Whitelaw Reid: “The prevalent stories of their fidelity to their masters were preposterously false.”

Public sentiment was against the sale of lands to the Yankees; “Get white laborers,” they urged, “and in a year you’ll make enough to be able to hold on to your lands.

They appeared at times when public men often seemed to be groping in the dark on an unknown road, but it is now evident that the road which has been taken is substantially the road they marked out.

Here was the opportunity for a statesman to grasp.

As a foreign critic said in comment on one of the addresses: "The author is one man who knows what he thinks about the new policy required by the new situation in which his country is placed, and has the courage and candor to say it.