Page:Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs (Volume Two).djvu/58

Rh statute made in pursuance of the Constitution shall be the supreme law of the land, anything in the constitution or laws of any State notwithstanding.” This resolution is a sad impeachment of Mr. Sumner’s quality as a lawyer and it is an equally sad impeachment of his sense or of his integrity as a man that he was willing to risk the rights of five million persons upon a statute whose language was rhetorical and indefinite, a statute which might be repealed and which was quite certain to be pronounced unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Upon the return of the resolution and amendment to the House, my own position was an embarrassing one. I was counted as a radical and in favor of securing to the negro race every right to which the white race was entitled. My opposition to the Senate amendment seemed to place me in a light inconsistent with my former professions. However, I met the difficulty by an argument in which I maintained that the right to vote carried with it the right to hold office. That in the United States there were only a few exceptions, and those were exceptions under the Constitution.

Finally, the House, by a reduced vote refused to concur with the amendment of the Senate. It was at this crisis that Wendell Phillips wrote an article in the Anti-Slavery Standard over his own name in which he said in substance and in words, that the House proposition was adequate and that it ought to be accepted by the Senate. His name and opinion settled the controversy. The Southern Republicans deserted Mr. Sumner feeling that the opinion of Phillips was a sufficient shield. A slight change of phraseology was made and the proposition of the House became the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

I wrote a letter of acknowledgment to Mr. Phillips in the opinion that he had saved the amendment. At that time the prejudice against negroes for office was very strong in Ohio,