man than Seward, Secretary of State, had said: "When the
insurgents shall have abandoned their armies and laid down their arms,
the war will instantly cease; and all the war measures then existing,
including those which affect slavery, will cease also." The convention
thanked the President and the Thirty-Seventh Congress for revoking a
prohibitory law in regard to the carrying of mails by Negroes, for
abolishing slavery in the District of Columbia, for recognizing Hayti
and Liberia, and for the military order retaliating for the unmilitary
treatment accorded Negro soldiers by the Confederate officers; and
especially it thanked Senator Sumner "for his noble efforts to cleanse
the statute-books of the nation from every stain of inequality against
colored men," and General Butler for the stand he had taken early in the
war. At the same time it resolved to send a petition to Congress to
ask that the rights of the country's Negro patriots in the field be
respected, and that the Government cease to set an example to those in
arms against it by making invidious distinctions, based upon color, as
to pay, labor, and promotion. It begged especially to be saved from
supposed friends: "When the _Anti-Slavery Standard_, representing the
American Anti-Slavery Society, denies that the society asks for the
enfranchisement of colored men, and the _Liberator_ apologizes for
excluding the colored men of Louisiana from the ballot-box, they injure
us more vitally than all the ribald jests of the whole pro-slavery
press." Finally the convention insisted that any such things as the
right to own real estate, to testify in courts of law, and to sue and
be sued, were mere privileges so long as general political liberty
was withheld, and asked frankly not only for the formal and complete
abolition of slavery in the United States, but also for the elective
franchise in all the states then in the Union and in all that might come
into the Union thereafter. On the whole this representative gathering
showed a very clear conception of the problems facing the Negro and the
country in 1864. Its reference to well-known anti-slavery publications
shows not only the increasing race consciousness that came through this
as through all other wars in which the country has engaged, but also the
great drift toward conservatism that had taken place in the North within
thirty years.

[Footnote 1: See Proceedings of the National Convention of Colored Men,
held in th