“Mr. President, we are not here to enlighten you, sir, as to your duties as the Chief Magistrate of this republic, but to show our respect, and to present in brief the claims of our race to your favorable consideration. In the order of divine Providence, you are placed in a position where you have the power to save or destroy us, to bless or blast us,—I mean our whole race. Your noble and humane predecessor placed in our hands the sword, to assist in saving the nation; and we do hope that you, his able successor, will favorably regard the placing in our hands the ballot with which to save ourselves. We shall submit no argument on that point. The fact that we are the subjects of government, and subject to taxation, subject to volunteer in the service of the country, subject to being drafted, subject to bear the burdens of the State, makes it not improper that we should ask to share in the privileges of this condition. I have no speech to make on this occasion. I simply submit these observations as a limited expression of the views and feelings of the delegation with which I have come.”
I omit Mr. Johnson’s long and untruthful speech, and give the reply of the delegation, which he would not listen to:—
“Mr. President, in consideration of a delicate sense of propriety, as well as your own repeated intimation of indisposition to discuss or to listen to a reply to the views and opinions you were pleased to express to us in your elaborate speech to-day, we would respectfully take this method of reply thereto.
“Believing, as we do, that the views and opinions expressed in that address are entirely unsound, and prejudicial to the highest interests of our race, as well as of our country, we cannot do otherwise than expose the same, and, so far as may be in our power, arrest their dangerous influence.
“It is not necessary at this time to call attention to more than two or three features of your remarkable address.
“The first point to which we feel especially bound to take exception is your attempt to found a policy opposed to our enfranchisement, upon the alleged ground of an existing hostility on the part, of the former slaves towards the poor white people of the South.
“We admit the existence of this hostility, and hold that it is entirely reciprocal.
“But you obviously commit an error by drawing an argument from an incident of a state of slavery, and making it a basis for a policy adapted to a state of freedom.
“The hostility between the whites and blacks of the South is easily explained. It has its root and sap in the relation of slavery, and was incited on both sides by the cunning of the slave-masters. These masters secured their ascendency over both the poor whites and the blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each.
“There was no earthly reason why the blacks should not hate and dread the poor whites when in a state of slavery; for it was from this class that their masters received their slave-catchers, slave-drivers, and overseers. They were the men called in upon all occasions by the masters when any fiendish outrage was to be committed upon the slave.