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intelligent and upright as the bar of Massachusetts will solemnly indorse my assertion, that in the Southern
courts, from highest to lowest, pleading for life, liberty or property, the negro has distinct advantage because
he is a negro, apt to be overreached, oppressed--and that this advantage reaches from the juror in making his
verdict to the judge in measuring his sentence.
Now, Mr. President, can it be seriously maintained that we are terrorizing the people from whose willing
hands comes every year $1,000,000,000 of farm crops? Or have robbed a people who, twenty-five years from
unrewarded slavery, have amassed in one State $20,000,000 of property? Or that we intend to oppress the
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people we are arming every day? Or deceive them, when we are educating them to the utmost limit of our
ability? Or outlaw them, when we work side by side with them? Or re-enslave them under legal forms, when
for their benefit we have even imprudently narrowed the limit of felonies and mitigated the severity of law?
My fellow-countrymen, as you yourselves may sometimes have to appeal at the bar of human judgment for
justice and for right, give to my people to-night the fair and unanswerable conclusion of these incontestable
facts.
But it is claimed that under this fair seeming there is disorder and violence. This I admit. And there will be
until there is one ideal community on earth after which we may pattern. But how widely is it misjudged! It is
hard to measure with exactness whatever touches the negro. His helplessness, his isolation, his century of
servitude,--these dispose us to emphasize and magnify his wrongs. This disposition, inflamed by prejudice
and partisanry, has led to injustice and delusion. Lawless men may ravage a county in Iowa and it is accepted
as an incident--in the South, a drunken row is declared to be the fixed habit of the community. Regulators
may whip vagabonds in Indiana by platoons and it scarcely arrests attention--a chance collision in the South
among relatively the same classes is gravely accepted as evidence that one race is destroying the other. We
might as well claim that the Union was ungrateful to the colored soldier who followed its flag because a
Grand Army post in Connecticut closed its doors to a negro veteran as for you to give racial significance to
every incident in the South, or to accept exceptional grounds as the rule of our society. I am not one of those
who becloud American honor with the parade of the outrages of either section, and belie American character
by declaring them to be significant and representative. I prefer to maintain that they are neither, and stand for
nothing but the passion and sin of our poor fallen humanity. If society, like a machine, were no stronger than
its weakest part, I should despair of both sections. But, knowing that society, sentient and responsible in every
fiber, can mend and repair until the whole has the strength of the best, I despair of neither. These gentlemen
who come with me here, knit into Georgia's busy life as they are, never saw, I dare assert, an outrage
committed on a negro! And if they did, no one of you would be swifter to prevent or punish. It is through
them, and the men and women who think with them--making nine-tenths of every Southern
community--that these two races have been carried thus far with less of violence than would have been
possible anywhere else on earth. And in their fairness and courage and steadfastness--more than in all the
laws that can be passed, or all the bayonets that can be mustered--is the hope of our future.
When will the blacks cast a free ballot? When ignorance anywhere is not dominated by the will of the
intelligent; when the laborer anywhere casts a vote unhindered by his boss; when the vote of the poor
anywhere is not influenced by the power of the rich; when the strong and the steadfast do not everywhere
control the suffrage of the weak and shiftless--then, and not till then, will the ballot of the negro be free. The
white people of the South are banded, Mr. President, not in prejudice against the blacks--not in sectional
estrangement--not in the hope of political dominion--but in a deep and abiding necessity. Here is this vast
ignorant and purchasable vote--clannish, credulous, impulsive, and passionate--tempting every art of the
demagogue, but insensible to the appeal of the stateman. Wrongly started, in that it was led into alienation
from its neighbor and taught to rely on the protection of an outside force, it cannot be merged and lost in the
two great parties through logical currents, for it lacks political conviction and even that information on which
conviction must be based. It must remain a faction--strong enough in every community to control on the
slightest division of the whites. Under that division it becomes the prey of the cunning and unscrupulous of
both parties. Its credulity is imposed upon, its patience inflamed, its cupidity tempted, its impulses
misdirected--and even its superstition made to play its part in a campaign in which every interest of society is
jeopardized and every approach to the ballot-box debauched. It is against such campaigns as this--the folly
and the bitterness and the danger of which every Southern community has drunk deeply--that the white
people of the South are banded together. Just as you in Massachusetts would be banded if 300,000 men, not
one in a hundred able to read his ballot--banded in race instinct, holding against you the memory of a century
of slavery, taught by your late conquerors to distrust and oppose you, had already travestied legislation from
your State House, and in every species of folly or villainy had wasted your substance and exhausted your
credit.
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But admitting the right of the whites to unite against this tremendous menace, we are challenged with the
smallness of our vote. This has long been flippantly charged to be evidence and has now been solemnly and
officially declared to be proof of political turpitude and baseness on our part. Let us see. Virginia--a state
now under fierce assault for this alleged crime--cast in 1888 seventy-five per cent of her vote;
Massachusetts, the State in which I speak, sixty per cent of her vote. Was it suppression in Virginia and
natural causes in Massachusetts? Last month Virginia cast sixty-nine per cent of her vote; and Massachusetts,
fighting in every district, cast only forty-nine per cent of hers. If Virginia is condemned because thirty-one
per cent of her vote was silent, how shall this State escape, in which fifty-one per cent was dumb? Let us
enlarge this comparison. The sixteen Southern States in '88 cast sixty-seven per cent of their total vote--the
six New England States but sixty-three per cent of theirs. By what fair rule shall the stigma be put upon one
section while the other escapes? A congressional election in New York last week, with the polling place in
touch of every voter, brought out only 6,000 votes of 28,000--and the lack of opposition is assigned as the
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