o provide for the publication of the laws
of the United States, and for other purposes," do hereby certify,
that the amendment aforesaid has become valid, to all intents and
purposes, as part of the Constitution of the United States.

"In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the
seal of the Department of State to be affixed.

"Done at the city of Washington, this 30th day of March, in the
year of our Lord, 1870, and of the independence of the United
States, the ninety-fourth.

[SEAL.]

"HAMILTON FISH."

The Emancipation Proclamation itself did not call forth such genuine
and wide-spread rejoicing as the message of President Grant. The event
was celebrated by the Colored people in all the larger cities North
and South. Processions, orations, music and dancing proclaimed the
unbounded joy of the new citizen. In Philadelphia Frederick Douglass,
Bishop Jabez P. Campbell, I. C. Wears, and others delivered eloquent
addresses to enthusiastic audiences. Mr. Douglass deeply wounded the
religious feelings of his race by declaring; "I shall not dwell in
any hackneyed cant by thanking God for this deliverance which has
been wrought out through our common humanity." A hundred pulpits, a
hundred trenchant pens sprang at the declaration with fiery
indignation; and it was some years before the bold orator was able to
make himself tolerable to his people. There was little of the spirit
of tolerance among the Colored people at the time, and upon such an
occasion the remark was regarded as imprudent, to say the least.

A new era was opened up before the Colored people. They were now for
the first time in possession of their full political rights. On the
25th of February, 1870, Hiram R. Revels took his seat as United States
Senator from Mississippi. On the 9th of January, 1861, Mississippi
passed her ordinance of secession, and Jefferson Davis resigned his
seat as United States Senator. Within a brief decade a civil war had
raged for four and a half years; and after the seceding Mississippi
had passed through the refining fires of battle and had been purged of
slavery, she sent to succeed the arch traitor a _Negro_,[123] a
representative of the race that Mr. Davis intended to be the
corner-stone of his new government!![124] It was God's work, and
marvellous in the eyes of the world. But this was not all. Just one
year from the d