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Unit 1: Reconstruction

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Reconstruction Era Activists and Primary Sources

Reconstruction Mixer Roles Chart

NAME	DESCRIPTION	CAUSE(S) AND AFFILIATIONS	STUDENTS ASSIGNED
Susan B. Anthony	With Stanton, the leading figure of 19thc women's rights; white; middle-class	Woman suffrage; abolition; labor. NWSA
Walter Moses Burton	Former slave; Texas politician	African-American rights. Union League
Lydia Maria Child	Author; white, abolitionist from Massachusetts.	African-American rights; Native-American rights.
Abram Colby	Former slave; Georgia politician	Labor; African-American rights. GERA
Frederick Douglass	Well-known abolitionist and orator; former slave.	African-American rights; woman suffrage; labor. CNLU
Henry Highland Garnet	Born a slave, escaped and became an abolitionist.	Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee
Frances Harper	Born free in Maryland; poet.	Woman suffrage; African-American rights. AWSA
Newton Knight	Poor white farmer from Mississippi; Confederate deserter.	African-American rights; integrated education. Union League
Augusta Lewis	Raised middle-class, but became a typesetter in NYC.	WWA
John Roy Lynch	Former slave; Mississippi politician.	African-American rights.
Benjamin Montgomery	Former slave; landowner in Mississippi.	African-American rights.
Kate Mullany	Irish immigrant; helped organize the first female labor union in the U.S.	Labor; woman suffrage. NLU, WWA
Isaac Myers	Black caulker in Baltimore shipyards.	African-American rights; labor. CNLU
Wendell Phillips	Long-time abolitionist; president of the AASS	Abolition; black male suffrage; labor. AASS
P.B.S. Pinchback	Born free black; Louisiana Senator.	African-American rights; slavery in Cuba.
Charlotte "Lottie" Rollin	Born free in South Carolina; influential in SC Republican politics.	Woman suffrage; black education AWSA
Elizabeth Cady Stanton	With Anthony, the leading figure of 19thc women's rights.	Woman suffrage; abolition; labor. WWA, NLU
Ira Steward	White machinist, wants to unite white and black labor.	Labor. Boston Eight-Hour League.
Lucy Stone	White, college-educated; abolitionist and woman's rights activist.	Woman suffrage; African-American rights. AERA, AWSA
William Sylvis	Labor organizer, wants to unite white and black labor.	President NLU
W. J. Whipper	Born free in Philadelphia; South Carolina politician; married Lottie Rollin; supports free education.	Woman suffrage; African-American rights; education.

AASS: American Anti-Slavery Society

AERA: American Equal Rights Association

AWSA: American Woman Suffrage Association

CNLU: Colored National Labor Union

GERA: Georgia Equal Rights Association

NLU: National Labor Union

WWA: Working Women's Association

Susan B. Anthony

I grew up in Massachusetts but moved to New York in the late 1830's. After being denied a right to speak at a meeting because I was a woman, I was inspired to fight for women's rights. Working closely with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, I started petitions for women's rights. I also promoted the anti-slavery cause by gathering signatures for the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery.

After the war, Stanton and I established the American Equal Rights Association calling for equal rights for all. But many abolitionists and Republicans felt that now was the "Negro's Hour" and did not support our call for women's right to vote. But I would rather cut off my right arm before I demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman. After all, if anyone should get the vote first, I thought we should "give it to the most intelligent" as I have said publicly.

So I went searching for other allies to promote our cause. I helped to form the Working Women's Association and was seated as a delegate at the congress of the National Labor Union (NLU), the first national labor federation in the United States. I was pleased that the NLU president urged labor organizations to embrace female workers and created a special committee on female labor. The committee called for forming labor organizations among working women and fighting to win federal and state laws for equal pay for equal work. Although women's suffrage was voted down, I was encouraged by the positive steps the NLU made. I hoped the alliance between labor and women could eventually lead to a new third party.

But that hope crumbled when during a printers' strike I appealed to the employers to hire women and establish a women's training school. Although I was simply trying to open opportunities for women workers, many in the labor movement accused me of encouraging the employers to use women as strikebreakers. At the next National Labor Union convention, I was expelled.

I continued to work for women's suffrage and was arrested and thrown in jail in 1872 when I voted in the presidential election.

Primary Source:

Introduction: In the antebellum period, certain activists in the abolitionist movement embraced women’s rights as well. Others saw this as a distraction. This division of focus continued after the Civil War. In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and others created the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to advocate for suffrage for both women and blacks. Some activists disagreed with the approach, arguing the focus – for the moment – needed to be on black male suffrage. As a founding member of the AERA, Anthony likely shared the views expressed here by Stanton, excerpts from a speech Stanton gave at the first annual meeting of the new organization.

Excerpt from: Address to The First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, May 9, 1867.

In considering the question of suffrage, there are two starting points: one, that this right is a gift of society, in which certain men, having inherited this privilege from some abstract body and abstract place, have now the right to secure it for themselves and their privileged order to the end of time. This principle leads logically to governing races, classes, families; and, in direct antagonism to our idea of self-government, takes us back to monarchies despotisms, to an experiment that has been tried over and over again, 6,000 years, and uniformly failed. …

Ignoring this point of view as untenable and anti-republican, and taking the opposite, that suffrage is a natural right—as necessary to man under government, for the protection of person and property, as are air and motion to life—we hold talisman by which to show the right of all classes to the ballot, to remove every obstacle, to answer every objection, to point out the tyranny of every qualiﬁcation to the free exercise of this sacred right.

To discuss the question of suffrage for women and negroes, as women and negroes, and not as citizens of a republic, implies that there are some reasons for demanding this right for these classes that do not apply to "white males."

