Had it existed either in war times or during reconstruction, does any man doubt that it would have been added to the other charges and proclaimed upon the house-tops and at the street corners, as this charge is at present?
Douglass argues that if the charges against Black people had been valid during earlier times, they would have been used to justify violence then as well.
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More from Frederick Douglass
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
Nothing but the shot-gun or the bull-dozer’s whip can keep them from voting their convictions.
To-day the negro, starting from nothing, pays taxes upon six millions in Georgia, and forty millions in Louisiana.