FOOTNOTES:
[132] Miss Laura Clay and Mrs. Catharine Waugh McCulloch, the national auditors, were unable to be present.
[133] There were present also reporters from the New York Sun, New York World, Springfield Republican, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, and other papers.
APPENDIX.
Chapter XIV—Page [229].
ADDRESS TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN.
Adopted by the Women's National Loyal League, May 14, 1863.
... We ask not for ourselves or our friends redress of specific grievances or posts of honor or emolument. We speak from no considerations of mere material gain; but, inspired by true patriotism, in this dark hour of our nation's destiny, we come to pledge the loyal women of the Republic to freedom and our country. We come to strengthen you with earnest words of sympathy and encouragement. We come to thank you for your proclamation, in which the nineteenth century seems to echo back the Declaration of Seventy-six. Our fathers had a vision of the sublime idea of liberty, equality and fraternity; but they failed to climb the heights which with anointed eyes they saw. To us, their children, belongs the work to build up the living reality of what they conceived and uttered. It is not our mission to criticise the past. Nations, like individuals, must blunder and repent. It is not wise to waste our energy in vain regret, but from each failure we should rise up with renewed conscience and courage for nobler action. The follies and faults of yesterday we cast aside as the old garments we have outgrown. Born anew to freedom, slave creeds and codes and constitutions all now must pass away. "For men do not put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break and the wine runneth out and the bottles perish; but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved."
Our special thanks are due to you, that by your proclamation 2,000,000 women are freed from the foulest bondage humanity ever suffered. Slavery for man is bad enough, but the refinements of cruelty ever must fall on the mothers of the oppressed race, defrauded of all the rights of the family relation and violated in the most holy instincts of their nature. A mother's life is bound up in that of her child. There center all her hopes and ambitions. But the slave-mother in her degradation rejoices not in the future promise of her daughter, for she knows by experience what her sad fate must be. No pen can describe the unutterable agony of that mother whose past, present and future all are wrapped in darkness; who knows the crown of thorns she wears must press her daughter's brow; who knows the wine-press she treads those tender feet must tread alone. For, by the law of slavery, "the child follows the condition of the mother."
By your act, the family, that great conservator of national virtue and strength, has been restored to millions of humble homes around whose altars coming generations shall magnify and bless the name of Abraham Lincoln. By a mere stroke of the pen you have emancipated millions from a condition of wholesale concubinage. We now ask you to finish the work by declaring that nowhere under our national flag shall the motherhood of any race plead in vain for justice and protection. So long as one slave breathes in this republic, we drag the chain with him. God has so linked the race, man to man, that all must rise or fall together. Our history exemplifies this law. It was not enough that we at the North abolished slavery for ourselves, declared freedom of speech and press, built churches, colleges and free schools, studied the science of morals, government and economy, dignified labor, amassed wealth, whitened the sea with our commerce and commanded the respect and admiration of the nations of the earth—so long as the South, by the natural proclivities of slavery, was sapping the very foundations of our national life....
You are the first President ever borne on the shoulders of freedom into the position you now fill. Your predecessors owed their elevation to the slave oligarchy, and in serving slavery they did but obey their masters. In your election, northern freemen threw off the yoke, and with you rests the responsibility that our necks never shall bow again. At no time in the annals of the nation has there been a more auspicious moment to retrieve the one false step of the fathers in their concessions to slavery. The Constitution has been repudiated and the compact broken by the southern traitors now in arms. The firing of the first gun on Sumter released the North from all constitutional obligations to slavery. It left the government, for the first time in our history, free to carry out the declaration of our Revolutionary fathers, and made us in fact what we ever have claimed to be, a nation of freemen.
"The Union as it was"—a compromise between barbarism and civilization—can never be restored, for the opposing principles of freedom and slavery can not exist together. Liberty is life, and every form of government yet tried proves that slavery is death. In obedience to this law, our republic, divided and distracted by the collisions of class and caste, is tottering to its base and can be reconstructed only on the sure foundation of impartial freedom to all. The war in which we are involved is not the result of party or accident, but a forward step in the progress of the race never to be retraced. Revolution is no time for temporizing or diplomacy. In a radical upheaving the people demand eternal principles on which to stand.
