with the following advice to Congress:
"Discharge your joint Committee on Reconstruction; abolish your
Freedmen's Bureau; repeal your Civil Rights Bill, and admit all the
delegates from the seceded States to their seats in Congress, who have
been elected according to the laws of the country and possess the
constitutional qualification, and all will be well."

Mr. Raymond spoke in favor of the amendment, except the
disfranchisement clause. He had opposed the Civil Rights Bill on the
ground of want of constitutional power in Congress to pass it. He
favored the first section of this amendment, since it gave the
previous acts of Congress a constitutional basis.

In answer to Mr. Broomall's "ingenious argument," Mr. Raymond said:
"It seems to me idle to enter into such calculations, which depend on
a series of estimates, each one of which can not be any thing more
than a wild and random guess. I take it that we all know perfectly
well that the great masses of the Southern people 'voluntarily adhered
to the insurrection;' not at the outset not as being originally in
favor of it, but during its progress, sooner or later, they
voluntarily gave in their adhesion to it, and gave it aid and comfort.
They did not all join the army. They did not go into the field, but
they did, at different times, from various motives and in various
ways, give it aid and comfort. That would exclude the great body of
the people of those States under this amendment from exercising the
right of suffrage."

Mr. Raymond asserted that all that was offered to the rebel
legislatures of the Southern States, in return for the concessions
required of them, was "the right to be represented on this floor,
provided they will also consent not to vote for the men who are to
represent them! The very price by which we seek to induce their assent
to these amendments we snatch away from their hands the moment that
assent is secured. Is there any man here who can so far delude himself
as to suppose for a moment that the people of the Southern States will
accede to any such scheme as this? There is not one chance in ten
thousand of their doing it."

Mr. McKee advocated the amendment. He thought that opposition to its
third section was a rebuke to those States which had passed laws
disfranchising rebels. To obviate all objections to this section,
however, he proposed a substitute forever excluding "all persons who
voluntarily adhered to the late insurrection" from h