tion came to the conclusion that
the good of the country demanded that there should be a compromise,
and they proposed, as a compromise, the provision as it now stands;
and that is, that, for the purposes of representation, a person held
in slavery, or in involuntary servitude, shall be esteemed
three-fifths of a man and two-fifths property; and they established
the same rule in relation to taxation. They very wisely concluded
that, as it was all-important that some general rule should be
adopted, this was the best rule, because promising more than any other
rule to arrive at a just result of ascertaining the number of
Representatives and ascertaining the quota of taxation."

Mr. Johnson did not think that the North needed such a provision as
this amendment to render her able to cope with Southern statesmanship
in Congress: "Are not the North and the statesmen of the North equal
to the South and the statesmen of the South on all subjects that may
come before the councils of the nation? What is there, looking to the
history of the two sections in the past, which would lead us to
believe that the North is inferior to the South in any thing of
intellectual improvement or of statesmanship? You have proved--and I
thank God you have proved--that if listening to evil counsels,
rendered effective, perhaps, by your own misjudged legislation, and by
the ill-advised course of your own population, exhibited through the
press and the pulpit, a portion of the South involved the country in a
war, the magnitude of which no language can describe--you have proved
yourselves, adequate to the duty of defeating, them in their mad and,
as far as the letter of the Constitution is concerned, their
traitorous purpose. And now, having proved your physical manhood, do
you doubt your intellectual manhood? Mr. President, in the presence in
which I speak, I am restrained from speaking comparatively of the
Senate as it is and the Senate as it has been; but I can say this,
with as much sincerity as man ever spoke, that there is nothing to be
found in the free States calculated to disparage them properly in the
estimation of the wise and the good. They are able to conduct the
Government, and they will not be the less able because they have the
advice and the counsels of their Southern brethren."

In answer to the position that the Southern States were not possessed
of a republican form of government, Mr. Johnson remarked: "Did our
fathers consider th