Mr. Chanler.--"I merely wish to say, in reply to the gentleman, that I have read history a little further back. I remember when the British fleet and the British army held out a similar threat to the white race of this country. The proclamation of General McClellan did keep down the negroes; and this fact proves what I assert--that they are a race to be kept under. No race capable of achieving its liberty by its own efforts, would have listened for one moment to the paper threats of all the generals in the world. The negroes listened to McClellan, and they shrank behind the bush. They are bushmen in Africa. They are a dependent race, unwilling--I assert it from the record of history--unwilling to assert their independence at the risk of their lives. By their own efforts they never have attained, and I firmly believe they never will attain, their liberty." Mr. Bingham replied: "I desire to say to the gentleman from New York, when he talks of being a 'student of history,' that before the tribunal of history the facts are not against me nor against the colored race. I beg leave to say to the gentleman that these people have borne themselves as bravely, as well, and, I may add, as wisely during the great contest just closed, as any people to whom he can point, situated in like circumstances, at any period of the world's history. They were in chains when the rebellion broke out. They constituted but one-sixth of the whole body of the people. By the terms of the Constitution of the United States, if they lifted a hand in the assertion of their right to freedom, they were liable that moment to be crushed by the combined power of the Republic, called out, in pursuance of the very letter of the Constitution, 'to suppress insurrection.' Yet, notwithstanding the fact that their whole living generation and the generations before them, running back two centuries, had been enslaved and brutalized, reduced to the sad and miserable condition of chattels, which, for want of a better name, we call a 'slave'--an article of merchandise, a thing of trade, with no acknowledged rights in the present, and denied even the hope of a heritage in the great hereafter--yet, sir, the moment that the word 'Liberty' ran along your ranks, the moment that the word 'Emancipation' was emblazoned upon your banners, those men who, with their ancestors, had been enslaved through five generations, rose as one man to stand by this republic, the last hope of oppressed humanity upon the earth, until they numbered one hundred and seventy-five thousand arrayed in arms under your banners, doing firmly, unshrinkingly, and defiantly their full share in securing the final victory of our arms. I have said this much in defense of men who had the manhood, in the hour of the nation's trial, to strike for the flag and the unity of the republic in the tempest of the great conflict, and to stand, where brave men only could stand, on the field of poised