I should, I think, have loved Liberty at all times, but in the times in which we live I feel inclined to adore it.… There is no legislator sufficiently wise and sufficiently powerful to maintain free institutions, if he does not take…

All our contemporaries, then, who would create or assure the independence and dignity of their fellow-men, must show themselves the friends of Equality; and the only worthy way of showing themselves such is to be so.

Our fathers could not bear a Stamp Act in making which they had no voice, and they braved terrible war with the most formidable power of the globe rather than pay a tax of threepence on tea imposed by a Parliament in which they were…

Clearly, if you do not recognize his title to representation, you must at least by careful legislation relieve him from this intolerable taxation.

But if you reject their votes, you cannot take their money.

As you detect no color in their money, you ought to detect no color in their votes.

In this denial of the right to vote there is a surpassing tyranny, being nothing less than a confiscation of the highest property the citizen can possess.

To take his money is robbery; to appropriate his house or land is spoliation; but house and land are less than the right by which the citizen is assured in all other rights.

But, if such discrimination is just where the white prevails, it would be equally just where the black prevails, and it would be as constitutional in one case as in the other.

Unquestionably a black man’s government is as constitutional as a white man’s government.

To call such a government “republican” is a mockery of sense and decency.

A monarch “surrounded by republican institutions,” as at one time was the boast of France, would be less offensive to correct principles, and give more security to Human Rights.

Representation is a modern invention of incalculable value to embody the will of the people.

Wherever a favored class appears, whether in one or the other, its republican character ceases.

It may be an aristocracy or oligarchy, but it is not a democracy or a republic.

Oligarchy is the government of the few, being not even aristocracy, but an abuse of aristocracy, as despotism is the abuse of monarchy.

Perhaps these States may be characterized in either way; and yet aristocracy, especially in origin, has something respectable, which cannot be attributed to a combination whose single distinctive element is color of the skin.

These words completely characterize the aristocracy of color; for this aristocracy is plainly in the enjoyment of privileges not communicable to other citizens by anything they can themselves do to obtain them.

The rule of inequality is plainly unreasonable; and what a mockery is that sovereignty of the people which sanctions any denial of equal rights!

Universal suffrage openly proclaims this right; and what is the republic without it?

Founded on color of the skin, they are, beyond question, the most senseless and disgusting of all history.

But this same spirit predominates still in the Rebel States.

It rages there with more revolting cruelty than Venice ever witnessed.

It is nothing less than a caste, which is irreligious as well as unrepublican.

A caste exists only in defiance of the first principles of Christianity and the first principles of a republic.