation;  and God --even the God of Mohammed-- has punished the moslem by his own degradation and his overthrow for violating that first law of nature --the preservation of the purity of race.  The crescent no more waves in terror under the walls of Malta, as pirate or corsair, no more affrights on the Adriatic or the Danube, but trembles in doubtful existence on the Sea of Marmora.  I myself have seen in Constantinople around a mosque where the sultan was at prayer some thirty or forty beautiful Circassians and Georgians of his harem kissing the hand of a eunuch, an Ethiopian, a negro selected from the interior of Africa as the custodian of these women, and who thus had become their master.  The moment the Turk thus associated himself with the negro or negress and recognized him or her either as brother or sister, from that hour the Turkish empire began to crumble until it now exists only by the toleration of the Christian Powers of Europe.

The Moors and the negroes Next.

Let gentlemen, then, but study the history of the Arabs in their mixture of races;  let them but study the history of the Turks, let them but study the history of Morocco, if they will ever take the trouble to study at all, and they will see what a fatal step they are taking now in equalizing unnatural races, or rather in subjecting the superior white race of the South to negroes from Africa.  Muley Ismael was emperor of Morocco about 1630, and he had a negro as well as a Georgian wife, between whom and others were born from him, the historian records, eight hundred children, the last born when he was near eighty years of age.  This Murley Ismael, in order to do what you in this Congress are doing, that is, to enforce a military despotism upon his people, neglected the moors, and enlisted an army of one hundred thousand negroes, obtained from the coast of Guinea.  Through civil war and bloodshed, and for over one hundred years, as you will find in the history of Morocco written by Chenier, the moors were in the most miserable condition a people could be in, almost all the time under the power of these negroes, these janizaries, these pretorian guards of the emperor, and they never ceased in their insolent demands and pretensions.  It was not till 1780 that these one hundred thousand negroes could be got rid of by any device;  and then through Sidi Mahomet, by cunning and fraud, they were reduced to fifteen thousand before they noted their weakness.  It took a hundred years for the Moorish race to recover itself from the fatal crime of Muley Ismael;  and it will cost a hundred years to recover from your legislation if the people continue you in power another election.

The latin-spanish and the anglo-saxon race as Settler on the American Continent.

But I need not go to the Mediterranean.  I need not cross the Atlantic to show the fatal step you are taking by this reconstruction bill in going into this copartnership with negroes.  Our continent has been settled by two classes of men --Anglo-Saxon, Celt, and Teuton in the North, and the Spanish-Latin race in the South.  God never made a nobler race of men than the old hidalgos of Spain, who, under Columbus, in a little caravel of forty tons, started on the trackless Atlantic in search of the then unknown America.  God never made a nobler race, I repeat, than these hidalgos of Spain.  What did they do ?  They ran all along the Gulf of Mexico, from Florida, on the north, to Cape Horn, on the southern verge of South America.  They settled Mexico and Venezuela, New Granada and Chile, and Peru, and coasting all the northern Pacific imprinted the holy classic names of old Spain upon the now golden mountains and wine-covered valleys of the State of California.  They climbed the snowclad Cordilleras, and planted their banner on every hill and every valley of Mexico, Peru, and Chile.  They drove Montezuma from the halls of his Aztec ancestors, and under Cortez and Pizarro, Peruvian, Mexican, and semi-barbarian civilization fell before the mighty prowess of their arms.  Their heroic deeds, their lofty chivalry, their Christian loyalty now read more like the romances of a Froissart than, as they are, the true records of history.

