which no man has any right to appropriate, law or no law; and, in the
second, bestowing a boon which had been honestly earned in every
conflict waged by the Union from Yorktown to Appomatox Court House--a
boon, I am forced to exclaim, which has, in many respects, proved to
be more of a curse than a blessing, more a dead weight to carry than a
help to conserve his freedom; and to aid in the fixing of his proper
status as a co-equal citizen. I deny the _right_ of any man to enslave
his fellow; I deny the _right_ of any government, sovereign as the
Union or dependent as are the States in many respects, to pass any
regulation which robs _one man or class_ to enrich _another_.
Individuals may invest their capital in human flesh, and governments
may legalize the infamous compact; yet it carries upon its face the
rankest injustice to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the
common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country--men too
of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the
masterly irony of _Junius_, speak of the black man as the "ward of the
nation"--a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous
and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among
them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization which I pronounce to be
reared upon quicksand, a civilization more fruitful of poverty, misery
and crime than of competence, happiness and virtue. Those who regard
the black man in the light of a "ward of the nation," are too
narrow-minded, ignorant or ungenerous to deserve my contempt. The
people of this country have been made fabulously affluent by legalized
robbery of the black man; the coffers of the National Government have
overflowed into the channels of subsidy and peculation, enriching
sharpers and thieves, with the earnings of slave labor; while nineteen
out of every twenty landowners in the South obtained their unjust hold
upon the soil by robbing the black man. When the rebellion at last
closed, the white people of the South were poor in gold but rich