By unanimous consent, Mr. Brooks (James of New York) presented a protest; which was ordered to be entered on the journal, as follows:Are you also proud of that portion of 'Northern history' and wish it was never altered?"The recognized presence of three persons on the floor of this house from the State of Arkansas, sent here by military force acting under a brigadier general of the army, but nevertheless claiming to be members of this Congress, and to share with us, the representatives from free States, in the imposition of taxes and customs and other laws upon our people, makes it our imperative duty in this, the first case, to remonstrate most solemnly, and to protest as solemnly, against this perilous and destructive innovation upon the principles and practices of our hitherto constitutional self-government. The so-called reconstruction acts which created the military government in Arkansas and like governments in other southern States to share with us in the legislative power of the northern and western free people, we have every reason to believe, have been held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, the public declaration of which fact was avoided only by the extraordinary and strange device of this Congress in snatching jurisdiction from the court in the McCardle case when such a public decision was about to be made.
Of the three great branches of the government, it seems, then, that after the Executive vetoed these acts as unconstitutional, the judiciary adjudicated them to be so, while a Congress, the creation of but twenty-seven of the thirty-seven States of the Union, overrides these equal and co-ordinate branches of that government, first by voting down the vetoes, next by nullifying the judgments of the court! In an era of profound peace, when not an armed man rises against the government from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, there, in ten States, our American historical way of creating the organic law has been utterly subverted by the bayonet. Ever since the Declaration of Independence, with scarcely an exception, and even amid the battles of the Revolution, conventions have been convoked through, and constitutions created by, the electors of the States, the only authorized depositaries of the sovereign power of every State without exterior dictation or domination, as well under the old confederation as under the existing federal Constitution. The hardest and harshest test-oath required from 1766 to the peace of 1783 was an abjuration oath of allegiance to George III, while some of the now so-called bayonet-made constitutions from the south propose absurd and cruel tests; absurd, as in Arkansas, where is interwoven in the organic law a mere party test between the radical reconstructionists and the democratic conservatives, such as would exclude from voting, if living there, the thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of democrats in the free States, (art. S, sec. 4;) or cruel, as in Alabama, where no white man can vote who will not forever forswear his own race and color, and perjure himself by swearing, in defiance of the law of God, that the negro is his equal and forever to be his equal at the ballot-box, in the jury-box, with the cartridge-box; in the school, in the college, in house and home, and by the fire-side; in short, in every way, everywhere, (art. 7, sec. 4.)
Now, in these and the other southern States in the midst of war President Lincoln, in his proclamation, December 8, 1863, offered amnesty and pardon to rebels then in arms, if they would lay down their arms and take an oath of fidelity, while now, not a Union man in Arkansas or Alabama can vote unless in the first place he swears allegiance to the majesty of this Congress, and in the next swears off his Americanism and Africanizes himself. Hitherto constitutions with us have been the outgrowth of popular life, springing from the exuberance of our enterprise and energy in the settlement of the forests or prairies of our country; but here, before us now. are nine constitutions, with one if not three more yet to come from Texas, which have all been imposed upon the people by five military satraps or pentarchs, in a manner never before known under our law, but borrowed at best from imperial Roman military colonization, or from the worst precedents of the French revolution. France is then recorded to have had five constitutions in three years, so frequently made and so frequently changed that they were ironically classed by the French people with the periodical literature of the day. Louisiana, a colony of that France, has had four constitutions in four years, and a constitution there has now become periodical literature, as in France, in the agonies and throes of the great revolution. Laws, mere statute laws, which can never be created by conventions, are appended, more or less, to all these constitutions, and bayonet-created, one-branch governments, with no executive, no senate, no house of representatives, no judiciary, have ordained irrepealable, irreversible laws in the very organism of the State, such as cannot be thus created by the executive, the senate, and the house of representatives of legitimate governments when acting in unison and all combined. All this has been done, without regard to preceding constitutions or precedents, or to the common law of the States or the law of nations.