The obstinate persistence with which fallacious and absurd objections are pressed against their enfranchisement—as if they were anomalous beings, outside all human laws and necessities—is most humiliating and insulting to every black man and woman who has one particle of healthy, high-toned self-respect. There are no special claims to propose for women and negroes, no new arguments to make in their behalf. The same already made to extend suffrage to all the white men in this country, the same John Bright makes for the working men of England, the same made for the enfranchisement of 22,000,000 Russian serfs, are all we have to make for black me and women. … In thus relaying the foundations of government, we settle all these side issues of race, color and sex, end all class legislation, and remove forever the fruitful cause of all the jealousies, dissensions and revolution of the past. This is the platform of the American Equal Rights Association. …

"Negro suffrage" may answer as a party cry for an effete political organization through another Presidential campaign; but the people of this country have a broader work on hand to-day than to save the Republican party, or, with some abolitionists, to settle the rights of races. The battles of the ages have been fought for races, classes, parties, over and over again, and force always carried the day, and will until we settle the higher, the holier question of individual rights. This is our American idea, and on a wise settlement of this question rests the problem whether our nation shall live or perish. … What thinking man can talk of coming down into the arena of politics? If we need purity, honor, self-sacriﬁce and devotion anywhere, we need them in those who have in their keeping the life and prosperity of a nation. In the enfranchisement of woman, in lifting her up into this broader sphere, we see for her new honor and dignity, more liberal, exalted and enlightened views of life, its objects, ends and aims, and an entire revolution in the new world of interest and action where she is soon to play her part. And in saying this, I do not claim that woman is better than man, but that the sexes have a civilizing power on each other. The distinguished historian, Henry Thomas Buckle, says:

"The turn of thought of woman, their habits of mind, their conversation, invariably extending over the whole surface of society, and frequently penetrating its intimate structure, have, more than all other things put together, tended to rise us into an ideal world, and lift us from the dust into which we are too prone to grovel.

And this will be her inﬂuence in exalting and purifying the world of politics. When woman understands the momentous interests that depend on the ballot, she will make it her ﬁrst duty to educate every American boy and girl into the idea that to vote is the most sacred act of citizenship—a religious duty not to be discharged thoughtlessly, selﬁshly or corruptly; but conscientiously, remembering that, in a republican government, to every citizen is entrusted the interests of the nation. "Would you fully estimate the responsibility of the ballot, think of it as the great regulation power of a continent, of all our interests, political, commercial, religious, educational, social and sanitary!"

To many minds, this claim for the ballot suggests nothing more than a rough polling-booth where coarse, drunken men, elbowing each other, wade knee-deep in mud to drop a little piece of paper two inches long into a box—simply this and nothing more. …

That little piece of paper dropped into a box is the symbol of equality, of citizenship, of wealth, virtue, education, self-protection, dignity, independence and power—the mightiest engine yet placed in the hand of man for the uprooting of ignorance, tyranny, superstition, the overturning of thrones, altars, kings, popes, despotisms, monarchies and empires. … Talk not of the "muddy pool of politics," as if such things must need be.

Behold, with the coming of woman into this higher sphere of inﬂuence, the dawn of the new day, when politics, so called, are to be lifted into the world of morals and religion; when the polling-booth shall be a beautiful temple, surrounded by fountains and ﬂowers and triumphal arches, through which young men and maidens shall go up in joyful procession to ballot for justice and freedom; and when our elections shall be like the holy feasts of the Jews at Jerusalem. Through the trials of this second revolution shall not our nation rise up, with new virtue and strength, to fulﬁll her mission in leading all the peoples of the earth to the only solid foundation of government, "equal rights to all?" What an inheritance is ours! … … Never, until woman is an independent, self-sustaining force in society, can she take her true, exalted position as the mother, the educator of the race. Never, as a dependent on his wish, his will, his bounty to be sheltered, fed and clothed, will man recognize in woman an equal moral power in the universe of mind. The same principle that governed plantation life, governs the home. The master could quote law and gospel for his authority over the slave, so can the husband still. … Hence we have, in the home as on the plantation, ruler and subject on one side, purse, power and rights on the other— favors or wrongs, according to the character of the "divinely-appointed head," But fair, equal-handed justice can never be found where the rights of one class are at the mercy of another. … Speech from http://gos.sbc.edu/s/stantoncady2.html.

Walter Moses Burton

I was born into slavery in North Carolina, but was later brought to Texas where I spent most of my life. The plantation owner I worked for, Thomas Burke Burton, taught me how to read and write.

When I was freed after the Civil War, Mr. Burton sold me several large plots of land, making me one of the wealthiest Black men in Fort Bend County. I became involved in politics, joined the Republican Party, and was soon elected president of the Fort Bend County Union League. The Union Leagues were secret interracial political organizations that educated voters, trained and nominated candidates for office, and provided armed protection at the polls and from white terrorists.

Fort Bend County was 80 percent Black and we were organized. In 1869, the first election held under the new Reconstruction constitution, I was elected both tax collector and the first ever African American sheriff in the United States. These were especially important local positions because Reconstruction governments raised taxes to provide money for public schools and to get wealthy white landowners to sell unused land to newly freed Blacks. It was my job to make sure taxes were paid and justice was given equally to Blacks and whites.

In 1873 I was elected to the Texas Senate, where I served for seven years. As a state senator, I advocated for public education and helped establish the first state-supported Black college in Texas. I also opposed the convict labor system that provided corporations and plantations with free Black labor. Because the 13th Amendment abolished slavery "except as a punishment for crime," Blacks who were convicted even on bogus chargers could be re-enslaved.

No other county in Texas elected more Blacks to political office than Fort Bend. Long after Reconstruction had ended Black people were still in positions of power in our county. But white people outnumbered Black people in Texas two to one. Reconstruction was short-lived here and the Democrats took back control of the state government through fraud, violence, and intimidation in 1872.

Primary Sources:

The letter linked below was written by a member of a Tennessee Union League Chapter. As a "Union Leaguer," Burton likely shared the author's sentiments.

“Observations of a Union Leaguer” TN man’s letter to Prez Johnson April 1865 (Excerpt follows).

Johnson MSS. Letter of A. Watson of Tennessee to President Johnson (April 17, 1865).

The city of Washington is spotted with rebels....Not only are rebels in the streets, and in every kind of business, but they are in every department, and even in and around the White House. Shall this thing continue, or will you, like the fabled Hercules, clean the Augean stables. This kind of filth has been accumulating for four long years, until it stinks in the nostrils of every loyal man. Shall it be cleaned out thoroughly, and the atmosphere of the National Capitol be made as loyal and sweet as the air from a new blown rose...

