Than maiest well seine this in sooth,
That he is gentle because he doth
As longeth to a gentleman.”[200]
This beautiful testimony, to which the honest heart responds, is from an age when humanity was less regarded than now. Plainly it shows how conduct and character are realities, while other things are but accidents.
Among the Romans degradation ended with life. Slaves were admitted to honorable sepulture, and sometimes slept the last sleep with their masters. The slaves of Augustus and Livia were buried on the famous Appian Way, where their tombs with historic inscriptions have survived the centuries.[201] “Bury him with his niggers,” was the rude order of the Rebel officer, as he flung the precious remains of our admirable Colonel Shaw into the common trench at Fort Wagner, where he fell, mounting the parapets at the head of colored troops. And so was he buried, lovely in death as in life. The intended insult became an honor. In that common trench the young hero rests, symbolizing the great Equality for which he died. No Roman monument, with its Siste, viator, to the passing traveller, no “labor of an age in pilèd stones,” can match in grandeur that simple burial.
PREJUDICE OF COLOR.
Mr. President, against these conclusions there is but one argument, which, when considered, is nothing but a prejudice, as little rational as what Shylock first calls his “humor” and then “a lodged hate and a certain loathing,” making him seek the pound of flesh nearest the merchant’s heart. The prejudice of color pursues its victim in the long pilgrimage from the cradle to the grave, barring the hotel, excluding from the public conveyance, insulting at the theatre, closing the school, shutting the gates of science, and playing its fantastic tricks even in the church where he kneels and the grave where his dust mingles with the surrounding earth. The God-given color of the African is a constant offence to the disdainful white, who, like the pretentious lord, asking Hotspur for prisoners, can bear nothing so unhandsome “betwixt the wind and his nobility.” This is the whole case. And shall those Equal Rights promised by the great Declaration be sacrificed to a prejudice? Shall that Equality before the Law, which is the best part of citizenship, be denied to those who do not happen to be white? Is this a white man’s government or is it a government of “all men,” as declared by our fathers? Is it a Republic of Equal Laws, or an Oligarchy of the Skin? This is the question now presented.
Once Slavery was justified by color, as now the denial of Equal Rights is justified; and the reason is as little respectable in one case as in the other. The old pretension is curiously illustrated by an incident in the inimitable Autobiography of Franklin. An Ante-revolutionary Governor of Pennsylvania remarked gayly, “that he much admired the idea of Sancho Panza, who, when it was proposed to give him a government, requested it might be a government of blacks, as then, if he could not agree with his people, he might sell them”; on which a friend said, “Franklin, why do you continue to side with those damned Quakers? Had you not better sell them?” Franklin answered, “The Governor has not yet blacked them enough.” The Autobiography proceeds to record, that the Governor “labored hard to blacken the Assembly in all his Messages, but they wiped off his coloring as fast as he laid it on, and placed it in return thick upon his own face, so that, finding he was likely to be negrofied himself, he grew tired of the contest and quitted the Government.”[202] To negrofy a man was to degrade him.
Thus in the ambition of Sancho Panza, and in the story of the British governor, was color the badge of Slavery. “Then I can sell them,” said Sancho Panza; and the British governor repeated the saying. This is changed now; but not entirely. At present nobody dares say, “I can sell them”; but the inn, the common conveyance, the theatre, the school, the scientific institute, the church, and the cemetery deny them the equal rights of Freedom.
Color has its curiosities in history. For generations the Roman circus was convulsed by factions known from their liveries as white and red; new factions adopted green and blue; and these latter colors raged with redoubled fury in the hippodrome of Constantinople.[203] Then came blacks and whites, Neri and Bianchi, in the political contentions of Italy,[204] where the designation was from the accident of a name. In England the most beautiful of flowers, in two of its colors, became the badge of hostile armies, and the white rose fought against the red. But it has been reserved for our Republic, dedicated to the rights of human nature, to adopt the color of the skin as the sign of separation, and to organize it in law.