cisely the predicament of my honorable
friend.

"I maintain that a negro can not be made a citizen by Congress; he can
not be made a citizen by any naturalization laws, because the
naturalization laws apply to foreigners alone. No man can shake the
legal truth of that position. They apply to foreigners alone; and a
negro, an Indian, or any other person born within the United States,
not being a foreigner, can not be naturalized; therefore they can not
be made citizens by the uniform rule established by Congress under the
Constitution, and there is no other rule. Congress has no power, as I
said before, to naturalize a citizen. They could not be made citizens
by treaty. If they are made so at all, it is by their birth, and the
locality of their birth, and the general operation and effect of our
Constitution. If they are so made citizens, that question is a
judicial question, not a legislative question. Congress has no power
to enlarge or extend any of the provisions of the Constitution which
bear upon the birth or citizenship of negroes or Indians born in the
United States.

"If there was any despot in Europe or in the world that wanted a
master architect in framing and putting together a despotic and
oppressive law, I would, if my slight voice could reach him, by all
means say to him, Seek the laboratory of the Senator from Illinois. If
he has not proved himself an adept in this kind of legislation,
unconstitutional, unjust, oppressive, iniquitous, unwise, impolitic,
calculated to keep forever a severance of the Union, to exclude from
all their constitutional rights, privileges, and powers under the
Government eleven States of the Union--if he has not devised such a
measure as that, I have not reason enough to comprehend it."

Mr. Davis closed his speech by saying: "Was it for these fruits and
these laws that we went into this war? Was it for these fruits and
these laws and these oppressions that two million and a quarter of men
were ordered into the field? Was it that the American people might
enjoy these as the fruits of the triumphant close of this war, that
hundreds of thousands of them have been mutilated on the battle-field
and by the diseases of the camp, and that a debt of four or five
thousand million dollars has been left upon the country? If these are
to be the results of the war, better that not a single man had been
marshaled in the field nor a single star worn by one of our officers.
These military gen