If there was a grievous fault in Mr. Lincoln's administration it was in the fostering of his enemies, and the discarding of his friends. In fattening rebels, and starving those who had elevated him to power....Rebels were fostered and fattened....until rebellion was made respectable by its numbers and its wealth, the air of this city was filled with it....Mr. Lincoln to placate these aristocrats....has given them place and power, which they have constantly used against him, and his friends. He has fallen the victim of mistaken clemency, and to the policy of buying his enemies....and to the discarding of his friends, and their advice...."He that is not for me is against me" -- and "No man can serve two masters" are aphorisms not only of the scriptures, but equally admitted by all mankind.

In every department of the government in this city and elsewhere more than half are opposed to the principles enunciated by the Baltimore convention which elevated Mr. Lincoln and yourself to power. They not only receive the money of the government, but are in high official position giving tone to public opinion here and elsewhere, and are using their positions to defeat the policy of the Administration, and shield rebels from just and merited punishment.....

There is but only true policy of government in this country, which is "to the victors belong the control." Any other policy is a fraud upon the people and the party which gave to the nominees their votes. Mr. Lincoln's Administration attempted the impossible policy of running the Train of Freedom, with Slavery Conductors, and giving them plenty of money, if they would not smash the cars. They did not destroy the Company because it was too strong and rich, but they destroyed its President....

No such system can ever succeed. We have escaped by the merest accident, and now....shall we allow these men to again put our lives, and the lives of the nation in peril....I trust that the Machinery of State will be put in the hands and under the control of its friends, who are alone competent to run it smoothly and safely. Not a man should be employed, unless he is one of our friends and the known enemy of the Rebellion. Only in this way can you, and we, and the nation be entirely safe. "He that is not for us is against us." -- All such should be driven from power at once....[The Union] League is strong in this city and if permitted will assist you in clearing rebels out of the departments, and out of every part of the city....

Some of the most prominent men of the League ask of you an interview, at some convenient period, that we may orally communicate in full the state of things in this city. We are long residents here and know nearly all of the prominent men in power, and especially the rank and file of the office holders, and are better calculated to point out the disloyal, than any other body of men here. We know thousands of rebels in office, and will give you their names, and the evidence, if you will see that they are removed. Believing that you will thus act has prompted me to write you this hasty letter, as from your speeches we are of opinion that rebels may now be forced out of office and into the obscurity which they merited four years ago. Better late than never, and it is never too late to do good....if you will grant us an interview we can assist you very materially in setting the ship of state on the right course, so as to avoid the rocks which stranded the last one.

Lydia Maria Child

I was born in Massachusetts in 1802. I became involved in the anti-slavery movement in 1831 and wrote An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans, the first major study of slavery published in the United States. I also helped to edit the memoirs of fugitive Harriet Jacobs, telling the story of her sexual exploitation under slavery and her successful struggle to free herself and her children.

During and after the Civil War, I continued to use my writing to calm white fears of emancipation and push for full citizenship and suffrage for African Americans. I was an early supporter of women's rights, but also thought that after the war, voting rights for Black men should be prioritized over women's suffrage. I believed that if Black men were not given full legal and political equality they could never truly be free from slavery. Therefore, I worked hard for the passage of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This issue caused a split in the women's suffrage movement between those abolitionists like myself and others like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who prioritized women's suffrage.

As the struggle for civil rights was debated in the North and the South, there was a new surge of white Americans moving West. To secure land for these newly arriving white, the federal government continued to remove Indian tribes from their native land onto reservations. I wrote An Appeal for the Indians, which called for an end to the violent genocide against Native Americans and for a more human policy toward these "peoples less advanced than ourselves." I argued that U.S.-Indian relations consisted of an "almost unvaried history of violence and fraud," and that we must add to the "vigilant watch over the rights of black men" a new campaign supporting the rights of "red men." I lost many friends because of my involvement in social issues, but I continued to advocate for truth and justice by opposing slavery and Indian removal, and working for women's rights.

Introduction: As a young adult, Maria Child's writing demonstrated a strong interest in Native American history and their contemporary well-being. In the 1830s, she joined the abolition movement. She was also a women's rights activist but believed ending slavery was the first priority. Even during Reconstruction, Child believed black male suffrage should come first.

In 1868, Child wrote an An Appeal for the Indians in response to a government report titled, "Of the Indian Peace Commission," which explored ways to end fighting between white settlers and Plains Indians. She did not agree with all of the Commission's suggestions, but the report, as she writes, "at last...manifests something like a right spirit toward the poor Indians" and so "encourages a hope that the Anglo-Saxon race are capable of civilization." Below are several of Child's observations.

Primary Source: An Appeal for the Indians” (1868).

I know it is an almost universal opinion that Indians are incapable of civilization; but I see no rational ground for such an opinion. Their mode of warfare is certainly barbarous; but then, all wars are barbarous to a shocking degree. . . .

Do we say that their modes of torture indicate irreclaimable barbarism? Let us glance at the record of modern nations, and see whether it proves our natures to be essentially different from theirs. . . . I might fill columns with similar monstrosities practiced by nations of the white race. The tortures of the Inquisition were almost entirely for differences of belief concerning theological doctrines; an insanity of cruelty of which Indians were never guilty. . . .

The Indians are at least more consistent that white men. They profess to believe in revenge, and practice accordingly; while we profess a religion of love and forgiveness, and do such things as these! . . .

It is generally supposed that the Indians knew nothing of agriculture, till they saw it practised by the whites; but this is not true. In our war with the Indians, 1794, Gen. Wayne destroyed many settlements of the Wyandots and Miamis on the shores of Lake Erie. In an official dispatch, he wrote thus: "The very extensive and cultivated fields and gardens show the work of many hands. The margins of the rivers appear like one continued village for miles. I have never beheld such immense fields of corn in any part of America, from Canada to Florida." All this was laid waste by white men. The Cherokee tribe in Georgia, numbering about twenty thousand, resolved to adopt our mode of life. They made good progress in Agriculture and various mechanic arts, and were as orderly as any other citizens. But the state of Georgia coveted their lands, and they were driven off to a Territory beyond Arkansas, by a series of insupportable persecutions, at which the Government of the United States winked, if it did nothing worse. How can people improve, who are never secure in the possession of their lands? Yet, while we are perpetually robbing them, and driving them "from post to pillar," we go on repeating, with the most impudent coolness, "They are destined to disappear before the white man." And we "nail it with Scripture," just as we did our enslavement of the negroes; "Japhet shall be enlarged, and inhabit the tents of Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant." If the white man is Japhet, all I have to say is, he has behaved in a rascally manner toward Shem and Canaan.

