The United States are bound to guarantee to each State a republican form of government.  Can it be pretended that this obligation is not palpably broken if we carry out a measure like this, which wipes away every vestige of republican government in ten States and puts the life, property, liberty, and honor of all the people in each of them under the domination of a single person clothed with unlimited authority?

The Parliament of England, exercising the omnipotent power which it claimed, was accustomed to pass bills of attainder; that is to say, it would convict men of treason and other crimes by legislative enactment.  The person accused had a hearing, sometimes a patient and fair one, but generally party prejudice prevailed instead of justice.  It often became necessary for Parliament to acknowledge its error and reverse its own action.  The fathers of our country determined that no such thing should occur here.  They withheld the power from Congress, and thus forbade its exercise by that body, and they provided in the Constitution that no State should pass any bill of attainder.  It is therefore impossible for any person in this country to be constitutionally convicted or punished for any crime by a legislative proceeding of any sort.  Nevertheless, here is a bill of attainder against 9,000,000 people at once.  It is based upon an accusation so vague as to be scarcely intelligible and found to be true upon no credible evidence.  Not one of the 9,000,000 was heard in his own defense.  The representatives of the doomed parties were excluded from all participation in the trial.  The conviction is to be followed by the most ignominious punishment ever inflicted on large masses of men.  It disfranchises them by hundreds of thousands and degrades them all, even those who are admitted to be guiltless, from the rank of freemen to the condition of slaves.

The purpose and object of the bill—­the general intent which pervades it from beginning to end—­is to change the entire structure and character of the State governments and to compel them by force to the adoption of organic laws and regulations which they are unwilling to accept if left to themselves.  The negroes have not asked for the privilege of voting; the vast majority of them have no idea what it means.  This bill not only thrusts it into their hands, but compels them, as well as the whites, to use it in a particular way.  If they do not form a constitution with prescribed articles in it and afterwards elect a legislature which will act upon certain measures in a prescribed way, neither blacks nor whites can be relieved from the slavery which the bill imposes upon them.  Without pausing here to consider the policy or impolicy of Africanizing the southern part of our territory, I would simply ask the attention of Congress to that manifest, well-known, and universally acknowledged rule of constitutional law which declares that the Federal Government has no jurisdiction, authority, or power to regulate such subjects for any State.  To force the right of suffrage out of the hands of the white people and into the hands of the negroes is an arbitrary violation of this principle.