REQUIREMENT OF REPUBLICAN INSTITUTIONS.
These are marked instances; but they are types. If Frederick Douglass and Oscar James Dunn could be made to suffer, how much must others be called to endure! All alike, the feeble, the invalid, the educated, the refined, women as well as men, are shut out from the ordinary privileges of the steamboat or rail-car, and driven into a vulgar sty with smokers and rude persons, where the conversation is as offensive as the scene, and then again at the roadside inn are denied that shelter and nourishment without which travel is impossible. Do you doubt this constant, wide-spread outrage, extending in uncounted ramifications throughout the whole land? With sorrow be it said, it reaches everywhere, even into Massachusetts. Not a State which does not need the benign correction. The evidence is on your table in numerous petitions. And there is other evidence, already presented by me, showing how individuals have suffered from this plain denial of equal rights. Who that has a heart can listen to the story without indignation and shame? Who with a spark of justice to illumine his soul can hesitate to denounce the wrong? Who that rejoices in republican institutions will not help to overthrow the tyranny by which they are degraded?
I do not use too strong language, when I expose this tyranny as a degradation to republican institutions,—ay, Sir, in their fundamental principle. Why is the Declaration of Independence our Magna Charta? Not because it declares separation from a distant kingly power; but because it announces the lofty truth that all are equal in rights, and, as a natural consequence, that just government stands only on the consent of the governed,—all of which is held to be self-evident. Such is the soul of republican institutions, without which the Republic is a failure, a name and nothing more. Call it a Republic, if you will, but it is in reality a soulless mockery.
Equality in rights is not only the first of rights, it is an axiom of political truth. But an axiom, whether of science or philosophy, is universal, and without exception or limitation; and this is according to the very law of its nature. Therefore it is not stating an axiom to announce grandly that only white men are equal in rights; nor is it stating an axiom to announce with the same grandeur that all persons are equal in rights, but that colored persons have no rights except to testify and vote. Nor is it a self-evident truth, as declared; for no truth is self-evident which is not universal. The asserted limitation destroys the original Declaration, making it a ridiculous sham, instead of that sublime Magna Charta before which kings, nobles, and all inequalities of birth must disappear as ghosts of night at the dawn.
REAL ISSUE OF THE WAR.
All this has additional force, when it is known that this very axiom or self-evident truth declared by our fathers was the real issue of the war, and was so publicly announced by the leaders on both sides. Behind the embattled armies were ideas, and the idea on our side was Equality in Rights, which on the other side was denied. The Nation insisted that all men are created equal; the Rebellion insisted that all men are created unequal. Here the evidence is explicit.
The inequality of men was an original postulate of Mr. Calhoun,[174] which found final expression in the open denunciation of the self-evident truth as “a self-evident lie.”[175] Echoing this denunciation, Jefferson Davis, on leaving the Senate, January 21, 1861, in that farewell speech which some among you heard, but which all may read in the “Globe,” made the issue in these words:—
“It has been a belief that we are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, which has brought Mississippi into her present decision. She has heard proclaimed the theory that all men are created free and equal, and this made the basis of an attack upon her social institutions; and the sacred Declaration of Independence has been invoked to maintain the position of the equality of the races.”[176]
The issue thus made by the chief Rebel was promptly joined. Abraham Lincoln, the elected President, stopping at Independence Hall, February 22d, on his way to assume his duties at the National capital, in unpremeditated words thus interpreted the Declaration:—