Presented from such points of view, how must our religion appear to the Indians, who have always believed in One Great Spirit, the Father of the whole human race? No wonder there has been so little success in attempts to convert them to Christianity. Their ideas of politeness prevent them from ever ridiculing or contradicting the theological ideas of other people; but when missionaries told them of a hell, where sinners were punished to all eternity, perhaps there was some latent sarcasm in their reply, "If there be such a place, it must be for white men only."

Abram Colby

I was born into slavery in Greene County, Georgia. My mother was enslaved and my father was our owner. In 1851, after more than 30 years in slavery, my father freed me.

After the Civil War, I built a local chapter of the Georgia Equal Rights Association. We organized against employers who were cheating Black freedmen out of wages and still whipping them. We couldn't get a fair hearing in the courts, so I appealed to the military general in control of Georgia to address our grievances. He never responded.

But Congress put Georgia under military occupation after the Georgia legislature rejected the 14th Amendment and sent Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, to Congress. Black voters across the state registered to vote for the first time. In Greene County, Blacks became a majority of registered voters.

We organized ourselves into companies and marched to the polls. I was elected to represent Greene County in the Georgia House of Representatives. But the Georgia Democrats argued that the state Constitution did not give Blacks the right to hold public office. Many white Republicans voted with the Democrats to expel Black legislators.

The Ku Klux Klan stepped up their attacks on Republican voters. When I ran for re-election, I was offered $5,000 to join the Democratic Party, but I told them "I would not do it if they give me all the country was worth." Twenty-three KKK members then came to my house in the middle of the night, pulled me out of bed, and took turns whipping and beating me.

In December 1869, Congress reimposed military rule on Georgia. The Black legislators who had been expelled were reseated. As Georgia's first Black legislators, we tried to pass bills creating a militia to protect freedmen, guarantee civil rights, and ensure equal access to public transportation. But we failed because the white Republicans were too weak.

I was re-elected to the House of Representatives in 1870, but Democrats won more than 80 percent of the seats. Despite intense violence, I continued to organize and speak out against racist terrorists.

Primary Source: Testimony before Congress, 1872

Abram Colby, Testimony in Washington D.C., 1872. In Testimony Taken by the Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States (Washington, 1872), printed in Dorothy Sterling, ed., Trouble They Seen: The Story of Reconstruction in the Words of African Americans ( New York: Da Capo Press, 1994).

[Colby, a former slave and Georgia state legislator, was attacked in 1869 by the KKK, who wanted to end his political career. Colby narrowly escaped death at the hands of the KKK and in 1872 went to Washington to testify before a joint committee focused on violence in the South.]

Colby: On the 29th of October 1869, [the Klansmen] broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, "Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?" I said, "If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket." They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them.

Question: What is the character of those men who were engaged in whipping you?

Colby: Some are first-class men in our town. One is a lawyer, one a doctor, and some are farmers. They had their pistols and they took me in my night-clothes and carried me from home. They hit me five thousand blows. I told President Grant the same that I tell you now. They told me to take off my shirt. I said, "I never do that for any man." My drawers fell down about my feet and they took hold of them and tripped me up. Then they pulled my shirt up over my head. They said I had voted for Grant and had carried the Negroes against them. About two days before they whipped me they offered me $5,000 to go with them and said they would pay me $2,500 in cash if I would let another man go to the legislature in my place. I told them that I would not do it if they would give me all the county was worth.

The worst thing was my mother, wife and daughter were in the room when they came. My little daughter begged them not to carry me away. They drew up a gun and actually frightened her to death. She never got over it until she died. That was the part that grieves me the most.

Question: How long before you recovered from the effects of this treatment?

Colby: I have never got over it yet. They broke something inside of me. I cannot do any work now, though I always made my living before in the barber-shop, hauling wood, etc.

Question: You spoke about being elected to the next legislature?

Colby: Yes, sir, but they run me off during the election. They swore they would kill me if I stayed. The Saturday night before the election I went to church. When I got home they just peppered the house with shot and bullets.

Question: Did you make a general canvas there last fall?

Colby: No, sir. I was not allowed to. No man can make a free speech in my county. I do not believe it can be done anywhere in Georgia.

Question: You say no man can do it?

Colby: I mean no Republican, either white or colored.

Frederick Douglass

Born into a life of slavery, I became famous after I escaped to the North, became an abolitionist, and wrote my bestselling autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. During the Civil War, I helped convince President Lincoln that Blacks should be allowed to fight in the Union Army, declaring that those “who would be free themselves must strike the blow.” I was also an early supporter of women’s rights. I was the only African American at the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, supported women’s right to vote, and promoted women’s equality in my newspaper, The North Star.

After the war, I was voted vice president of the American Equal Rights Association, an organization formed to fight for the rights of women and African Americans. But middle-class white women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony could not understand the plight of Black people in the South. While white women enjoyed some small say through the votes of men in their families, Black people had no such power. Without extending the right to vote to Black men in the South, it would leave freedpeople vulnerable to white attacks. White women were not being dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp posts, they were not in danger of having their homes burnt down; their children were not being prevented from entering schools. Stanton and Anthony didn’t understand this, and when the Republicans moved to extend the right to vote for Black men without doing so for white women, they allied themselves with racist Democrats.

While I continued to champion equal rights for all, in 1869 I became president of the Colored National Labor Union and focused my attention toward the plight of Black workers. While Blacks were now free, they were stuck in the worst jobs and the traditional labor unions refused to let Black people be members. I helped Black workers fight for the right to have all trade unions and employment opportunities open to them. I knew that if Black and white laborers were divided by racism, they could never see that “both are plundered by the same plunderer.”

Primary Source:

Introduction: The National Labor Union, founded in 1866, was the first national federation for labor in the United States. It was a relatively inclusive organization, but did not fully embrace black labor. Thus, Isaac Myers, a skilled ship caulker from Baltimore, spearheaded the creation of the Colored National Labor Union. The CNLU organized skilled and unskilled workers with the goal of improving their living and working conditions. Frederick Douglass became a member and was its most famous speaker.

