Whitelaw Reid: “Extravagant living left nearly every planter enormously in debt when the war came.”

Our national experience has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on the broad base of universal suffrage.

And it is both natural and right that colored Americans, entitled to the rights of citizens, should claim their exercise.

It has proved, also, that universal suffrage is the surest guarantee and most powerful stimulus of individual, social and political progress.

Let me repeat, that I think it best for all men—white men, black men, and brown men, if you make that distinction, that all men of proper age and unconvicted of crime, should have the right of suffrage.