Northern power and loyalty never can be measured until the purpose of the war be liberty to man; for a lasting enthusiasm ever is based on a grand idea, and unity of action demands a definite end. At this time our greatest need is not men or money, valiant generals or brilliant victories, but a consistent policy, based on the principle that "all governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed." The nation waits for you to say that there is no power under our declaration of rights nor under any laws, human or divine, by which free men can be made slaves; and therefore that your pledge to the slaves is irrevocable, and shall be redeemed.
If it be true, as it is said, that northern women lack enthusiasm in this war, the fault rests with those who have confused and confounded its policy. The pages of history glow with instances of self-sacrifice by women in the hour of their country's danger. Fear not that the daughters of this republic will count any sacrifice too great to insure the triumph of freedom. Let the men who wield the nation's power be wise, brave and magnanimous, and its women will be prompt to meet the duties of the hour with devotion and heroism.
When Fremont on the western breeze proclaimed a day of jubilee to the bondmen within our gates, the women of the nation echoed back a loud amen. When Hunter freed a million men and gave them arms to fight our battles, justice and mercy crowned that act and tyrants stood appalled. When Butler, in the chief city of the southern despotism, hung a traitor we felt a glow of pride; for that one act proved that we had a government and one man brave enough to administer its laws. And when Burnside would banish Vallandigham to the Dry Tortugas, let the sentence be approved and the nation will ring with plaudits. Your proclamation gives you immortality. Be just, and share your glory with men like these who wait to execute your will.
On behalf of the Women's National Loyal League,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, President.
Susan B. Anthony, Secretary.
Chapter XV—Page [247].
RECONSTRUCTION.
Address Delivered at Ottumwa, Kansas, July 4, 1865.
Mr. President, and Men and Women of Kansas:
It is a pleasure to me, beyond the reach of words, to be with you today. I accepted the invitation of your committee that I might feast my eyes on your grand prairies, ever fringed with the darker green of their timber-skirted creeks and rivers. I came here on this 89th anniversary of our National Independence, that I might look into the honest, earnest faces of the men and the women who, ten years ago, taught the nation anew, that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Through all this glorious decade of heroic struggle, my interests, my sympathies, my affections have been bound up with yours; for, during and since the cruel outrages of the summer of 1856, my two and only brothers have stood shoulder to shoulder with the freedom-loving, freedom-voting, freedom-fighting men of Kansas. And, as I have waited the telegraphic word that trembled along the western wires, telling of your successes and your defeats, it has ever been with bated breath lest those of my own home circle, too, should be numbered among the slain. Therefore, though not here in person through all these trial years, in spirit I have been with you, in your privations and hardships, in your sufferings and sacrifices to make freedom and free institutions the sure inheritance of Kansas and the nation.
You have already listened to the grand old Declaration of the Fathers of 1776. You have heard the true words of your representative to the next Congress.[134] His manly utterances here today give you assurance that he will faithfully reflect the highest and truest sentiments of his constituency. Men and women of Kansas, I congratulate you, that you have in this chosen agent a man who will speak and vote on the vital questions to come before the next Congress from the standpoint of human equality.
It is my purpose to call your attention to the recent declarations of our President to our "erring sister States" of the South. I ask you specially to note his proclamation to Mississippi. After pointing out that the Constitution of the United States guarantees to every State in the Union a republican form of government, and that the late rebellion has deprived the people of Mississippi of all civil government, he continues:
Now, therefore, in obedience to the high and solemn duties imposed upon me by the Constitution of the United States, and for the purpose of enabling the loyal people of said State to organize a State government, whereby justice may be established, domestic tranquillity insured, and loyal citizens protected in all their rights of life, liberty, and property, I, Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, and Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy of the United States, do hereby appoint William L. Sharkey Provisional Governor of the State of Mississippi, whose duty it shall be, at the earliest practicable period, to prescribe such rules and regulations as may be necessary and proper for convening a convention, composed of delegates to be chosen by that portion of the people of said State who are loyal to the United States, and no others, for the purpose of altering or amending the constitution thereof; and with authority to exercise, within the limits of said State, all the powers necessary and proper to enable such loyal people of the State of Mississippi to restore said State to its constitutional relations to the Federal government, and to present such republican form of State government as will entitle the State to the guarantee of the United States therefor, and its people to protection by the United States against invasion, insurrection, and domestic violence: Provided, That in any election that may be hereafter held for choosing delegates to any State Convention as aforesaid, no person shall be qualified as an elector, or shall be eligible as a member of such convention, unless he shall have previously taken and subscribed the oath of amnesty, as set forth in the President's proclamation of May 29, A. D. 1865, and is a voter qualified as prescribed by the Constitution and laws of the State, of Mississippi, in force immediately before the ninth (9th) of January, A. D. 1861, the date of the so-called ordinance of secession; and the said convention, when convened, or the Legislature that may be thereafter assembled, will prescribe the qualifications of electors, and the eligibility of persons to hold office under the Constitution and laws of the State, a power the people of the several States composing the Federal Union have rightfully exercised from the origin of the government to the present time.