Colored National Labor Union 1869.pdf

Proceedings of the Colored National Labor convention: held in Washington, D.C., on December 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th, 1869. https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/591

Mr. Isaac Myers from the Committee on Platform, reported the following as the platform of the Convention, and it was read:

Whereas labor has its privileges no less than its duties, one of which is to organize, and. if need be, to furnish reasons for its organization: Therefore,

Resolved, That labor was instituted by Almighty God as a means of revealing the rich endowments of inanimate creation to be understood and used by man, and that labor is a duty common to, and the natural heritage of, the human family, each person having a natural right to labor in any field of industry for which he or she is capacity, the right to be governed and restricted only by the laws of political economy.

Resolved, That capital is an agent or means used by labor for its development and support, and labor is an agent or means used by capital for its development and general enhancement, and that, for the well-being and productiveness of capital and labor, the best harmony and fellowship of action should at all times prevail, that "strikes" may be avoided and the workingman convinced that justice is done him, and the he is receiving an equivalent for the labor performed.

Resolved, That there should be a frequent interchange of opinions upon all questions affecting alike the employer and employed, and that co-operation for the purposes of protecting and the better remuneration of labor is a sure and safe method, invading no specific rights, but is alike beneficial to the whole community, and tends to lift the working classes to higher achievements and positions in society ….

Resolved, That education is one of the strongest safeguards of republican institutions, the bulwark of American citizenship, and a defense against the invasion of the rights of man; its liberal distribution to all, without regard to race, creed, or sex, is necessary for the well being and advancement of society, …; that educated labor is more productive, is worth, and commands, higher rates of wages, is less dependent upon capital ; therefore it is essentially necessary to the rapid and permanent development of the agricultural, manufacturing, and mechanical growth and interests of the nation that there shall be liberal free school system enacted by the Legislatures of the several States for the benefit of all the inhabitants thereof.

Resolved, That the Government of the United States, republican in form, is a Government of the people, for the people, and by the people, and that all men are equal in political rights and entitled to the largest political and religious liberty compatible with the good order of society, as, also, the use and enjoyment of the fruits of their labor and talents: and that no laws should be made by any legislative body to the advantage of one class and against the interest and advantage of the other…. …

Resolved, That we feel it to be a duty that we owe to ourselves, to society, and to our country, to encourage by all the means within our reach industrial habits among our people, the learning of trades and professions by our children without regard to sex; to educate and impress them with the fact that all labor is honorable and a sure road to wealth; that habits of economy and temperance, combined with industry and education, is the great safeguard of free republican institutions….

Resolved, That regarding the labor of the country the common property of the people, that no portion should be excluded therefrom because of a geographical division of the globe in which they or their forefathers were born, or on account of statutes or color, but that every man or woman should receive employment according to his or her ability to perform the labor required, …; that the exclusion of colored men and apprentices from the right to labor in any department of industry or workshops in any of the States and Territories of the United States by what is known as "Trades' Unions" is an insult to God and injury to us, and disgrace to humanity. While we extend a free and welcome hand to the free immigration of labor of all nationalities, we emphatically deem imported contract Coolie labor to be a positive injury to the working people of the United States, is but the system of slavery in a new form, and we appeal to the Congress of the United States to rigidly enforce the act of 1862, prohibiting Coolie importation, and to enact such other laws as will best protect. and free, American labor against this or any similar form of slavery. …

Resolved, That we recommend that the establishment of co-operative workshops, land, building … associations among our people as a remedy against their exclusion from other workshops on account of color as a means of furnishing employment as well as a protection against the aggression of capital and as a the easiest and shortest method of enabling every man to procure a homestead for his family; and to accomplish this end we would particularly impress the greatest importance of the observance of diligence in business, and the practice of rigid economy in our social and domestic arrangements.

Resolved, that we regard the use of intoxicating liquors as the most damaging and damnable habits practiced by the human family; that we denounce the infamous practice planters have in drenching their employees with this poison drug until or without cost, intending to stupefy their brain and incapacitate them to know the condition of their accounts the value of their labor and to rob them of their sense and feelings of humanity; that we appeal to our people to discountenance the use of intoxicating liquors because of its effects to shorten life, and because it is the great cause of so much misery and poverty among the working classes of the country, and we advise the organization of temperance associations as a necessary instrument for the speedy and permanent elevation of our people.

Resolved, That we regard education as one of the greatest blessings that the human family enjoys, and that we earnestly appeal to our fellow citizens to allow no opportunity, no matter how limited or remove, to pass unimproved; that the thanks of the colored people of this country are due the Congress of the United States for the establishment and maintenance of the Freedman's Bureau, and to Major General O. O. Howard, Commissioner, Rev. J.W. Alford and John M. Langston, Esq., General Inspectors, for their co-operative labors in the establishment and good government of hundreds of schools in the Southern States, whereby thousands of men, women, and children have been and are now being taught the rudiments of an English education. The thanks of the whole people are due to these philanthropists and friends … ; to the various Legislatures until every State can boast of having a free school system that knows no distinction in dissemination of knowledge to is inhabitants on account of race, color, sex, creed, or previous condition….

Resolved, That we recommend a faithful obedience to the laws of the United States and of the several States in which we may reside; that the Congress and the courts of the United States have ample power to protect its citizens. All grievances, whether personal or public, should be carried to the proper tribunal, … until justice is granted; that armed resistance against the laws is treason against the United States …. We further appeal to the colored workingmen to form organizations throughout every State and Territory, that they be able in those districts far removed from courts of justice to communicate with the Bureau of Labor to be established by the National Labor Union and that justice may be meted out to them as though they lived in the large cities, where justice is more liberally distributed….

ISAAC MYERS HENRY LEE, HARRY S. HARMON REV. JOSS P. EVANS.

Henry Highland Garnet

I was born into slavery in 1815 in Kent County, Maryland. When I was 9 years old, I escaped slavery with my family and we settled in New York City.

It was at the Oneida Theological Institute where I became known for my skills as a speaker and developed my philosophy on abolitionism. Eventually, I became a minister. In 1843, I spoke to the delegates of the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York, where I called for a militant slave revolt against the plantation owners of the South. Many abolitionists at the time thought my call for self-emancipation was too radical. But it was ultimately the enslaved rebelling - running away, refusing to work on the plantations, taking up arms, and joining the Union Army - that won the Civil War.

