Not by force, said the North; not by government guardianship, said the South; then by the ballot, the sole and legitimate defence of a free people, said the Common Sense of the Nation.
Du Bois outlines the differing post-Civil War proposals for protecting newly freed people, concluding that the ballot was widely seen as their essential defense.
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To me Jubilee Hall seemed ever made of the songs themselves, and its bricks were red with the blood and dust of toil.
But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.
Words and music have lost each other and new and cant phrases of a dimly understood theology have displaced the older sentiment.