All citizens who are industrious, honest, brave and patriotic should vote, without regard to their color; for, a man may possess all these characteristics and yet be "ignorant." Ignorance is only relative anyway.
(a) The Negro is a citizen. See XIV Amendment to Constitution, etc.
(b) He is industrious, and by his industry has not only helped to develop the resources of the United States but he has produced much of the property which is unjustly held by many white voters, and withheld from him; especially in the South.
The property of the South is due not more to the capital invested in the agricultural and manufacturing enterprises of that section than to the labor of the Negro, who furnishes the foundation of all wealth—labor—there.
(c) The untutored Negro has shown himself to be honest; he has never betrayed a trust imposed in him. During the great Civil War he was true to the trust imposed in him by his master at the front, who confided to his care the sustenance and even life of his wife and little ones. This was the supremest test of his honesty, which he sacredly discharged. Since the war, he has faithfully adhered to and followed the fortunes of the Republican party, by the mandate of which he was emancipated; even though in doing so he has suffered all the evils which a hostile opponent can invent to plague and swerve him from what he considers the path of gratitude and honor.
(d) He is brave; as the records of our wars will prove. His blood has stained many battlefields where, under "Old Glory," he fought for the Union and Liberty; not only on American soil, but also in foreign lands. The Negro, in contending in war, for the life and liberties of this Republic, has literally covered himself with glory.
(1) That he is patriotic goes without saying, in the light of what has been written in the foregoing paragraph. With all his coarse and homely ignorance, the heart of the American Negro, when yet a slave, throbbed with patriotic love and loyalty; and this, too, at a time when his college-bred and intelligent (?) master was doing his uttermost to destroy this glorious fabric of Union.
It is only reasonable to assume that a man whose ignorance does not blind him from shooting right, can, and will, under proper instruction, which is given in prints and on the stump to all other voters, vote rightly.
(2) The first and most potent step in the direction of humiliating the Negro and relegating him to a condition of mental serfdom, is to deprive him of the ballot. It is the only token of real power which he possesses, aside from his brawn, which the white American really covets; and once shorn of that, he would, like Samson, be passive, in the hands of the Philistines.