“opposes Senator Sumner’s amendment; he says it invokes an
implication of some principle or provision of the Constitution
somewhere, or an implication arising from the general fitness
of things possibly, to enable it to invade the domiciliary
rights of the citizens of a State.”
These were the precise words of the Senator; I remember them well;
I was astonished at them. I could not understand by what delusion,
hallucination, or special _ignis-fatuus_ the Senator was led into
the idea that in this bill there is any suggestion of invading the
domiciliary rights of the citizens of the States. Why, Sir, the Senator
has misread the bill. I will not say he has not read it. He certainly
has misread it. And now let our colored fellow-citizen answer him:--
“I do not speak unadvisedly, when I declare that no such end
is desired by a single intelligent colored man; no such design
can be gleaned from any word ever spoken by Charles Sumner; his
amendment cannot by any reasonable stretch of the imagination
be open to the implication.”
Not a Senator, not a lawyer says that; it is only one of our colored
fellow-citizens whom the Senator would see shut out of the cars, shut
out of the hotels, his children shut out from schools, and himself
shut out from churches; and seeing these things, the Senator would do
nothing, because Congress is powerless! Our colored fellow-citizen
proceeds:--
“The amendment says that all citizens, white and black,
are entitled to the equal and impartial enjoyment of any
accommodation, advantage, facility, or privilege furnished
by common carriers, by innkeepers, by licensed theatres, by
managers of common schools supported by general taxation or
authorized by law. Does any of the same invade the domiciliary
rights of a citizen in any State?”
That is not my language, Sir; it is Mr. Downing’s.
“Could any man, white or black, claim a right of entrance into
the domicile of the poorest, the humblest, the weakest citizen
of the State of Maine by virtue of Mr. Sumner’s amendment, when
it shall become a law? Certainly not; a man’s private domicile
is his own castle: no one, with even kingly pretensions, dare
force himself over its threshold. But the public inn, the
public or common school, the public place of amusement, as
well as common carriers, asking the special protection of law,
created through its action on the plea and for the benefit of
the public good, have no such exclusive right as the citizen
may rightfully claim within his home; and it seems to me to be
invoking the aid of an unholy prejudice in attempting to force
the idea that Mr. Sumner desires, or that the colored people
in petitioning for civil rights are designing, to break into
social circles against the wish of those who compose them.”