The amendment reached the Senate on the thirty-first day of January and on the sixth of February was taken up for consideration. Mr. Fessenden, chairman of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, was entitled to open the debate, but yielded to Mr. Sumner. Mr. Sumner, with his rigid adherence to principle, opposed the amendment. "Knowing as I do," said he, "the eminent character of the committee which reports this amendment, its intelligence, its patriotism and the moral instincts by which it is moved, I am at a loss to understand the origin of a proposition which seems to me nothing else than another compromise of human rights, as if the country had not already paid enough in costly treasure and more costly blood for such compromise in the past." He declared that he was "painfully impressed by the discord and defilement which the amendment would introduce into the Constitution." He quoted the declaration of Madison in the convention of 1787, that it was wrong to admit into the Constitution the idea of property in man. "Of all that has come to us from that historic convention, where Washington sat as President and Franklin and Hamilton sat as members, there is nothing having so much of imperishable charm. It was wrong to admit into the Constitution the idea than man could hold property in man. Accordingly, in this spirit the Constitution was framed. This offensive idea was not admitted. The text at least was kept blameless. And now, after generations have passed, surrounded by the light of Christian truth and in the very blaze of human freedom, it is proposed to admit into the Constitution the twin idea of inequality in rights, and thus openly set at naught the first principles of the Declaration of Independence and the guarantee of republican government itself, while you blot out a whole race politically. For some time we have been carefully expunging from the statute-books the word 'white,' and now it is proposed to insert into the Constitution itself a distinction of color."