The debate on the direct question of Reconstruction did not begin at so early a date in the Senate as in the House, but kindred topics led to the same line of discussion as that in which the House found itself engaged. During the first week of the session Mr. Wilson of Massachusetts had submitted a bill for the protection of freedman, designed to overthrow and destroy the odious enactments which in many of the Southern States were rapidly reducing the entire negro race to a new form of slavery. Mr. Wilson's bill provided that "all laws, statutes, acts, ordinances, rules and regulations in any of the States lately in rebellion, which, by inequality of civil rights and immunities among the inhabitants of said States is established or maintained by reason of differences of color, race or descent, are hereby declared null and void." For the violation of this statute a punishment was provided by fine of not less than five hundred dollars nor more than ten thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not less than six months nor more than five years. In debating his bill Mr. Wilson declared that he had "no desire to say harsh things of the South nor of the men who have been engaged in the Rebellion. I do not ask their property or their blood; I do not wish to disgrace or degrade them; but I do wish that they shall not be permitted to disgrace, degrade or oppress anybody else. I offer this bill as a measure of humanity, as a measure that the needs of that section of the country imperatively demand at our hands. I believe that if it should pass it will receive the sanction of nineteen-twentieths of the loyal people of the country. Men may differ about the power or the expediency of giving the right of suffrage to the negro; but how any humane, just and Christian man can for a moment permit the laws that are on the statute-books of the Southern States and the laws now pending before their Legislatures, to be executed upon men whom we have declared to be free, I cannot comprehend."