Belief 3 - Reading 24 of 31, The Reconstruction Convention

Use the links above to navigate this simulation.

Belief 3 - Reading 24 of 31

Navigate within this Belief: Reading 23 << >> Reading 25

Additional Beliefs: Belief 1 Belief 2 Belief 3 Belief 4 Belief 5 Belief 6 Belief 7 Belief 8

THE PRESIDENT AND THE COLORED TROOPS

Harper's Weekly, October 28, 1865, page 674 (Editorial)

It should be the merest matter of course that the President of the United States, speaking to any body of citizens, and especially to those who had risked their lives in the common defense, should express his faith in equal rights. But so long has the Government been under the control of the party which denies and insults the American principle that its plain affirmation by the President is a striking and significant fact, showing that the country is rapidly returning to the simple faith of the fathers, who held that every man has natural rights which every other man is sacredly bound to respect.

Such a speech is still more impressive when made by a President who has learned by the most bitter personal experience that the denial of that principle leads logically and inevitably to the unimaginable horrors of civil war; and who, during that war, acting as military Governor of his own State, and holding her back from complicity in the effort to destroy the National Government, proclaimed universal freedom, and declared that he would be the Moses of the enslaved race to lead them out of bondage into liberty.

And such a speech is still more striking when uttered by a President who, it was hoped by the party hostile to equal rights, would forget his own life, his own acts, his own solemn pledges, and join in the futile attempt to annihilate the rights which the people had guaranteed.

It is for such reasons that the remarks of the President to the returning colored veterans of the District of Columbia have produced so profound an impression, so sheering to every man who believes that the peace of the country can be permanently established only upon universal justice, so confounding to the political hucksters and wreckers who hope by pandering to the hatreds of baffled rebels to obtain a temporary party ascendancy.

The colored men who stood before the President on their way from the battle-fields in which they had sustained the Government were the representatives of the race who in all the rebel States were steadily faithful during the war; of those whose color was a sure sign of loyalty, and to whom every Union soldier escaping from the cruelties of Andersonville, of Belle Isle, of Salisbury, turned in perfect confidence of assistance which was never betrayed; of those whom the Democratic party would now thrust helplessly back into the power of the jailers of Andersonville and the Libby to treat as they choose. The President, to the dire confusion of that party, called them "my friends." He said to them, "This is your country as well as any body else’s country." He declared, "This country is founded upon the principles of equality." He said: "He that is most meritorious and virtuous and intellectual and well-informed must stand highest without regard to color." He announced that "Liberty means freedom to work and enjoy the products of your own labor." He called them "my countrymen," and thanked them for the compliment they had conferred upon him by their call.

Those who have counted upon the President’s treachery to the principles upon which he was elected have reckoned without their host. Those who hoped to see in his acts and hear in his words an illustration of what they foolishly call the "instinctive antipathy" and "unconquerable loathing" to any honest men whatever their color or condition have been fatally mistaken. President Johnson shows that he feels with President Lincoln, who, in his letter to the unconditional Union men of Illinois, anticipating the glad day of victory in whose gray dawn he was translated, said with prophetic truth: "And there will be some black men who can remember that with silent tongue, and clenched teeth, and steady eye, and well-poised bayonet, they have helped mankind on to this great consummation; while I fear that there will be some white men unable to forget that with malignant heart and deceitful speech they have striven to hinder it."

These last hoped that the successor of Lincoln, who has faithfully continued his policy, would fall helplessly into their clutches. But turning away from the malignant heart and deceitful speech to the men of the steady eye and well-poised bayonet, he says, "My friends and countrymen, this is your country as much as any body’s."

Harper's Weekly, October 28, 1865, page 674 (Editorial)

This site is brought to you by…