The Thirteenth Amendment, it is conceded, did something more than to prohibit slavery as an institution resting upon distinctions 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 the 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, so 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 doctrines 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 such power contained in the second section of the Amendment. The question whether the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was or was not constitutional never came squarely before the Supreme Court on a test case, but, as we have seen, other acts analogous to it did come before that tribunal in such a way that the authority of the court must be construed as adverse to it. My own thought is that the dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice Harlan above quoted is worth more than all the other literature on this subject that the books contain. The autumn elections of 1866 returned a larger majority in Congress against President Johnson than had been there before. The result in Illinois was the reëlection of Trumbull as Senator by the unanimous vote of the Republican legislative caucus, although there were three major-generals of the victorious Union army (Palmer, Oglesby, and Logan) competing for that position, all of whom reached it later.