The President says he finds the people of Mississippi "deprived of all civil government" by the revolutionary progress of the rebellion; therefore he appoints a provisional governor, to call an election of the loyal people for delegates to a convention to alter or amend the constitution that was in force prior to the rebellion. He does this "for the purpose of enabling the loyal people of said State to organize a State government whereby justice may be established, domestic tranquillity insured, and loyal citizens protected in all their rights of life, liberty and property." To this laudable end he instructs the governor, who is his military agent, to allow no man to vote or to be voted for, unless he shall have previously taken and subscribed to the oath of amnesty of May 29, 1865, and is a voter by the old constitution and laws of the slaveholding State of Mississippi. By this ordering, the President makes it impossible for the great mass of the loyal people to have a voice in organizing the new government. He re-establishes precisely the same basis of class representation that worked out the ruin of the old State government. Not to mention the loyal women, who make fully one-half of the loyal people, he shuts out all the loyal black men, with all the loyal poor white men, who were not allowed to vote under the old regime of slavery.
Thus, by this initiative step, the President makes it inevitable that the rebuilding of the government shall be controlled by the ex-rebels; the men who have fought desperately for four years to overthrow the federal government; the men who hate republicanism; the men who love and are determined to enjoy aristocracy. The loyal white men there, who have stood firmly and truly by the government through all the cruel persecutions of this bloody rebellion, are today a most powerless and pitiable minority; and yet the President tells this little handful that their only hope of organizing a genuine republican form of government lies in their ability to outvote the vast horde of disloyal civilians and pardoned, but not penitent, returned rebel soldiers. Such an offence against white loyalty is enough to make the very stones cry out.
But what shall we say of the other and deeper crime against the thousands of loyal black soldiers, who have fought bravely for us from the hour we permitted them to shoulder the musket; against the entire slave population, who have welcomed our Yankee soldiers, been faithful spies and guides to our armies, nursed our sick and wounded, relieved and rescued our starving prisoners, and in every conceivable way and manner given "aid and comfort" to our Union cause? I tell you, men and women of Kansas, no tongue can speak the ingratitude, the injustice, the shame and outrage of a proposition thus to leave those true and faithful freedmen to the cruel legislation of their old tyrants and oppressors, made tenfold more their enemies, because of their attachment and service to the government which they themselves have failed to destroy. Think of it, to thrust four million loyal people under the political heel of eight millions, almost to a man, disloyal!
I am sure you, who have given the best blood of Kansas to put down the slaveholders' rebellion against the rightful rule of the majority, will never by your silence give seeming consent to a reorganization of those rebel States on any basis save that of the ballot to all loyal citizens, black and white. You will never consent that loyal Union soldiers and friends, for no crime but the color of their skin, shall be made subjects, if not slaves, to disloyal rebel soldiers and enemies, with no virtue but that of belonging to the "governing race," as the President's North Carolina appointee calls the white faces. No, no, you will make these grand old prairies ring with your thunder-toned protests until they shall be felt and feared in the legislative halls at Washington. Then will your honorable and honored representative say for you on the floor of the next Congress, as he has said here today in the shadow of these mighty oaks of your Neosho, "no reconstruction except on the basis of the ballot in every loyal hand, black and white." Then will your senator[135] echo your voice from his seat in the Capitol, as he did the other day in old, Faneuil Hall, when he said, "the price of our victories is lost unless we give the negro the homestead, the musket, and the ballot."
