y
expression of our citizenship in the halls of the National
Legislature. The fair vote which we cast for Rutherford B. Hayes
seemed to have incurred the enmity of that chief Executive, and he and
his advisers turned the colored voters of the South over to the
bloodthirsty minority of that section.

The Republican party has degenerated into an ignoble scramble for
place and power. It has forgotten the principles for which Sumner
contended, and for which Lincoln died. It betrayed the cause for which
Douglass, Garrison and others labored, in the blind policy it pursued
in reconstructing the rebellious States. It made slaves freemen and
freemen slaves in the same breath by conferring the franchise and
withholding the guarantees to insure its exercise; it betrayed its
trust in permitting thousands of innocent men to be slaughtered
without declaring the South in rebellion, and in pardoning murders,
whom tardy justice had consigned to a felon's dungeon. It is even now
powerless to insure an honest expression of the vote of the colored
citizen. For these things, I do not deem it binding upon colored men
further to support the Republican party when other more advantageous
affiliations can be formed. And what of the Bourbon Democratic party?
There has not been, there is not now, nor will there ever be, any good
thing in it for the colored man. Bourbon Democracy is a curse to our
land. Any party is a curse which arrays itself in opposition to human
freedom, to the universal brotherhood of man. No colored man can ever
claim truthfully to be a Bourbon Democrat. It is a fundamental
impossibility. But he can be an independent, a progressive Democrat.

The hour has arrived when thoughtful colored men should cease to put
their faith upon broken straws; when they should cease to be the
willing tools of a treacherous and corrupt party; when they should
cease to support men and measures which do not benefit them or the
race; when they should cease to be duped by one faction and shot by
the other. The time has fully arrived when they should have their
position in parties more fully defined, and when, by the ballot which
they hold, they should force more respect for the rights of life and
property.

To do this, they must adjust themselves to the altered condition which
surrounds them. They must make for themselves a place to stand. In the
politics of the country the colored vote must be made as uncertain a
quantity as the German and Iri