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JUNE, 1863 DOUGLASS' MONTHLY. 835 [[line]] [[3 columns]] [[column 1]] intended from the beginning for white men, and for white men exclusively; that the men who formed the Union and framed the Constitution designed the permanent exclusion of the colored people from the benefits of those institutions. Davis, Taney and Yancy, traitors at the south, have propagated this statement, while their copperhead echoes at the north have repeated the same. There never was a bolder or more wicked perversion of the truth of history. So far from this purpose was the mind and heart of your fathers, that they desired and expected the abolition of slavery. They framed the Constitution plainly with a view to the speedy downfall of slavery. They carefully excluded from the Constitution any and every word which could lead to the belief that they meant it for persons of only one complexion. The Constitution, in its language and in its spirit, welcomes the black man to all the rights which it was intended to guarantee to any class of the American people. Its preamble tells us for whom and for what it was made. But I am told that the ruling class in America being white, it is impossible for men of color ever to become a part of the "body politic." With some men this seems a final statement, a final argument, which it is utterly impossible to answer. It conveys the idea that the body politic is a rather fastidious body, from which everything offensive is necessarily excluded. I, myself, once had some high notions about this body politic and its high requirements, and of the kind of men fit to enter it and share its privileges. But a days experience at the polls convinced me that the "body politic" is not more immaculate than many other bodies. That in fact it is a very mixed affair. I saw ignorance enter, unable to read the vote it cast. I saw the convicted swindler enter and deposit his vote. I saw the gambler, the horse jockey, the pugilist, the miserable drunkard just lifted from the gutter, covered with filth, enter and deposit his vote. I saw Pat, fresh from the Emerald Isle, requiring two sober men to keep him on his legs, enter and deposit his vote for the Democratic candidate amid the loud hurrahs of his fellow citizens. The sight of these things went far to moderate my ideas about the exalted character of what is called the body politic, and convinced me that it could not suffer in its composition even should it admit a few sober, industrious and intelligent colored voters. It is a fact, moreover, that colored men did at the beginning of our national history, form a part of the body politic, not only in what are now the free states, but also in the slave states. Mr. Wm. Goodell, to whom the cause of liberty in America is as much indebted as any other American citizen, has demonstrated that colored men formerly voted in eleven out of thirteen of the original states. The war upon the colored voters, and the war upon the Union, originated with the same parties, at the same time, and for the same guilty purpose of rendering slavery perpetual, universal and all controlling in the affairs of the nation. Let this object be defeated and abandoned, let the country be brought back to the benign objects set forth in the preamble of the Constitution, and the colored man will easily find his way into the body politic, and be welcome [[/column 1]] [[column 2]] in the jury box as well as at the ballot box. I know that prejudice largely prevails, and will prevail to some extent long after slavery shall be abolished in this country, but the power of prejudice will be broken when slavery is once abolished. There is not a black law on the statute book of a single free state that has not been placed there in deference to slavery existing in the slave states. But it is said that the negro belongs to an inferior race. Inferior race! This is the apology, the philosophical and ethnological apology for all the hell-black crimes ever committed by the white race against the blacks and the warrant for the repetition of those crimes through all time. Inferior race! It is an old argument. All nations have been compelled to meet it in some form or other since mankind have been divided into strong and weak, oppressors and oppressed. Whenever and wherever men have been oppressed and enslaved, their oppressors and enslavers have in every instance found a warrant for such oppression and enslavement in the alleged character of their victims. The very vices and crimes which slavery generates are usually charged as the peculiar characteristics of the race enslaved. When the Normans conquered the Saxons, the Saxons were a coarse, unrefined, inferior race. When the United States wants to possess herself of Mexican territory, the Mexicans are an inferior race. When Russia wants a share of the Ottoman Empire, the Turks are an inferior race, the sick man of Europe. So, too, when England wishes to impose some new burden on Ireland [[???]] as an inferior race. But this is a monstrous argument. Now, suppose it were true that the negro is inferior instead of being an apology for oppression and proscription, it is an appeal to all that is noble and magnanimous in the human soul against both. When used in the service of oppression, it is as if one should say, "that man is weak; I am strong, therefore I will knock him down, and as far as I can I will keep him down. Yonder is an ignorant man. I am instructed, therefore I will do what I can to prevent his being instructed and to withhold from him the means of education. There is another who is low in his associations, rude in his manners, coarse and brutal in his appetites, therefore I will see to it that his degradation shall be permanent, and that society shall hold out to him no motives or incitements to a more elevated character. I will not stop here to denounce this monstrous excuse for oppression. That men can resort to it shows that when the human mind is once completely under the dominion of pride and selfishness, the reasoning faculties are inverted if not subverted. I should like to know what constitutes inferiority and the standard of superiority. Must a man be as wise as Socrates, as learned as Humboldt, as profound as Bacon, or as eloquent as Charles Sumner, before he can be reckoned among superior men? Alas! if this were so, few even of the most cultivated of the white race could stand the test. Webster was white and had a large head, but all white men have not large heads. The negro is black and he has a small head, but all negroes have not small heads. What rule shall we apply to all these heads? Why this: Give all an equal chance to grow. [[/column 2]] [[column 3]] But I am told that the Irish element in this country is exceedingly strong, and that that element will never allow colored men to stand upon an equal political footing with white men. I am pointed to the terrible outrages committed from time to time by Irishmen upon negroes. The mobs at Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York, are cited as proving the unconquerable aversion of the Irish towards the colored race. Well, my friends, I admit that the Irish people are among our bitterest persecutors. In one sense it is strange, passing strange that they should be such, but in another sense it is quite easily accounted for. It is said that a negro always makes the most cruel negro driver, that a northern slaveholder the most rigorous master, and the poor man suddenly made rich becomes the most haughty insufferable of all purse-proud fools. Daniel O'Connell once said that the history of Ireland might be traced like a wounded man through a crowd——by the blood. The Irishman has been persecuted for his religion about as rigorously as the black man has been for his color. The Irishman has outlived his persecution, and I believe that the negro will survive his. But there is something quite revolting in the idea of a people lately oppressed suddenly becoming oppressors, that the persecuted can so suddenly become the persecutors. Let us see a small sample of the laws by which our Celtic brothers have in other days been oppressed. Religion, not color, was the apology for this oppression, and the one apology is about as good as the other. [[???]] friend of the Irish——Sydney Smith: In 1695, the Catholics were deprived of all means of educating their children, at home or abroad, and of all the privileges of being guardians to their own or to other persons' children. Then all the Catholics were disarmed, and then all the priests banished. After this (probably by way of a joke) an act was passed to confirm the treaty of Limerick, the great and glorious King William, totally forgetting the contract he had entered into of recommending the religious liberties of the Catholics to the attention of Parliament. On the 4th of March, 1704, it was enacted that any son of a Catholic who would turn Protestant should succeed to the family estate, which from that moment could no longer be sold, as charged with debt and legacy. On the same day, Popish father were debarred, by a penalty of five hundred pounds, from being guardians to their own children. If the child, however young, declared himself a Protestant, he was to be delivered immediately to the custody of some Protestant relation. No Protestant to marry a Papist. No Papist to purchase land or take a lease of land for more than thirty-one years. If the profits of the land so leased by the Catholic amounted to above a certain rate, settled by the act, farm to belong to the first Protestant who made the discovery. No Papist to be in a line of entail, but the estate to pass on to the next Protestant heir, as if the Papist were dead. If a Papist dies intestate, and no Protestant heir can be found, property to be equally divided among all the sons; or, if he has none, among all the daughters. By the 16th clause of this bill, no Papist to hold any office, civil or military. Not to dwell in [[/column 3]]