The military, which, under legitimate institutions, can only be used in time of peace to conserve or preserve the State, have here been used to destroy States. The General of the army, who represents the sword, and only the sword of the republic, has beenexalted by acts of Congress above the constitutional Commander-in-chief of the army and navy, in order to execute those military decrees, and as the surer way to root out every vestige left of constitutional law or liberty. The same General of the army, in order to prolong or perpetuate his military domination north and west as well as south, has been selected in party convention at Chicago to head the electoral vote for the Presidency in ten of our States which are as much under his feet as Turkey is under the Sultan or Poland under the Czar of Russia. But, as if only to add insult to the injury of this military outrage upon popular government in these ten States, either by act of Congress or by these Congress-soldier-made State constitutions, at least 250,000 whites have been disfranchised, while 750,000 negroes, inexperienced in all law-making, and more ignorant than our children, have been enfranchised in their stead, and have thus been created absolute masters and sovereigns over the whole white population of the south.
Because of all this, and in opposition to all this, we, representatives of the people from the free States, in behalf of our constituents and of thousands and tens of thousands of others who would be here represented if the popular power without could now constitutionally act here within, earnestly and solemnly protest against this violence upon our Constitution and upon our people, and do hereby counsel and advise all friends of popular government to submit to this force and fraud only until at the ballot-box, operating through the elections, this great wrong can be put right. There is no law in the land supreme over the constitutional law. There is no government but constitutional government; and hence all bayonet-made, all Congress-imposed constitutions are of no weight, authority, or sanction, save that enforced by arms, an element of power unknown to Americans in peace, and never recognized but as it acts in and under the supreme civil law, the Constitution, and the statutes enacted in pursuance thereof. We protest, then, in behalf of the free people of the north and the west, against the right of this military oligarchy established in Arkansas or elsewhere in the now re-enslaved States of the south to impose upon us, through Congress, taxes or customs or other laws to maintain this oligarchy or its Freedmen's Bureau. We protest against going into the now proposed copartnership of military dictators and negroes in the administration of this government. We demand, in the name of the fathers of the Constitution and for the sake of posterity, not its reconstruction, but the restoration of that sacred instrument, which has been to us all a pillar of fire from 1787 on to its present overthrow; and in all solemnity, before God and man, under a full sense of the responsibility of all we utter, we do hereby affix our names to this protest against the admission of these three persons, claiming to be members of Congress from Arkansas.
* JAMES BROOKS.
* JAMES B. BECK.
* VAN TRUMP.
* CHAS. A. ELDRIDGE.
* SAMUEL J. RANDALL.
* W. MUNGEN.
* STEPHEN TABER.
* ASA P. GROVER.
* L. S. TRIMBLE.
* GEORGE M. ADAMS.
* A. J. GLOSSBRENNER.
* STEVENSON ARCHER.
* JOHN A. NICHOLSON.
* JOHN MORRISSEY.
* THOS. LAURENS JONES.
* W. E. NIBLACK.
* JULIUS HOTCHKISS.
* WM. H. BARNUM.
* JOHN W. CHANLER.
* S. B. AXTELL
* S.S. MARSHALL.
* W. S. HOLMAN.
* CHARLES HAIGHT.
* CHARLES SITGREAVES.
* J. PROCTOR KNOTT.
* J. S. GOLLADAY.
* J. M. HUMPHREY.
* FERNANDO WOOD.
* J. LAWRENCE GETZ.
* F. STONE.
* M. C. KERR.
* JOHN FOX.
* JAMES A. JOHNSON.
* JOHN V. L. PRUYN.
* W. E. ROBINSON.
* B. M. BOYER.
* GEO. W. WOODWARD.
* CHAS. E. PHELPS. * A. G. BURR. * D.M. VAN AUKEN. * J. R. McCORMICK. * DEMAS BARNES. * JAMES M. CAVANAUGH. * LEWISS W. ROSS. * H. McCULLOUGH.Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 24 Jun 1868.
Is there a name on that list that isn't a Democrat?