I opposed the U.S.-Mexico War because I knew the real aim was to reimpose slavery on Mexico, which had abolished it decades earlier. I travelled the country and the world preaching about the ills of slavery. In 1865, I gave a speech to the U.S. House of Representatives urging them to adopt the 13th Amendment. I was the first African American to deliver a sermon to Congress.

After the war, although slavery in the United States had been abolished, our brothers and sisters in Cuba were still in bondage. In 1868, a war broke out on the island as Cubans fought for their independence from Spain. Cuban revolutionaries like Jose Marti linked the struggle against slavery to the fight against the Spanish. I knew we had to help their efforts and formed the Cuban-Anti Slavery Committee in New York City in 1872. I met with Cuban liberation leaders to form an international coalition to spread emancipation across the globe. At a mass meeting in New York City, I urged people to link the Black freedom struggle with the liberation movements in Latin America. We gathered 500,000 signatures to advance the cause of freedom and delivered the petition to President Grant to recognize the independent Republic of Cuba.

Primary Source:

Henry Highland Garnet, Slavery in Cuba: A Report of the Proceedings of the Meeting Held at Cooper Institute, 1872.

Slavery in Cuba report by CASC 1872

Whereas, We, colored citizens of the United States, having become possessed of the rights of freemen, after many years' experience of the degradation and evil effects of human slavery, remembering full well the cruelties of family separation, of the lash, constant toil and pain, of inequality before the law; we are therefore deeply impressed with the condition of the five hundred thousand of our brethren in the Island of Cuba, who are now in a state of slavery, undergoing the same sad experience of ourselves in the past, being separated mother from child, husband from wife, brother from sister, and toiling constantly under the lasth of the tyrant master; and

Whereas, We have watched with deep interest the struggle going on in that island for the past four years between the Cuban patriots and the Spanish government; it is therefore

Resolved, That it is with feelings of great apprehension and concern that we view the indisposition or inability of the Spanish Government to enforce any measure in favor of the abolition of slavery in the Island of Cuba, being aware that every measure in that direction has heretofore met with the most violent opposition of the Spaniards in authority on that island.

Resolved, That after a careful survey of the situation, as collected from official correspondence and other information and evidences of the condition and disposition of the respective combatants, it is our opinion that the success of the Spanish arms will tend to rivet more firmly the chains of slavery on our brethren, re-establishing it where it does not now exist, restoring the horrors of the African slave trade and the Coolie traffic, and indefinitely postpone the abolition of the worst of evils that ever disgraced an enlightened and Christian age, that the success of the Cuban patriots will immediately give to the whole inhabitants of the island, freedom and equality before the law.

Resolved, That the Spanish Government in that island, by their barbarous edicts and inhuman butcheries, have fully demonstrated their want of human sympathy, and their inability to entertain that appreciation of the rights of others which should appear conspicuous in the conduct of all Christian people, and give us no hope, in the event of their success, of the final freedom of the inhabitants of the whole island.

Resolved, That we, therefore, after four years' patient waiting, deem it our duty, and do hereby petition our government at Washington, the President and Congress of the United States, to accord to the Cuban Patriots that favorable recognition that four years' gallant struggle for freedom justly entitles them to.

Frances Watkins Harper

I was born free in Maryland, a state with legal ized slavery. I was raised in a strong abolitionist household and when I turned 25, I moved north to teach. A few years later, Maryland passed a law forbidding free Blacks from entering its borders or risk being enslaved. I was outraged that I could not return to my home state and became an anti-slavery activist. During the 1850s and 1860s I gave abolitionist speeches all across the country and was active in the Underground Railroad.

Like many female abolitionists, I became increasingly aware of the ways that women were oppressed. When my husband died in 1864, I was left with four children and his debt. Even though my lecture fees paid for our farm, the investment was legally my husband’s, so his creditors confiscated my farm to pay his debt. After the war, I joined the American Equal Rights Association to fight for both the rights of women and Black people. But more and more, people in the movement were choosing between working for the vote for white women or the vote for Black men. I believed that giving white women the ballot would not be a cure for our problems — after all, didn’t many white women enslave Black people?

I agreed with many who argued that we had to have a temporary focus on winning Black male suffrage. The hardships of Black women seemed to stem more from the fact we were Black than because we were women. I supported the 15th Amendment and was a founding member of the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. I increasingly criticized the racism of white suffragists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But I also believed we should not put off fighting for women’s suffrage to some distant future. I wrote, “When they are reconstructing the government, why not lay the whole foundation anew. . . .Is it not the Negro woman’s hour also? Has she not as many rights and claims as the Negro man?” I argued after the 15th Amendment was passed that the vote should immediately be extended to women.

Primary Source: "We Are All Bound Together"

Voices of Black Suffragists

A free-born native of Baltimore, Maryland, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper gave her first anti-slavery lecture in New Bedford, Massachusetts in 1854. Her books of poetry enhanced her prominence but when she in 1859 wrote an open letter to the condemned John Brown, her correspondence was read by tens of thousands of Americans. In May 1866 Harper addressed the Eleventh National Women’s Rights Convention in New York City where she sat on the platform with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. That address appears below.

I FEEL I AM SOMETHING of a novice upon this platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs. But I did not feel as keenly as others, that I had these rights, in common with other women, which are now demanded. About two years ago, I stood within the shadows of my home. A great sorrow had fallen upon my life. My husband had died suddenly, leaving me a widow, with four children, one my own, and the others stepchildren. I tried to keep my children together. But my husband died in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very milk-crocks and wash tubs from my hands. I was a farmer’s wife and made butter for the Columbus market; but what could I do, when they had swept all away? They left me one thing-and that was a looking glass! Had I died instead of my husband, how different would have been the result! By this time he would have had another wife, it is likely; and no administrator would have gone into his house, broken up his home, and sold his bed, and taken away his means of support.

I took my children in my arms, and went out to seek my living. While I was gone, a neighbor to whom I had once lent five dollars, went before a magistrate and Swore that he believed I was a non-resident, and laid an attachment on my very bed. And I went back to Ohio with my orphan children in my arms, without a single feather bed in this wide world, that was not in the custody of the law. I say, then, that justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is unequal before the law.

