“to make and enforce contracts, to sue, be parties, and give evidence, to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property, and to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens, and shall be subject to like punishment, pains, and penalties, and to none other, any law, statute, ordinance, regulation, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding.” The Senate will perceive that this Act operates not only in the National but in the State jurisdiction. No person will question that. It operates in every National court and in every State court. The language is, “in every State and Territory in the United States.” Every State court is opened. Persons without distinction of color are entitled to sue and be sued, especially to be heard as witnesses, and the colored man may hold up his hand as the white man.… Now I ask the Senator from Wisconsin to consider what is the difference in character between the right to testify and the right to sit on a jury. MR. CARPENTER. Or on the bench. MR. SUMNER. The Senator will allow me to put the question in my own way. I say nothing about the bench, and the Senator is too good a lawyer not to see why. He knows well the history of trial by jury; he knows that at the beginning jurors were witnesses from the neighborhood,--afterward becoming judges, not of law, but of fact. They were originally witnesses from the vicinage; so that, if you go back to the very cradle of our jurisprudence, you find jurors nothing but witnesses: and now I insist that they must come under the same rule as witnesses. If the courts are opened to colored witnesses, I insist by the same title they must be opened to colored jurors. Call the right political or civil, according to the distinction of the Senator. No matter. The right to be a juror is identical in character with the right to be a witness. I know not if it be political or civil; it is enough for me that it is a right to be guarded by the Nation. I say nothing about judges; for the distinction is obvious between the two cases. I speak now of colored jurors; and I submit, as beyond all question, that every reason or argument which opens the courts to colored witnesses must open them to colored jurors. The two go together, as natural yoke-fellows.