And then will your other senator,[136] who has not spoken since he, with his colleagues in the Senate, said, "colonize" the faithful, loyal blacks; since he said, admit Louisiana and Arkansas back into the Union on the vote of the merest minority of their freshly-oathed white men—then will he say "no reconstruction without negro suffrage." But, good people, I charge you, suffer not this man to return to his seat in the Senate, until he has not only repented and confessed, but given sure promise forever to forsake his old sins of "white suffrage" and "black colonization." You owe it to yourselves and your country to see that your entire representation in the next Congress is right on this one vital question of reunion. Tell your senator if he must advocate a class and caste government in the rebel States, it must be loyal blacks, not disloyal whites. If he must colonize somebody, it must be the cowed, unconverted rebels, the anti-negro-equality white faces. Tell him henceforth to speak and vote to disfranchise, and drive out if need be, the persons who make war and oppress and outrage, and are resolved not to give "fair play" to peaceable, industrious citizens. You have but to speak and you will be obeyed, for it is the people's will, not that of their servants, which is law.
Now, a word on your State legislature: One of the first reports that met my ear on my arrival in your State last winter, was that the Republicans of Kansas, almost in a body, had voted against a bill for "negro suffrage," and that they voted thus for the reason that the question was introduced and urged by the opposition party of the State. My humble but earnest advice to you is that you permit those delegates who voted against right, against justice, against equality to all men, for so paltry a reason, henceforth to remain quietly at home. Teach them and all other aspirants for your suffrages that your representatives must speak and vote for the right, though the arch-demon from the pit below shall present the measure. That miserable political quibbling at Topeka last winter lost Kansas the place which of right belonged to her—that of being the first of the loyal States to give her freedmen their inalienable right to self-protection.
Our hope of salvation from the fatal errors that are now fastening themselves upon the plan and the policy of reorganization, lies in the prompt and right action of the coming Congress. The delegates from any and all of the rebel States, sent up to Washington by "free white loyal male" suffrages to knock for admission into the Union, must be sent home with instructions that no member will be admitted to Congress except he be elected by a majority of all the loyal men of the State, black as well as white. To the end that Congress may thus reject the amnestied white suffrage delegates, the people, all over the country, should unite in one mighty voice and demand that their representatives shall thus speak and thus vote. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." If we sleep now, all is lost; for on this one question of the negro hangs the future of our republic.
Since the firing of the first gun of the rebellion there has been no hour fraught with so much danger as is the present. To have been vanquished on the field of battle would have involved much of misery; but to be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought victories, and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of negro disfranchisement, negro serfdom, would be a defeat and disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars, equalled only by that which the Revolutionary fathers entailed upon their descendants by their fatal compromises with slavery. It would leave the final triumph of the great principles of republicanism, universal freedom and equality, "taxation and representation inseparable," the "consent of the governed," to be worked out and established in each of those old slave States, through a fearful re-enactment of the early struggles which you of Kansas so well remember.
If Congress shall admit the rebel representatives on the basis of white suffrage, those States will have added to their old representation the other two-fifths of what used to be "all other persons," which will give them an increase of fourteen votes in the House as a reward for their four years of fire and sword against the government. With this added power on the floor of Congress united to their political aiders and abettors from the Northern States, there is scarcely any project they may not be able to carry through in their own time and way. Nor is there room for a doubt, that it is the spirit and purpose of the slave oligarchy, whipped and cowed as they say by force of might, not right, to make a most desperate political fight to regain their old supremacy in the legislation of the country.
I base my estimate of the nature and intentions of the to-be-restored representation of the South, on the results of the elections already held in several of the rebel States, and from the efforts everywhere among the old planters again to reduce the black freedmen, as nearly as possible, to the status of slavery. In Virginia, the elections gave a legislature largely secession and almost wholly anti-negro. The planters have solemnly leagued themselves together to pay only five dollars per month to able field hands, each laborer to furnish his own clothes and pay his own doctor bills. This, too, when these same planters used to pay or receive for the hire of these same laborers, the sum of fifteen dollars and upwards. In South Carolina, Gen. Rufus Saxton reports that the old planters are actually driving the freedmen to work in the fields in chain gangs, and that the woods are strewn with the bodies of negroes shot dead in their efforts to escape the cruel torture. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the city election resulted in a secession mayor and common council. The only Union success I have noticed is that of Fernandina, Florida, and there the negroes were allowed to vote. Even the loyal State of Missouri saved her free constitution by less than two thousand votes.
