ay and hour Senator Revels took his seat in the United
States Senate, on the 24th of February, 1871, Jefferson F. Long, a
_Negro_, was sworn in as a member of the House of Representatives from
Georgia, the State of Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the
Confederate States!! And then, as if to add glory to glory, the
American Government despatched E. D. Bassett, a Colored man from
Pennsylvania, as Minister Resident and Consul-General to Hayti! And
with almost the same stroke of his pen, President Grant sent J. Milton
Turner, a Colored man from Missouri, as Resident Minister and
Consul-General to Liberia! Mr. Bassett came from Philadelphia where
the Declaration of Independence was written and proclaimed, and where
the noble Dr. Franklin had stood against the slavery compromises of
the Constitution! Philadelphia, then, the birthplace of American
Independence, had the honor of furnishing the first Negro who was to
illustrate the lofty sentiment of the equality of _all_ men before the
law. And the republic that Mr. Bassett went to had won diplomatic
relations with all the civilized powers of the earth through the
matchless valor and splendid statesmanship of Toussaint L'Ouverture.
This was a black republic that had a history and a name among the
peoples of the world.

Mr. Turner went from Missouri, the first State to violate the
ordinance of 1787, and to establish slavery "northwest of the Ohio"
River. He went to a republic on the West Coast of Africa that had been
built by the industry, intelligence, and piety of Negroes who had
flown from the accursed influences of American slavery. The
slave-ships had disappeared from the coast, and commercial fleets,
from all lands came to trade with the citizens of a free republic
whose ministers were welcomed in every court of Europe, and whose
official acts were clothed with the authority and majesty of "_the
Republic of Liberia_!"

In this same period Frederick Douglass was made a Presidential Elector
for the State of New York; and thus helped cast the vote of that great
commonwealth for U. S. Grant as President, in 1872. In the chief city
of this State the first Federal Congress met, and on the first day of
its first session spent the entire time in discussing the slavery
question. Through the streets of this same city Mr. Douglass had to
skulk and hide from slave-catchers on his way from the hell of
slavery, to the land of freedom. In this city, a few years later, he
w