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Founders, statesmen and world leaders — cited from their collected works.
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With a moderate degree of intelligent leadership among the laboring class of the South, properly handling the justice of their cause, and wisely using the exodus example, they can easily exact better terms for their labor than ever before.
As an assertion of power by a people hitherto held in bitter contempt, as an emphatic and stinging protest against high-handed, greedy, and shameless injustice to the weak and defenceless, as a means of opening the blind eyes of oppressors…
Not only is the South the best locality for the negro, on the ground of his political powers and possibilities, but it is best for him as a field of labor.
Plainly enough, the exodus is less harmful as a measure than are the arguments by which it is supported.
Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.
It cannot be doubted that in so far as this exodus tends to promote restlessness in the colored people of the South, to unsettle their feeling of home, and to sacrifice positive advantages where they are, for fancied ones in Kansas or…
It is a more cheerful thing to be able to say I was born here and know all the people, than to say I am a stranger here and know none of the people.
The fact of being to the manner born has an elevating power upon the mind and heart of a man.
No people ever did much for themselves or for the world without the sense and inspiration of native land, of a fixed home, of familiar neighborhood and common associations.
The time and energy expended in wandering from place to place, if employed in making him a comfortable home where he is, will, in nine cases out of ten, prove the best investment.
A man should never leave his home for a new one till he has earnestly endeavored to make his immediate surroundings accord with his wishes.
The colored people of the South, just beginning to accumulate a little property, and to lay the foundation of family, should not be in haste to sell that little and be off to the banks of the Mississippi.
It does not appear that the friends of freedom should spend either time or talent in furtherance of this exodus, as a desirable measure, either for the North or the South.
It leaves the whole question of equal rights on the soil of the South open and still to be settled, with the moral influence of exodus against us; since it is a confession of the utter impracticability of equal rights and equal protection…
It is a surrender, a premature disheartening surrender, since it would secure freedom and free institutions by migration rather than by protection; by flight rather than by right; by going into a strange land rather than by staying in…
The business of this nation is to protect its citizens where they are, not to transport them where they will not need protection.
Besides the objection thus stated, it is manifest that the public and noisy advocacy of a general stampede of the colored people from the South to the North is necessarily an abandonment of the great and paramount principle of protection…
Why should a people who have made such progress in the course of a few years be humiliated and scandalized by exodus agents, begging money to remove them from their homes? especially at a time when every indication favors the position that…
Every day brings fresh and increasing evidence that we are, and of right ought to be, a nation; that Confederate notions of the nature and powers of our government ought to have perished in the rebellion which they supported; that they are…
We stand at the gateway of a marked and decided change in the statesmanship of our rulers.
We see and feel to-day, as we have not seen and felt before, that the time for conciliation and trusting to the honor of the late rebels and slaveholders has passed.
There is a growing recognition of the duty and obligation of the American people to guard, protect, and defend the personal and political rights of all the people of all the States; to uphold the principles upon which rebellion was…
We stand to-day at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction.
Without abating one jot of our horror and indignation at the outrages committed in some parts of the Southern States against the negro, we cannot but regard the present agitation of an African exodus from the South as ill-timed and in some…