The result of white suffrage can not be other than the election of large majorities of anti-negro, if not absolutely secession State and National representatives. Tennessee, the President's own State, of the loyalty of whose people we have heard much, has adopted a free constitution, and under it framed a new code of anti-negro laws; and we can hardly expect any rebel State to do better, for these new free State law-makers are the persecuted loyal men of Tennessee who have been outraged in their homes, hunted to the caves and mountains, or for a time driven out of the State altogether by the secessionists. One of these new free State laws says, the testimony of no "free colored person shall be received in court against any white person." By this enactment, the meanest white man may enter the home of the bravest black soldier, or wealthiest colored citizen, may murder his sons, ravish his wife and daughters, pillage and burn his house, commit any and every possible crime against him and his, and yet, if no human eye but his own, or that of his family, or his colored friends, witness the barbarisms, that black man, the father, the husband, the land-holder, outraged beyond measure, has no possible legal redress in the courts of Tennessee.
Then again, in case a free colored person is imprisoned and unable to pay his jail fees, he may be apprenticed out to labor until the sum be paid. And yet again, the courts may apprentice colored children as they see proper. The law does not even say friendless or orphan children. Is not that slavery under a new form? Thus, to leave those devoted black men's lives, liberties and property to be protected by white men, whose loyalty to the government is because it is a means to secure power to themselves, not from any love of its republican principles, is to doom them to all the ignominies and cruelties of slavery itself.
Let us not be deceived by the wicked wiles of politicians who tell us that President Johnson can not give the right to the ballot to the black loyalists of the South; for it is but the new "refuge of lies" to which slavery resorts. The same men told us that Lincoln had not the power to emancipate the slaves; that the government had no right to arm the negro, etc. If President Johnson has constitutional authority, either civil or military, to take away a man's right to vote, as a punishment for disloyalty, he must have power to give a man the same right, as a reward for loyalty; if the President may disfranchise a rebel soldier in order to enable the loyal people of a State to organize a republican form of government, he may also enfranchise a Union soldier to accomplish the same purpose. If the President has not the right nor the power to give the ballot to any person not entitled to it under the old order of slavery, how will he organize South Carolina, by whose old constitution no person was allowed to vote unless he owned ten slaves or was worth ten thousand dollars? Of course nobody owns ten slaves, and how many men, think you, who remained loyal at home, or how many returned soldiers or amnestied civilians have the requisite ten thousand dollars? In South Carolina, therefore, the President will be compelled to create voters; and, if he shall enfranchise any of the white non-voters, can he not also enfranchise the loyal black non-voters?
Let us watch and pray without ceasing. Let us hope that the day will dawn, and that soon, when law shall be found on the side of justice to the black race. These objectors never questioned McClellan's military right to put down slave insurrections with an "iron hand," or Halleck's infamous Order No. 3 to drive all negroes outside the military lines. It was only when Generals Fremont, Hunter and others declared the slaves free, that they might cripple the rebel armies and add them to our Union forces, that the cry of no law, no power was raised. Thus it is clear that the blindness and inability to find rightful authority, civil or military, first to emancipate, then to arm, and now to enfranchise the negroes, have the one source. Slavery perpetrated the "sum of all villainies" on the negroes, and then, to justify its wickedness, filled the whole land with atrocious lies of their depraved and degraded nature. The American people consented to the outrage; and their continued prejudice against that oppressed race but proves the adage, "we hate those whom we have injured."
Last of all comes the objection that the old masters will influence the vote of the negroes, and that, therefore, to enfranchise them will but give increased power to the old lords of the lash. Do not believe such nonsense. Think you, men who for four years have withstood every possible temptation and torture to induce them to fight for the slave oligarchy, can now be wheedled into voting for it? No, no. Those loyal, brave, black men who have known enough to fight on the right side will know enough to vote on the right side; and it is because the aiders and abettors of the old slave power believe and know that the negroes will be an invincible host on the side of equality, that they thus fear them.
We never from the beginning have had a genuine republican form of government in any State in the Union; for in no State have "the people" ever been permitted to elect their representatives. Even in Massachusetts and Vermont, the States nearest republican, only one-half of the people, the "male inhabitants," are allowed to vote. In other States it is only all "free white male persons," and in others still, all "free white male inhabitants owning so many slaves or so much property." It is not true therefore that the people have ever exercised the right to prescribe the qualifications of voters or officers. From the beginning, Congress always has settled the question in its organic act. That of your own Territory read, "Every free, white, male inhabitant shall vote at the first election, and be eligible to any office within the Territory." Thus you see Congress, not you, the people, decided who should and who should not vote in Kansas. And when the delegates of the prescribed "free, white, male" order met in convention, they proved themselves nothing above human, very like the so-elected conventions of other States, and retained all legislative power within the limits of the original congressional permit. The same is true of the rebel States, in which the President now finds the people destitute of all civil government; when he specifies who may vote, when he excludes any class from the ballot-box, he makes it impossible for "the people" to form a republican government.