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members. At the South, the legislation of the country was in behalf of the rich slaveholders, while the poor white man was neglected. What is the consequence today? From that very class of neglected poor white men, comes the man who stands to-day, with his hand upon the helm of the nation. He fails to catch the watchword of the hour, and throws himself, the incarnation of meanness, across the pathway of the nation. My objection to Andrew Johnson is not that he has been a poor white man; my objection is that he keeps “poor whits” all the way through. That is the trouble with him.

This grand and glorious revolution which has commenced, will fail to reach its climax of success, until throughout the length and brea[d]th of the American Republic, the nation shall be so color-blind, as to know no man by the color of his skin or the curl of his hair. It will then have no privileged class, trampling upon and outraging the unprivileged classes, but will be then one great privileged nation, whose privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity can attain.

I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated by preju[d]ice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of the question, with the winning party.

You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man’s hand against me. Let me go to-morrow morning and take my seat in one of your street cars-I do not know that they will do it in New York, but they will in Philadelphia-and the conductor will put up his hand and stop the car rather than let me ride.

Going from Washington to Baltimore this Spring, they put me in the smoking car. Aye, in the capital of the nation, where the black man consecrated himself to the nation’s defence, faithful when the white man was faithless, they put me in the smoking car! They did it once; but the next time they tried it, they failed; for I would not go in. I felt the fight in me; but I don’t want to have to fight all the time. Today I am puzzled where to make my home. I would like to make it in Philadelphia, near my own friends and relations. But if I want to ride in the streets of Philadelphia, they send me to ride on the platform with the driver. Have women nothing to do with this? Not long since, a colored woman took her seat in an Eleventh Street car in Philadelphia, and the conductor stopped the car, and told the rest of the passengers to get out, and left the car with her in it alone, when they took it back to the station. One day I took my seat in a car, and the conductor came to me and told me to take another seat. I just screamed “murder.” The man said if I was black I ought to behave myself. I knew that if he was white he was not behaving himself. Are there not wrongs to be righted?

In advocating the cause of the colored man, since the Dred Scott decision, I have sometimes said I thought the nation had touched bottom. But let me tell you there is a depth of infamy lower than that. It is when the nation, standing upon the threshold of a great peril, reached out its hands to a feebler race, and asked that race to help it, and when the peril was over, said, You are good enough for soldiers, but not good enough for citizens ….

We have a woman in our country who has received the name of “Moses,” not by lying about it, but by acting it out-a woman who has gone down into the Egypt of slavery and brought out hundreds of our people into liberty. The last time I saw that woman, her hands were swollen. That woman who had led one of Montgomery’s most successful expeditions, who was brave enough and secretive enough to act as a scout for the American army, had her hands all swollen from a conflict with a brutal conductor, who undertook to eject her from her place. That woman, whose courage and bravery won a recognition from our army and from every black man in the land, is excluded from every thoroughfare of travel. Talk of giving women the ballot-box? Go on. It is a normal school, and the white women of this country need it. While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.

Newton Knight

In 1858, my family settled on a small farm in Jones County, Mississippi. When the Civil War began, I volunteered to fight for the Confederacy. In 1862, the Confederacy passed the “Twenty Negro Law” that allowed men who owned 20 or more slaves to return home. As more of us poor white farmers died, it became clear that poor men were fighting a rich man’s war. I deserted the army and returned home. I was shocked by what I found. The farms were run down. The crops had failed. While children went hungry, the Confederacy imposed a tax system that allowed the army to take supplies from families. When more soldiers deserted, we formed the “Knight Company” to defend Jones County citizens from Confederate troops. We were aided by local whites and Blacks, some still enslaved. The Knight Company, numbering more than 100 men, declared ourselves “Southern Yankees” and successfully overthrew the Confederate government in Jones County. One enslaved woman, Rachel, helped us as a spy and supplied us with food. In return, I promised to work for Black freedom. I fell in love with Rachel and had a child with her. After the war, I was appointed relief commissioner. In this position, I distributed food to the poor and helped liberate enslaved children who had not been freed. I was active in the local Union League — an organization of mostly Black and some white Republicans — that met in secret, educated each other on politics, and organized to protect ourselves from the Ku Klux Klan. Republican Ulysses Grant was elected president in 1868. In 1870, Mississippi at last approved a new constitution that guaranteed Black civil and voting rights. Republicans swept political offices across Mississippi. I was appointed U.S. marshal for southern Mississippi and I campaigned to build an integrated school in Jones County. In the election of 1875, however, violence and fraud kept Republicans from voting. The governor pleaded with President Grant to send troops, but he refused. The Democrats took back power in Mississippi and began to turn back the clock. I retreated to my farm, married Rachel, and lived with my interracial family until my death.

Primary Sources:

The letter linked below was written by a member of a Tennessee Union League Chapter. As a fellow "Union Leaguer," Knight likely shared the author's sentiments.

“Observations of a Union Leaguer” TN man’s letter to Prez Johnson April 1865 (Excerpt follows).

Johnson MSS. Letter of A. Watson of Tennessee to President Johnson (April 17, 1865).

Augusta Lewis

I was born in 1848, the year of the first women’s rights conference. Orphaned as a young girl, I was raised in a wealthy home. My family paid for my education until the depression that followed the Civil War forced me, still in my teens, out into the workforce. I developed a deep sympathy for all those who had to work for a wage.

I became a typesetter and got a job at the New York World. In 1867, members of the International Typographical Union in New York, which like other labor unions did not allow women into their organization, went on strike. To fight the union, the owners of the World hired women, paid them less, and trained them to set type. Setting type was almost an all-male profession, but for a short time all my co-workers were women. After 10 months, the World reached a settlement with the union and fired all of the female typesetters they had trained. I wasn’t fired, but I quit in support of the other women.

After this experience, at the age of 20, I joined with Susan B. Anthony to form the Working Women’s Association (WWA). Anthony wanted the group to promote women’s suffrage. Although I supported suffrage, I was skeptical that the vote would cure the economic inequality between men and women and thought that we should focus first on getting women good union jobs. Unfortunately, the WWA increasingly became dominated by middle-class women like Anthony who didn't understand the problems working women faced.

In 1868, in addition to starting the WWA, I also formed the Women’s Typographical Union that quickly grew to more than 40 members. When the male Typographical Union again went on strike in 1869, we sided with the men and encouraged women not to take their jobs. We argued that we would be stronger if all workers fought together. But Anthony argued that women should again break the strike. It allowed the employers to claim they were supporting women’s rights in their attempts to crush the union. By the end of 1869, the Working Women’s Association disbanded.

