ceeding slowly in the work of reconstruction. In his opinion,
neither the negro nor his master was now fit to vote. Upon this point
he said: "It seems to me there can be little doubt that at this
particular time the negroes of the rebel States are unfit to exercise
the elective franchise. I have recently conversed with two officers of
the Federal army from Texas, who told me that there, in the interior
and agricultural portions of the State, the negroes do not yet know
that they are free; and one of the officers told me that he personally
communicated to several negroes for the first time the fact of their
freedom. Emancipation may be known in the towns and cities throughout
the South, but the probabilities are that in the agricultural portions
of that country the negroes have no knowledge that they are free, or
only vague conceptions of their rights and duties as freemen. Sir,
give these men a little time; give them a chance to learn that they
are free; give them a chance to acquire some knowledge of their rights
as freemen; give them a chance to learn that they are independent and
can act for themselves; give them a chance to divest themselves of
that feeling of entire dependence for subsistence and the sustenance
of their families upon the landholders of the South, to which they
have been so long accustomed; give them a little time to shake the
manacles off of their minds that have just been stricken from their
hands, and I will go with the honorable Senator from Massachusetts to
give them the right of suffrage. And I will here express the hope that
the day is not far distant when every man born upon American soil,
within the pale of civilization, may defend his manhood and his rights
as a freeman by that most effective ballot which

"'Executes the freeman's will
As lightning does the will of God.'"

Concerning the amendment proposed by Mr. Henderson, Mr. Williams said:
"All the impassioned declamation and all the vehement assertions of
the honorable Senator do not change or affect the evidence before our
eyes that the people of these United States are not prepared to
surrender to Congress the absolute right to determine as to the
qualifications of voters in the respective States, or to adopt the
proposition that all persons, without distinction of race or color,
shall enjoy political rights and privileges equal to those now
possessed by the white people of the country. Sir, some of the States
have lately s