"The honorable member reads the Constitution as if it said that none but white men should become citizens of the United States; but it says no such thing, and never intended, in my judgment, to say any such thing. If it had designed to exclude from all participation in the rights of citizenship certain men on account of color, and to have confined, at all times thereafter, citizenship to the white race, it is but fair to presume, looking to the character of the men who framed the Constitution, that they would have put that object beyond all possible doubt; they would have said that no man should be a citizen of the United States except a white man, or rather would have negatived the right of the negro to become a citizen by saying that Congress might pass uniform rules upon the subject of the naturalization of white immigrants and nobody else; but that they did not do. They left it to Congress. Congress, in the exercise of their discretion, have thought proper to insert the term 'white' in the naturalization act; but they may strike it out, and if it should be stricken out, I do not think any lawyer, except my friend from Kentucky, would deny that a black man could be naturalized, and by naturalization become a citizen of the United States. "But to go back to the point from which the questions of my honorable friend from Kentucky caused me to digress, we have now within the United States four million colored people, the descendants of Africans, whose ancestors were brought into the United States as chattels. It was because of that condition that they were considered as not entitled to the rights of citizenship. We have put an end to that condition. We have said that at all times hereafter men of any color that nature may think proper to impress upon the human frame, shall, if within the United States, be free, and not property. Then, we have four million colored people who are now as free as we are; and the only question is, whether, being free, they can not be clothed with the rights of citizenship. The honorable member from Kentucky says no, because the naturalization clause does not include them. I have attempted to answer that. He says no, because the act passed in pursuance of that clause does not include them. I have answered that by saying that that act in that particular may be changed."