that, if
war should come, it would be in the free States and not in the slave
States. The South, in 1865, had apparently forgotten these baseless
assurances; they had forgotten that, in the hour of conflict, the
Democrats who did not become loyal, at once became silent, and that
the few--scattering exceptions to a general rule--who were
demonstrative and loud in their sympathy for the rebels were compelled
to flee or accept imprisonment in Fort Lafayette. They seemed again
ready and eager to believe all the unsupported assertions which the
Northern Democrats, in a spirit of effrontery and not without
gasconade, ventured to put forth. It might be difficult to determine
which displayed the greater folly--those who made false
representations, or those who, warned by previous deception, appeared
so ready to be influenced anew by deception equally gross.

The truth was that the Republicans of the North, constituting, as was
shown by the elections of 1865, a majority in every State, were deeply
concerned as to the fate and fortune of the colored population of the
South. Only a minority of Republicans were ready to demand suffrage
for those who had been recently emancipated, and who, from the
ignorance peculiar to servitude, were presumably unfit to be intrusted
with the elective franchise. The minority, however, was composed of
very earnest men of the same type as those who originally created and
combined the anti-slavery sentiment of the country, and who now
espoused the right of the negro to equality before the law. Equality,
they believed, could neither be conferred nor maintained unless the
negro were invested with the badge of American manhood--the right to
vote--a right which they were determined to guarantee as firmly to the
colored man as it was already guaranteed to the white man.

The great mass of the Republicans stopped short of the demand for the
conferment of suffrage on the negro. That privilege was indeed, still
denied him in a majority of the loyal States, and it seemed illogical
and unwarrantable to expect a more advanced philanthropy, a higher
sense of justice, from the South than had been yet attained by the
North. But without raising the question of suffrage, there were rights
with which the negro must be endowed before he could essentially
better his material condition or advance in knowledge. It was, first
of all, required that he should have the full protection of the law of
marriage, of whi