Nor has the horrid menace of reënslavement proceeded from the Senator from Delaware alone. It has been uttered even by Mr. Willey, the mild Senator from Virginia, speaking in the name of State Rights. Newspapers have taken up and repeated the revolting strain. That is to say, no matter what may be done for Emancipation, whether by proclamation of the President, or by Congress even, the State, resuming its place in the Union, will, in the exercise of its sovereign power, reënslave every colored person within its jurisdiction; and this is the menace from Delaware, and even from regenerated Western Virginia! I am obliged to Senators for their frankness. If additional motive were needed for the urgency with which I assert the power of Congress, it would be found in the pretensions thus savagely proclaimed. In the name of Heaven, let us spare no effort to save the country from such shame, and an oppressed people from the additional outrage. As I quote Mr. Willey, I desire his precise words should be understood, that the country may see the necessity of Congressional action. In opposing Emancipation in the District of Columbia, he depicted the unhappy fate of the freedman. “Suppose they are emancipated, what then? Are they freemen in fact? Will they have the rights of freemen? Sir, such an idea is utterly fallacious. It will practically amount to nothing. You cannot enact the slave into a freeman by bill in Congress. A charter of his liberty may be engrossed, enrolled, and passed into a law, with all the formalities of legislation, _and still he must remain virtually a slave_.”[212] Pursuing this same strain in a later debate on the Confiscation Bill, which provided for Emancipation in certain cases, the Senator said:-- “Sir, what will be the necessary and inevitable result of this policy, if it be carried into effect? It will be that Virginia, by this increase of the free negro population under the operation of this bill, will be driven not only to reënslave those who may be manumitted under the operation of the present bill, but also to reënslave the sixty thousand free negroes already there.… Sir, the evil will be unendurable, and the result will be the reënslavement of the slaves thus manumitted, as well as those already free in our State.”[213] I quote these words with extreme pain. Their author is not known as a fanatic of Slavery. Therefore do they reveal the terrible peril against which Congress must provide.