will
be able to shake it off. He will have these piratical governments on
his hands voluntarily recognized as valid for municipal purposes until
duly altered. He will have gratuitously become a copartner in the
guilt which hitherto has rested upon the souls of Andrew Johnson and
his Northern and Southern satellites, but which thenceforth will rest
on his soul also until he can contrive duly to alter these
governments. And so it will happen that the great Union party to which
he belongs, and to which I belong, will become implicated, for how
long a time God only knows, in this unspeakable iniquity which daily
and hourly cries to Heaven from every rood of rebel soil for vengeance
on these monsters."

Mr. Bingham moved to refer the two bills--that of Mr. Stevens and that
of Mr. Ashley--to the Committee on Reconstruction. He opposed these
bills as "a substantial denial of the right of the great people who
saved this republic by arms to save it by fundamental law." He
advocated the propriety of making the proposed Constitutional
Amendment the basis of reconstruction. It had already received the
ratification of the Legislatures representing not less than twelve
millions of the people of this nation. The fact that all the rebel
States which had considered the amendment in their Legislatures had
rejected it did not invalidate this mode of reconstruction. "Those
insurrectionary States," said he, "have no power whatever as States of
this Union, and can not lawfully restrain, for a single moment, that
great body of freemen who cover this continent from ocean to ocean,
now organized States of the Union and represented here, in their fixed
purpose and undoubted legal right to incorporate the amendment into
the Constitution of the United States."

Mr. Bingham maintained that Congress has the power, without
restriction by the Executive or the Supreme Court, to "propose
amendments to the Constitutions, and to decide finally the question of
the ratification thereof, as well as to legislate for the nation." "I
look upon both these bills," said Mr. Bingham, "as a manifest
departure from the spirit and intent of our Constitutional Amendment.
I look upon it as an attempt to take away from the people of the
States lately in rebellion that protection which you have attempted to
secure to them by your Constitutional Amendment."

Mr. Dawson, in a speech of an hour's duration, maintained the
doctrine, which he announced as that which had gi