Senator Saulsbury, of Delaware, contended that the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution had given no power to Congress to confer upon free negroes rights and privileges which had not been conceded to them by the states where they resided. He said that in Maryland about one half of the colored population were free before the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted, that in Delaware the free negroes largely outnumbered the slaves, and that in Kentucky the free negroes were a large part of the population. All that the Thirteenth Amendment did was to put the slave population on the same footing on which the free negroes already stood. Congress had no power to legislate on the status of free negroes in the several states before the Civil War. But the powers of Congress in this respect had not been enlarged by anything in the Thirteenth Amendment. That amendment had merely said that the condition of slavery--the condition in which one man belongs to another, which gives that other a right to appropriate the profits of his labor to his own use and to control his person--should no longer exist. Those who voted for the amendment might have contemplated a larger exercise of power by Congress than mere emancipation, but they did not avow it on the floor of the Senate when the measure was pending. He continued: The honorable Senator from Illinois has avowed that he does not propose by this bill to confer any political power. I have no doubt the Senator is perfectly honest in that declaration, and that he personally does not mean to give any political power, for instance, the right of voting, not only to the freedmen, but to the whole race of negroes; but the intention of the Senator in framing this bill will not govern its construction, and I have not the least doubt that, should it be enacted and become a law, it will receive very generally, if not universally, the construction that it does confer a right of voting in the states; and why do I say so? Says the Senator, "It confers no political power; I do not mean that." The question is not what the Senator means, but what is the legitimate meaning and import of the terms employed in the bill. Its words are, "That there shall be no discrimination in civil rights or immunities." What are civil rights? What are the rights which you, I, or any citizen of this country enjoy? What is the basis, the foundation of them all? They are divisible into two classes; one, those rights which we derive from nature, and the other those rights which we derive from government. I will admit that you may divide and subdivide the rights which you derive from government into different classifications; you may call some, for the sake of convenience and more definiteness of meaning, political; you may call others civil. * * * * *