The Thirteenth Amendment, it is conceded, did something more than to prohibit slavery as an _institution_, resting upon distinction of race, and upheld by positive law. My brethren admit that it established and decreed universal _civil freedom_ throughout the United States. But did the freedom thus established involve nothing more than exemption from actual slavery? Was nothing more intended than to forbid one man from owning another as property? Was it the purpose of the nation simply to destroy the institution, and then remit the race, theretofore held in bondage, to the several States for such protection, in their civil rights, necessarily growing out of freedom, as those states in their discretion, might choose to provide? Were the States against whose protest the institution was destroyed, to be left free, as far as national interference was concerned, to make or allow discriminations against that race, as such, in the enjoyment of those fundamental rights which by universal concession, inhere in a state of freedom? Had the Thirteenth Amendment stopped with the sweeping declaration, in its first section, against the existence of slavery and involuntary servitude, except for crime, Congress would have had the power, by implication, according to the doctrine of _Prigg ~v.~ Commonwealth of Pennsylvania_, repeated in _Strauder ~v.~ West Virginia_, to protect the freedom established, and consequently, to secure the enjoyment of such civil rights as were fundamental in freedom. That it can exert its authority to that extent is made clear, and was intended to be made clear, by the express grant of power contained in the second section of the Amendment.