Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/356

332 the United States hardly admits of doubt. The evident intent of the Constitution is that the colored people shall have the right of suffrage on an equal footing with the white people. The intent of the provisions of the State constitutions in question, as avowed by many Southern men, is that the colored people shall not vote. However plausibly it may be demonstrated by ingenious argument that the provisions in the State constitutions are not in conflict with the National Constitution, or that, if they are, their purpose could be effectively thwarted by judicial decisions—yet it remains true that by many, if not by all, of their authors they were expressly designed to defeat the universally known and recognized intent of a provision of the National Constitution.

Can it be said by way of moral justification that the colored people have deserved to be deprived of their rights as a punishment for something they have done? It is an undisputed matter of history that they came to this country not of their own volition, that they were not intruders, but that they were brought here by force to serve the selfishness of white men; that they did such service as slaves patiently and submissively for two and a half centuries; that even during a war which was waged, incidentally if not directly, for their deliverance, a large majority of them faithfully continued to serve their masters while these were fighting to keep them in slavery; that they were emancipated, not by any insurrectionary act of theirs, but by the act of the Government; that when, after their emancipation, they confronted their old masters as free men, they did not, so far as known, commit a single act of vengeance for cruelties they may have suffered while in slavery; that the right of suffrage was given to them, not in obedience to any irresistible urgency on their part, but by the National power wielded by white men, to enable the emancipated colored people to protect their