. It was then that your
article appeared. Its influence was immediate and potential. Men
thought that if you the extremest radical could accept the House
proposition they might safely do the same. Had the Senate adhered one
of two things would have happened, either the House would have seceded
or the amendment would have failed.

Had the House concurred I fear we should have failed to carry several
States which have since ratified it.

Upon reflection I think as at the time I thought that your voice saved
the Fifteenth Amendment.

I am very truly,
GEO. S. BOUTWELL.

WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.
Boston.

P. S. This letter is not for the public use in so far as names are
mentioned, and of course, not for publication.
G. S. B.

The article of Mr. Phillips became so important in its influence upon
the final action of the Senate that I reproduce it in justice to Mr.
Phillips and as a further record of an historical event.

"We see the action of the Senate touching the Constitutional
Amendment with great anxiety. The House had passed a simple measure,
one covering all the ground that people are ready to occupy. It
answered completely the lesson of the war. Its simplicity gave it all
the chance that exists for any form of amendment being ratified.

"Why was it not left in that shape? Leaving out of sight the manifest
risk of attempting too much, the very fact of the little time left
before the session closes, was warning enough to clutch at anything
satisfactory and to run no risk of possible disagreement between the
Houses. We wait further knowledge before indulging any conjectures as
to the motive for this strange course of the Senate; before even
suspecting that it grew out of any concealed hate toward the whole
measure and was indeed a trick to defeat it. Whoever, in either House,
gratifies some personal whim to the extent of defeating or even
postponing this measure will incur the gravest responsibility. We
exhort every man who professes himself a friend of liberty to drop all
undue attachment to any form of words and to co-operate, heartily,
earnestly, with the great body of the members in carrying through as
promptly as possible, any form which included the substance of a
constitutional protection to the votes and right to office of the
colored race. That is the work of the hour. That is the lesson the
war has burned in on the brain and conscience of the Nation.

"To include with this, 'Nationality