Our Anglo-Saxon fathers started later from the shores of England and landed upon the rock of Plymouth or upon the flats of Jamestown.  The Puritan himself, trembling over his rock for awhile, in terror of the tomahawk, ventured at last on what was then deemed gigantic heroism.  He crossed the Connecticut and the Hudson, and slowly crept up the Mohawk, and halted for years and years upon lakes Erie, Ontario, and Huron.  The cavaliers of Jamestown threaded their way up the river James, stealthily wound over the passes of the Alleghenies, and looked down at last with astonishment and affright upon la belle riviére of Ohio.  But all this time these heroic hidalgos of Spain were spreading the name and fame of Castile and Aragon throughout the whole American continent, from Florida, on the north, to Cape Horn, on the south, and from Cape Horn to California, while our Anglo-Saxon race stood shivering upon the Ohio and Lake Erie without the courage to advance further.  What, sir, happened then ?  What has produced this difference between us and the lofty hidalgo ?  Why are they fallen, these men of the Armada, so exalted among all the nations of the earth, who made our ancestors in the days of Queen Elizabeth tremble on the throne ?  Why was it that in the Mexican war one regiment of our Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Teutonic blood, again and again put whole regiments of these once noble hidalgos of Spain to flight at Chepultepec, the Garita, and elsewhere ?  I will tell you why, sir.  The Latin, the Spanish race, freed from that instinct of ours which abhors all hybrid amalgamation, reveled in a fatally tempting admixture of blood --indulged in social and governmental copartnership with Aztecs, Indians, negroes, one and all.

The pure blood, the azure blood of the old hidalgos of Spain, lost and drained, dishonored and degraded, has dwindled into nothing, while the pure blood of the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts, the Teutons, abhorring all such association and amalgamation with the negro or the Indian, has leaped over Lake Erie, crossed la belle rivere, the great Father of Waters, the Mississippi, crowded the mountain passes of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and Montana, rolled over the Rocky mountains, and spread for hundreds of miles on the Pacific ocean --carrying not only there but everywhere, triumphant from the Arctic to the Antarctic, the glorious flag of our country, that emblem of a pure race, and ever contrasting the glory and honor, the prowess of that race with the degradation of the race of these once noble hidalgos of Spain.

Sir, you are on the eve now of an association and copartnership with a like inferior race which, if the people do not drive you from this Capitol, will be destructive of us all as has been a like copartnership to the Spaniards, the Turks, the Moors, and the Arabs.  I have recalled these sacred lessons of history, and I hold them up to you for your admonition and warning.  Heed, oh, heed !  Strike, but hear !

I have here, sir, and will publish in a note a table of the different admixtures of races which have brought about the utter degradation of the white race in parts of Spanish America, and I hold them up to you as what you are legislating to make of us.

Now, sir, this may be the last time in this Congress when I shall have an opportunity thus at length to address a white audience upon the floor of this House.  [Laughter.]  Aye;  you are so hurrying up this reconstruction, as you call it, that the African will soon come down from your galleries and make his appearance here upon the floor, side by side with you, as a man and a brother.  He is soon to be with you and part of you, a Representative upon this floor.  I tell you, gentlemen, that you make a fatal political mistake, for it will not be acquiesced in by the northern people, and your violent revolutionary acts here will be resisted in the elective tribunals elsewhere.  In order to obtain a few additional negro representative votes upon this floor from the South you are jeoparding the domination of your party in the great North and West.  The northern people are sound upon the subject of race, and where ethnology is discussed scientifically in the primary assemblies of the people they will become more and more sound, and become more and more converts to the principles I have been laying down,to-day.

But I know, sir, that it is vain for me to invoke the majority of this House to pause.  I have too often sent forth vain invocations here and appealed to the majority of this House in vain and in vain.  But, thank God, my voice and the voices of the few bold compatriots around in(, have gone beyond this Capitol and been heard among the people, who have responded by rolling up majorities in our favor such as we did not dream of so early after our vain appeals to you here on this floor.  But if you blacken this House this session of Congress, it will soon be whitened by the Democracy of the North and the West.  It cannot be that God inspired Columbus to the discovery of this great new world only to drive out Pequods, Chippewas, Mohawks, Pottawatomies, Sioux, Cheyennes, to substitute here a government of Congo negroes from Africa instead.  It cannot be that Almighty wisdom has gathered here the best blood from all the nations of Europe to be overwhelmed as Spanish blood has been, by the basest mixture of Aztec, Indian, and Congo negro.  But to you, pledged, manacled to party, and loving party more than you love country, or God, or man, I know I speak in vain.  A voice even from the dead would not now change a single opinion here, but we shall be heard and heeded elsewhere.  Posterity will vindicate our foresight.  History will do us justice, while a grateful country is already sending in its plaudits of "Well done, good and faithful servants."