“By your acts you attempt to free the slaves.  You will not have them among you.  You leave them where they are.  Then what is to be the result?—­I presume that local State governments will be preserved.  If they are, if the people have a right to make their own laws, and to govern themselves, they will not only reenslave every person that you attempt to set free, but they will reenslave the whole race.”

Nor has the horrid menace of reenslavement proceeded from the Senator from Delaware alone.  It has been uttered even by Mr. Willey, the mild Senator from Virginia, speaking in the name of State Rights.  Newspapers have taken up and repeated the revolting strain.  That is to say, no matter what may be done for Emancipation, whether by Proclamation of the President, or by Congress even, the State, on resuming its place in the Union, will, in the exercise of its sovereign power, reenslave every colored person within its jurisdiction; and this is the menace from Delaware, and even from regenerated Western Virginia!  I am obliged to Senators for their frankness.  If I needed any additional motive for the urgency with which I assert the power of Congress, I should find it in the pretensions thus savagely proclaimed.  In the name of Heaven, let us spare no effort to save the country from this shame, and an oppressed people from this additional outrage!

“Once free, always free.”  This is a rule of law, and an instinct of humanity.  It is a self-evident axiom, which only tyrants and slave-traders have denied.  The brutal pretension thus flamingly advanced, to reenslave those who have been set free, puts us all on our guard.  There must be no chance or loop-hole for such an intolerable, Heaven-defying iniquity.  Alas! there have been crimes in human history; but I know of none blacker than this.  There have been acts of baseness; but I know of none more utterly vile.  Against the possibility of such a sacrifice we must take a bond which cannot be set aside,—­and this can be found only in the powers of Congress.

Congress has already done much.  Besides its noble Act of Emancipation, it has provided that every person guilty of treason, or of inciting or assisting the Rebellion, “shall be disqualified to hold any office under the United States.”  And by another act, it has provided that every person elected or appointed to any office of honor or profit under the Government of the United States shall, before entering upon its duties, take an oath “that he has not voluntarily borne arms against the United States, or given aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in armed hostility thereto, or sought or accepted or attempted to exercise the functions of any office whatever under any authority, or pretended authority, in hostility to the United States."[30] This oath will be a bar against the return to National office of any who have taken part with the Rebels.  It shuts out in advance the whole criminal gang.  But these same persons, rejected by the National Government, are left free to hold office in the States.  And here is another motive to further action by Congress.  The oath, is well as far as it goes; more must be done in the same spirit.