Historical voices

Only a few years of non-tillage would be needed to give the sunny and fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate wilderness.

Machinery may continue to do, as it has done, much of the work of the North, but the work of the South requires bone, sinew, and muscle of the strongest and most enduring kind for its performance.

Important as manual labor is everywhere, it is nowhere more important and absolutely indispensable to the existence of society than in the more southern of the United States.

Alexander, a Democrat, and, I believe, once a slaveholder, had not only the courage, but the magnanimity to give me fair play in this fight.

It may or may not be true that my complexion was the cause of this departure, but no man has any right to assume that position in advance of a plain declaration to that effect by President Hayes himself.

Its fall would be a blow to freedom and progress throughout the world.

Among all the great capitals of the world it is preëminently the capital of free institutions.

He is an owner of the marble grandeur which he beholds about him,--as much so as any of the forty millions of this great nation.

Under its lofty domes and stately pillars, as under the broad blue sky, all races and colors of men stand upon a footing of common equality.

It is national territory, and the one place where no American is an intruder or a carpet-bagger.

Elsewhere we may belong to a section, but here we belong to a whole country, and the whole country belongs to us.

Elsewhere we may belong to individual States, but here we belong to the whole United States.

The same boundless welcome is given to all American citizens by Washington.

In the remotest section of the republic, in the most distant parts of the globe, amid the splendors of Europe or the wilds of Africa, we are still held and firmly bound to this common center.

It belongs to us; and whether it is mean or majestic, whether arrayed in glory or covered with shame, we cannot but share its character and its destiny.

I am not such a fool as to decry a city in which I have invested my money and made my permanent residence.

It is the easiest thing in the world, as all editors know, to pervert the meaning and give a one-sided impression of a whole speech by simply giving isolated passages from the speech itself, without any qualifying connections.

You have a right to say what you please on that point; yet I think it would be only fair and generous to wait for some dereliction of duty on my part before I shall be adjudged as incompetent to fill the place.

But the most dreadful thing threatened, was a colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves, sparrow-tailed coat, patent leather boots, and alabaster cravat, performing the ceremony--a very empty one--of introducing the…

All sorts of reasons against my appointment, but the true one, were given, and that was withheld more from a sense of shame, than from a sense of justice.

But as only one person can be appointed to any one office, only one can be pleased, while many are offended; unhappily, resentment follows disappointment, and this resentment often finds expression in disparagement and abuse of the…

The progress of a nation is sometimes indicated by small things.

Such men increase the faith of all in the possibilities of their race, and make it easier for those who are to come after them.

Only a few years before, any colored man was forbidden by law to carry a United States mail bag from one post-office to another.