The constitution under which the State government is proposed to be formed very properly contains a provision that all laws in force at the time of its adoption and the admission of the State into the Union shall continue as if the constitution had not been adopted.  Among those laws is one absolutely prohibiting negroes and mulattoes from voting.  At the recent session of the Territorial legislature a bill for the repeal of this law, introduced into the council, was almost unanimously rejected; and at the very time when Congress was engaged in enacting the bill now under consideration the legislature passed an act excluding negroes and mulattoes from the right to sit as jurors.  This bill was vetoed by the governor of the Territory, who held that by the laws of the United States negroes and mulattoes are citizens, and subject to the duties, as well as entitled to the rights, of citizenship.  The bill, however, was passed, the objections of the governor to the contrary notwithstanding, and is now a law of the Territory.  Yet in the bill now before me, by which it is proposed to admit the Territory as a State, it is provided that “there shall be no denial of the elective franchise or any other rights to any person by reason of race or color, excepting Indians not taxed.”

The incongruity thus exhibited between the legislation of Congress and that of the Territory, taken in connection with the protest against the admission of the State hereinafter referred to, would seem clearly to indicate the impolicy and injustice of the proposed enactment.

It might, indeed, be a subject of grave inquiry, and doubtless will result in such inquiry if this bill becomes a law, whether it does not attempt to exercise a power not conferred upon Congress by the Federal Constitution.  That instrument simply declares that Congress may admit new States into the Union.  It nowhere says that Congress may make new States for the purpose of admitting them into the Union or for any other purpose; and yet this bill is as clear an attempt to make the institutions as any in which the people themselves could engage.

In view of this action of Congress, the house of representatives of the Territory have earnestly protested against being forced into the Union without first having the question submitted to the people.  Nothing could be more reasonable than the position which they thus assume; and it certainly can not be the purpose of Congress to force upon a community against their will a government which they do not believe themselves capable of sustaining.

The following is a copy of the protest alluded to as officially transmitted to me: 

  Whereas it is announced in the public prints that it is the intention
  of Congress to admit Colorado as a State into the Union:  Therefore,