If to this extent the year of jubilee has come, you have done much towards ushering it in, and have a right to be specially glad and grateful that Heaven has been pleased to make you so potential an instrumentality in bringing about its…

We took our sable friends into our boat when it was bulleting; and if we allow them to be thrown overboard by the traitors now it is balloting, we sink, in short.

I think that you may justly rank it among your greatest efforts, and that it will go into history as the great statement of the Freedman’s claim to participate in the government of the country of which he makes part.

The general student of governmental law and civil polity will also constantly refer to it as a new and important development of the connection between representation and executive sovereignty, and as a powerful exposé of the true basis of…

You have done a great service to the colored race, to the science of statesmanship, and to your country, all at once.

Theoretically, at least, it deprives the black race of representation, and punishes them for acts of legislation in which they have no voice.

This Reconstruction is, indeed, a momentous affair, and I feel a greater doubt of its just determination than I felt for that of arms while the war raged.

I am sure that I express but the common sentiment of the people all about me, when I say that your own course meets with more than a hearty approval, even admiration and gratitude.

May God give you wisdom and firmness equal to the emergency, and crown your arduous labors with the success they deserve!

Please accept the thanks of a poor private for your noble, courageous, and Christian efforts in the great cause of Right, Justice, and Liberty, when Justice is unpopular, and you are obliged by duty to meet both friend and foe in this…

Whatever may be the practicability of this principle at the present time, and however the country or Congress may settle the question in the future, your arguments are certainly unanswerable, and will ever remain an enduring monument of…

The argument is so clear and able that it would seem that no intelligent man of candor could deny the conclusions.

Adherence to the Right because it is the Right will never fail to commend itself to all right-thinking men.

I thank you for that noble speech, … so logical, so happily illustrated, so full of earnestness and soul, and withal so convincing.

You are the one man among many who seems to have studied the present exigencies of your noble country, and to have judged aright the requirements of the age you and we all live in at present.

When men as patriotic and sincere as I am, and a great deal wiser, sustain the Blaine Amendment, I am confounded, and don’t know what to make of it.

To my mind it is most abhorrent, and I hope it will not receive the assent of Congress.

It was a blot too dark and foul to be permitted to stain the Constitution.

To speak of ‘race and color’ in that instrument would be an insult to the men who framed it.

As a native of Massachusetts, and more than that, as a lover of my race, I want to thank you for your timely and eloquent words in behalf of universal and impartial justice.

The black man could hope for nothing through it.

You have opened a new field of thought to American statesmen, and furnished a new book of elementary political lessons to the American people.

God bless you for this noble speech which you have made against the Apportionment Amendment!

I admire and applaud the tenacity with which you advocate the equal rights of all men of all races under one Constitution and Government.… I hope you will stand up for the Asiatics as well as for the negroes.

They are now treated as brutes in some of our States.