Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/536

528 space I can present only such portions of the paper as express most vividly and in fewest words my position in regard to the question. I go on to say:

"Bad as is the condition of the negro to-day at the South, there was a time when it was flagrantly and incomparably worse. A few years ago he had nothing—he had not even himself. He belonged to somebody else, who could dispose of his person and his labor as he pleased. Now he has himself, his labor, and his right to dispose of one and the other as shall best suit his own happiness. He has more. He has a standing in the supreme law of the land—in the Constitution of the United States—not to be changed or affected by any conjunction of circumstances likely to occur in the immediate or remote future. The Fourteenth Amendment makes him a citizen, and the Fifteenth makes him a voter. With power behind him, at work for him, and which cannot be taken from him, the negro of the South may wisely bide his time. The situation at the moment is exceptional and transient. The permanent powers of the government are all on his side. What though for the moment the hand of violence strikes down the negro's rights in the South, those rights will revive, survive, and flourish again. They are not the only people who have been, in a moment of popular passion, maltreated and driven from the polls. The Irish and Dutch have frequently been so treated. Boston, Baltimore, and New York have been the scenes of lawless violence; but those scenes have now disappeared. . . . . Without abating one jot of our horror and indignation at the outrages committed in some parts of the Southern States against the negro, we cannot but regard the present agitation of an African exodus from the South as ill-timed and, in some respects, hurtful. We stand to-day at the beginning of a grand and beneficent reaction. There is a growing recognition of the duty and obligation of the American people to guard, protect, and defend the personal and political rights of all the people of all the States, and to uphold the principles upon which rebellion was suppressed, slavery abolished, and the country saved from dismemberment and ruin.

"We see and feel to-day, as we have not seen and felt before, that the time for conciliation and trusting to the honor of the late rebels and slaveholders has passed. The President of the United States himself, while still liberal, just, and generous toward the South, has yet sounded a halt in that direction, and has bravely, firmly, and ably asserted the constitutional authority to maintain the public peace in every State in the Union and upon every day in the year, and has maintained this ground against all the powers of House and Senate.

"We stand at the gateway of a marked and decided change in the