More full explanations and descriptions will be given in the pamphlet, which will contain also specific directions to individuals or colonies how to proceed in the matter. While arrangements are being made with the government, the club will be glad to receive any suggestions from any one interested in the movement, and especially the leading colored men in the country.
Concerning this movement, any information desired may be had by addressing the president of the club,
J. W. ALDEN,
No. 9 Hanson Street, Boston, Mass.
[EMANCIPATION AND EMIGRATION.]
When emancipation took place, in 1863, it was not thought, by the noble army of philanthropists who had labored more than a quarter of a century for its accomplishment, that it would ever be necessary for the freedmen to flee their native States, in order to enjoy their civil and political rights and privileges under the Constitution.
Nor was it ever dreamed by the voting Republicans of 1876, that the administration they were putting into power could ever become so stupid as to surrender the national power into the hands of the rebel States, under so thin a guise as the old exploded humbug of South Carolina nullification—State rights, home-rule doctrine; and then stand by with folded arms and see the freedmen deliberately turned over to the tender mercies of the political trinity of despotism, to be stripped of their civil and political rights under the Constitution, and to be refused protection by the national government. It made no difference that the robbers were rebels and the robbed loyal citizens. The hollow promises of the rebels who had fought four years to destroy the government, it seems, were better currency at Washington than the protests of the loyal people who had saved it.
But the fifteen years that have elapsed since emancipation, have demonstrated the fact that these loyal people who fought for and saved the government, and who voted for and elected the present administration, must be returned to practical slavery, submit to serfdom, or emigrate to more civilized States, where their civil and political rights will be cheerfully accorded to them.
The proof of this proposition lies in the fact that State after State, in the South, which had amended their ante-bellum constitutions, so as to conform to that of the United States, preparatory to their readmission to the Union after the war, have, since their admission, remodelled the said constitutions in the interest of the "dominant class of white rulers." Moreover, the leaders of that same class are now in hot haste to have the United States Constitution made to conform to their own State laws, by the repeal of the amendments enfranchising the freedmen,—a specimen of sharp practice and unparalleled audacity, only equalled in the papal church, where the hierarchy made their system, and then a translation of the Bible to fit into it, instead of making a system to conform to the Bible, as originally written. (See Vaticanism Unmasked.)