c,
where explosion after explosion sent their mangled bodies and severed
limbs flying through the air, and they fell on glacis, ditch, and
scarp and counterscarp, did you caution them against such bravery, and
remind them that 'this was the white man's Government?' And when the
struggle was over, and many had fought 'their last battle,' and you
gathered the dead for burial, did you exclaim, 'Poor fools! how
cheated! this is the white man's Government?' No, no, sir; you
beckoned them on by the guerdon of freedom, the blessings of an equal
and just Government, and a 'good time coming.'

"'White man's Government, 'do you say? Go to Fort Pillow; stand upon
its ramparts and in its trenches, and recall the horrid butchery of
the black man there because he had joined you against rebellion, and
then say, if you will, 'This is the white man's Government.' Go to
Wagner. Follow in the track of the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, as they
went to the terrible assault, with the guns flashing and roaring in
the darkness. Mark how unflinchingly they received the pelting iron
hail into their bosoms, and how they breasted the foe! See how nobly
they supported, and how heroically they fell with their devoted
leader; count the dead; pick up the severed limbs; number the wounds;
measure the blood spilled; and remember why and wherefore and in whose
cause the negro thus fought and suffered, and then say, if you can,
'This is the white man's Government.' Go to Port Hudson, go to
Richmond, go to Petersburg, go anywhere and every-where--to every
battle-field where the negro fought, where danger was greatest and
death surest--and tell me, if you can, that 'this is the white man's
Government.' And then go to Salisbury and Columbia and Andersonville,
and as you shudder at the ineffable miseries of those dens, and think
of those who ran the dead-line, and were not shot, but escaped to the
woods and were concealed and fed and piloted by the black men, and
never once betrayed, but often enabled to escape and return to their
friends, and then tell me if 'this is a white man's Government.'

"In ancient Rome, when one not a citizen deserved well of the
republic, he was rewarded by the rights of citizenship, but we deny
them, and here in America--not in the Confederate States of America,
where, attempting to found a government upon slavery and the
subjection of one race to another, it would have been fitting, if
anywhere, but in the United States of Americ