Mrs. L. M. Worden, sister of the late Mrs. William H. Seward, and always a warm Abolitionist, wrote from Auburn, New York:—
“Please accept my thanks for your noble speech of the 5th and 6th of February, which I have read and re-read with great attention and deep gratitude and admiration. This ‘testimony of the truth’ will add yet another bright page to the record of your undeviating fidelity to the cause of Justice and Humanity.”
Mrs. Horace Mann, widow of the philanthropist, teacher, and Representative in Congress, wrote from Concord, Massachusetts:—
“I presume you will receive a thousand letters expressive of the satisfaction and delight that your speech upon the Suffrage question has given; and yet I must add mine, for it is but rarely that one feels that a moral subject is exhausted, and you appear to have accomplished this astonishing result. It is difficult to conceive how Congress can act otherwise than in the highest manner, after listening to it and reading it.”
Miss Susan B. Anthony, so earnest to secure suffrage for her own sex, was not less earnest for the colored race:—
“A thousand thanks for your renewed, repeated protest against that proposed Amendment. You stand in the Senate almost the lone man to vindicate the absolute Right. May you be spared these many years, thus to stand and thus to speak!”
PRESIDENT JOHNSON AND HIS COUNTER MANIFESTATIONS.
An immediate effect of the speech was to hasten yet more the issue with President Johnson. On the day after its delivery he was visited by a delegation of colored citizens, who pleaded especially for the ballot. The President answered with feeling, that he had always been a friend of the colored race, and said:—
“I do not like to be arraigned by some who can get up handsomely rounded periods, and deal in rhetoric, and talk about abstract ideas of Liberty, who never perilled life, liberty, or property. This kind of theoretical, hollow, unpractical friendship amounts to but very little. While I say that I am a friend of the colored man, I do not want to adopt a policy that I believe will end in a contest between the races, which, if persisted in, will result in the extermination of one or the other.”
The idea of “a contest between the races” recurred in stronger language, when, alluding to the colored man, he spoke of “the sacrifice of his life and the shedding of his blood.… I feel what I say, and I feel well assured, that, if the policy urged by some be persisted in, it will result in great injury to the white as well as to the colored man.… The query comes up right there, whether we don’t commence a war of races.… I do not want to be engaged in a work that will commence a war of races.… I feel a conviction that driving this matter upon the people, upon the community, will result in the injury of both races, and the ruin of one or the other.”[205]