Frederick Douglass

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…

What though for the moment the hand of violence strikes down the negro’s rights in the South, those rights will revive, survive, and flourish again.

The permanent powers of the government are all on his side.

With power behind him, at work for him, and which cannot be taken from him, the negro of the South may wisely bide his time.

The Fourteenth Amendment makes him a citizen and the Fifteenth makes him a voter.

He has a standing in the supreme law of the land-- in the Constitution of the United States--not to be changed or affected by any conjunction of circumstances likely to occur in the immediate or remote future.

Now he has himself, his labor, and his right to dispose of one and the other as shall best suit his own happiness.

Bad as is the condition of the negro to-day at the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and incomparably worse.

Hence the freedman, less from humanity than cupidity, less from choice than necessity, was speedily called back to labor and life.