The proposed amendment to allow Congress to lay a duty on exports is precisely in the same situation.  Its importance cannot well be overstated.  It is very obvious that for many years the South will not pay much under our internal revenue laws.  The only article on which we can raise any considerable amount is cotton.  It will be grown largely at once.  With ten cents a pound export duty it would be furnished cheaper to foreign markets than they could obtain it from any other part of the world.  The late war has shown that.  Two million bales exported, at five hundred pounds to the bale, would yield $100,000,000.  This seems to me the chief revenue we shall ever derive from the South.  Besides, it would be a protection to that amount to our domestic manufactures.  Other proposed amendments—­to make all laws uniform; to prohibit the assumption of the rebel debt—­are of vital importance, and the only thing that can prevent the combined forces of copperheads and secessionists from legislating against the interests of the Union whenever they may obtain an accidental majority.

But this is not all that we ought to do before these inveterate rebels are invited to participate in our legislation.  We have turned, or are about to turn, loose four million of slaves without a hut to shelter them, or a cent in their pockets.  The infernal laws of slavery have prevented them from acquiring an education, understanding the commonest laws of contract, or of managing the ordinary business of life.  This Congress is bound to provide for them until they can take care of themselves.  If we do not furnish them with homesteads, and hedge them around with protective laws; if we leave them to the legislation of their late masters, we had better have left them in bondage.  Their condition would be worse than that of our prisoners at Andersonville.  If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power, we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages.

Two things are of vital importance.

1.  So to establish a principle that none of the rebel States shall be counted in any of the amendments of the Constitution until they are duly admitted into the family of States by the law-making power of their conqueror.  For more than six months the amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery has been ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the States that acted on its passage by Congress, and which had Legislatures, or which were States capable of acting, or required to act, on the question.

I take no account of the aggregation of whitewashed rebels, who without any legal authority have assembled in the capitals of the late rebel States and simulated legislative bodies.  Nor do I regard with any respect the cunning by-play into which they deluded the Secretary of State by frequent telegraphic announcements that “South Carolina had adopted the amendment,” “Alabama has adopted the amendment, being the twenty-seventh State,” etc.  This was intended to delude the people, and accustom Congress to hear repeated the names of these extinct States as if they were alive; when, in truth, they have no more existence than the revolted cities of Latium, two thirds of whose people were colonized and their property confiscated, and their right of citizenship withdrawn by conquering and avenging Rome.