Frederick Douglass

The evils it brought are in their nature temporary, and the good is permanent.

And now while I am not blind to the evils which have thus far attended the enfranchisement of the colored people, I hold that the evils from which we escaped, and the good we have derived from that act, amply vindicate its wisdom.

The ballot in the hands of the negro was necessary to open the door of the school house, and to unlock the treasures of knowledge to him.

It was the policy of the system to keep him both ignorant and degraded, the better and more safely to defraud him of his hard earnings; and this argument never staggered me.

It was the nature of slavery from whose depths he had arisen to make him so, and it would have kept it so.

It would have been rewarding its enemies, and punishing its friends--embracing its foes, and spurning its allies,--setting a premium on treason, and degrading loyalty.

The very fact therefore that the old master-classes of the South felt that their interests were opposed to those of the freedmen, instead of being a reason against their enfranchisement, was the most powerful one in its favor.

It would have been, to have committed the lamb to the care of the wolf--the arming of one class and disarming the other--protecting one interest, and destroying the other--making the rich strong, and the poor weak--the white man a tyrant…

These reasons against the measure which were supposed to be unanswerable, were in some sense the most powerful arguments in its favor.

A man’s head will not long remain wrong, when his heart is right.

The demand for the ballot was such a vast advance upon the former objects proclaimed by the friends of the colored race, that it startled and struck men as preposterous and wholly inadmissible.

From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman, until he should cease to be merely a freedman, and should become a citizen.