When the loyal black men are not allowed their right to vote in the first election of the rebel States, their governments are thrown into the hands of a very small minority, and that too of very doubtful loyalty. The President by adhering to the old slave definition of "the people," rules that all our brave black Union soldiers and our best friends and allies, without whose aid we should still be struggling with rebels in arms, shall be subjects, not citizens, of the government they have rescued from the Confederate usurpers. It is not in human nature that a people fanatically believing themselves a superior race, and thereby rightful legislators over another and inferior race, shall execute justice and equality toward those whom they decree shall be "hewers of wood and drawers of water." No, the black man's guarantee to the protection of his inalienable rights to "life, liberty and property," is bound up in his right to the ballot.
When I speak of the inalienable rights of the negro, I do not forget that these belong equally to woman. Though the government shall be reconstructed on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, it yet will not be a true republic. Still one-half of the people will be in subjection to the other half, and the time will surely come when the whole question will have to be reopened and an accounting made with this other subject class. There will have to be virtually another reconstruction, based on the duty of the national government to guarantee to every citizen the right of self-protection, and this right, for woman as for man, is vested in the ballot.
That this superior "white male" class may not be trusted even to legislate for their own mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, the cruel statutes in nearly all the States, both slave and free, give ample proof. In scarcely a State has a married woman the legal right to the control of her person, to the earnings of her hands or brain, to the guardianship of her children, to sue or be sued, or to testify in the courts, and by these laws women have suffered wrongs and outrages second only to those of chattel slavery itself. If this be true, that this so-called superior class can not legislate justice even to those nearest and dearest in their own hearts and homes, is it not a crime to place a separate race, one hated and despised, wholly at the will of that governing class?
It must not be; and the one great work for the people at this hour, and every hour, between this and next December, is to agitate this question until the entire nation shall speak in tones not to be mistaken, which shall compel the coming Congress to refuse admission to every representative from the rebel States, who is sent there by the so-called "loyal white male" people.
"No reorganization without Negro Suffrage" is the word to send back to every rebel State. Until Congress shall define and settle this question, it can not in the future, as it has not in the past, perform its duty—guarantee a republican form of government in each of the States. When Congress shall thus decide, there will be work to do in most of the loyal States. Let us all labor to that end.
Men and women of Kansas, what say you, shall new loyal States or old rebel States be admitted into the Union until they present constitutions and laws truly republican, until they send representatives to Washington elected by a majority of all the people—white and black, men and women? You say No; your blood-enriched prairies, your battle-fought ravines, your sacked and burned cities, say No; your martyred dead, your own immortal John Brown, their freed souls all gloriously marching on, say No!
My friends, there is one word more I must leave with you. There is yet another danger. The reverence, the almost idolatry of the American people for their martyred President, is being used and abused by the political managers at Washington, and over all the country. The people are lulled to sleep over the most startling propositions, by insidious whisperings that President Lincoln originated or approved them. Almost every reconstruction plan is sent over the wires "sugar-coated" with, "President Johnson, in this, is but carrying out the spirit and purpose of Mr. Lincoln!" And there is no disguising or denying the fact, that the people are today accepting, and that too without questioning, the anti-negro reorganization plans already inaugurated, because of these wily, insinuating appeals to their reverence for the memory of their sacred dead.
If the four years' administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American people any one lesson above another, it was that they must think and speak and proclaim, and that he, as President, was bound to execute their will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say as he did four years ago, "I wait the voice of the people." The stern logic of the events of today would guide him, not those of yesterday. Therefore let us not be thrown off our watch by any of these appeals to our reverence for the opinions and plans of our departed President. If his freed spirit is permitted today to hover over each and all of the vast gatherings of the loyal people throughout the nation, it is beckoning every soul upward and onward in the path of equal justice to all; it is urging the great heart of the nation to plant our new Union on the everlasting rock of republicanism—universal freedom and universal suffrage.