There are freedmen unable to read or write who are excellent in all respects.

If willing to reject such persons as allies, can you justly exclude them from participation in the Government?

Can you justly exclude any good citizen from such participation?

On the contrary, I find in them a beautiful illustration of that Equality before the Law which is the promise of republican institutions.

At the ballot-box the humblest citizen is the equal of the great statesman or the great judge.

The common man may counterbalance the vote of the great statesman or great judge, but he cannot counterbalance this influence.

Let these be overthrown or abandoned, and I know no adequate safeguard against an outrageous oppression of the freedman, which will be Slavery under another name.

The original type, as received from Africa and perpetuated here, might not appear; but this is not the only form of the hateful wrong.

Surely it is the dictate of wisdom, instead of creating a third paper currency, to disembarrass the country of one of those now existing and make the other convertible into coin, so that we may hereafter enjoy one uniform currency.

Not to speak of peonage, as it existed in Mexico, there is a denial of rights, with exclusion from all participation in the Government and subjection to oppressive restraints, which of itself is a most direful slavery, under which the…

I confess my constant desire for measures to withdraw our greenbacks and to make our present bank-notes coin notes.

The emancipated African, shut out from all participation in the Government, despoiled of the ballot, was enmeshed in a web of laws which left him no better than a fly in the toils of a spider.

In Mississippi he could not “rent or lease any lands or tenements except in incorporated towns or cities,” thus keeping him a serf attached to the soil of his master.

Behind all these was violence, assassination, murder, with the Ku-Klux-Klan constituting the lawless police of this new system.

In the face of this unanswerable evidence, who will say that it was not proposed to revive Slavery?

To call such a condition Liberty is preposterous.

If not a slave of the old type, the freedman was a slave of a new type, invented by his unrepentant master as the substitute for what he had surrendered to the power of the Nation.

Beginning with a caste as offensive and irreligious as that of Hindostan, and adding to it the pretensions of an oligarchy in government, the representatives of the old system were preparing to trample upon an oppressed race.

He needs the rights of an American citizen; and you are to declare by your votes if he shall have them.

The opposition to the Reconstruction Acts manifests itself in an inconceivable brutality, kindred to that of Slavery, and fit prelude to the revival of this odious wrong.

Outrage in every form is directed against loyal persons, without distinction of color.

It is enough that a man is a patriot for Rebels to make war upon him.

The terrible atrocity of these acts is aggravated by the rallying cries of the murderers.

If the victim is black, then it is a “war of races”; if white, then he is nothing but a “carpet-bagger”; and so, whether black or white, he is a victim.

Persecution in all its untold cruelties, ending in martyrdom, rages over a wide-spread land.