Primary Source: This New York Times article describes a December 1868 meeting of the Workingwomen's Association and thus gives insight into the group's focus and concerns.

NYT: article about Working Women Association, 1868

Workingwomen's Association

The fortnightly meeting of the Workingwomen's Association took place last evening at Room No. 18 Cooper Institute. Miss Elizabeth Browne, the Secretary, read the minutes of the former meeting, and Mrs. S. F. Norton read a report regarding the condition of rag-pickers, to the effect that they begin work at three or four o'clock in the morning, and sold the paper and rags they collected at three cents a pound; broken glass, one cent a pound, and bones, scraps of meat, bread, and other bits of garbage, at fifty cents a bushel. Scraps of iron were sold according to temporary market value. The earnings of rag-pickers range from $2.50 to $10.00 a week. There is much jealousy among them in regard to infringing on each other's rounds. The large majority are Germans. A small colony of 452 persons exists in Willett Street, who live neatly and comfortably, and send their children to school. They place money in savings banks, and often emigrate to farms in the West. Another colony lives in shanties west of the Central Park, and exists from hand to mouth. Others are located, more or less, in downtown streets. There are about 1,200 rag-pickers in New York, more than half of whom are women. The rags and paper they collect are bought by paper manufacturers; the bones are made into parasol handles, tooth brushes, buttons, etc. The bits of glass are melted down by glass manufacturers. Cases occur where much money is accumulated by rag-pickers. One is spoken of who operates considerably in stocks and gold in the intervals of his work.

Mrs. Garafulia Clifton reported rag-pickers as often living six or seven together in one room, paying each fifty cents a week. Cellars were rented by them also at $6 or $7 a month. Their children run wild, and are called by the police "street rats." Drunkenness was rarely found among them.

Mrs. Shephard rendered a similar report, and Mrs. Frances McKinley talked eloquently regarding Hester Vaughan.

Miss Anthony said that Mr. Greeley had charged Mrs. Stanton and herself with getting up an excitement over Hester Vaughan in order to bring forward the woman suffrage question. Miss Anthony said that the suffrage question should be brought forward as much as possible, as by its realization only can fair wages and justice, generally, be obtained by women. The speaker said that the prison cell of Hester Vaughan, and all other female convicts in her Philadelphia prison, were visited only by men, and their comfort was uncared for. Women should be the visitors. A male principal was lately invited to a school in Bloomingdale at a salary of $1,400, because it was thought that no woman could be found suitable for the place. On the contrary, there were many, and if women could be elected as school trustees, they would see that their own sex had a fair share of good positions.

Mr. W. G. R. Hill spoke upon cooperation, and advised the establishment of a cheap cooperative eating-house by women, where a good meal could be got for ten or twelve cents. He offered to find a location, and a committee was appointed to meet at the Revolution office at noon to-day to discuss that and other questions.

Mrs. Parish reported on photographic employees, their wages, etc.

Miss Anthony read a letter written in the name of numerous women without means, who desired to go to the West or to California, or anywhere for work, if their passages could be paid.

Mrs. Shephard reported a visit to the Tombs, where she saw three women who had murdered their husbands. All had done so under the influence of drink, as well as those committed for theft. Thirty women were there for drunkenness alone.

Miss Anthony then adjourned the meeting until Friday, Jan. 8 at the same place.

John Roy Lynch

I was born into slavery in Louisiana. My mother was enslaved, and my father, the plantation overseer, was an Irish immigrant. He began to raise money to buy our freedom, but suddenly died and we were sold to a plantation in Mississippi. During the Civil War, I freed myself by running away and joining the Union Army.

After the war, I joined the Republican Party in Mississippi working as assistant secretary for the Republican State Convention. In 1869, the governor appointed me as justice of the peace in Adams County. In this position, I had significant authority. Now that Black people felt like they could get some justice, they would bring in white people for the smallest offense. In several cases, I was able to punish white planters who beat or threatened their Black workers - dispensing justice that was never received under slavery.

The same year I was elected to the Mississippi House of Representatives. And in 1872, by the time I was 25, I became the first African American Speaker of the House. Later that year, I was elected as part of the first generation of African American U.S. congressmen and traveled to Washington, D.C., to represent Mississippi. I was the youngest member of Congress. I advocated for the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which ended legal discrimination in public places and transportation, until the U.S. Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional in 1883.

Back in Mississippi, racist Democrats unleashed a wave of violence and intimidation in an effort to take back power. I exposed Democrats for working with terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan and other paramilitary groups to overthrow the Republican Party and suppress the Black vote. But the federal government refused to intervene. I was re-elected to Congress in 1876 and 1880 but felt increasingly isolated as Democrats took back power by force across the state. As I grew older, I became increasingly concerned about the racist and inaccurate portrayal of Blacks by historians of Reconstruction. I wrote a book titled The Facts of Reconstruction to set the record straight.

Primary Source:

Introduction: During Reconstruction, white southern Democrats used violence, intimidation, and fraud to try to defeat white and black Republicans and thereby reassert control over local and state governments. The violence was particularly bad in South Carolina during the winter of 1870-1871, as whites protested elections reults. Federal oversight led to a series of trials of white perpetrators; while notable, these trials were largely symbolic efforts to enforce the 14th and 15th Amendments. The trial transcripts provide first-hand accounts of the KKK's terrorist tactics. John Roy Lynch saw similar violence and intimidation take place in Mississippi.

Testimony about KKK.pdf

Excerpt: Testimony of Mervin Givens, Spartanburg, South Carolina, July 12, 1871

Mervin Givens (colored) sworn and examined.

By Mr. Stevenson:

Question: Your name in old times was Mery Moss?

Answer: Yes, sir; but since freedom I don't go by my master's name. My name now is Givens.

Question: What is your age?

Answer: About forty I expect...

Question: Have you ever been visited by the Ku-Klux?

Answer: Yes, sir.

Question: When?

Answer: About the last of April.

Question: Tell what they said and did.

Answer: I was asleep when they came to my house, and did not know anything about them until they broke in on me.

Question: What time of night was it?

Answer: About twelve o'clock at night. They broke in on me and frightened me right smart, being asleep. They ordered me to get up and make a light, but not quick enough. They jumped at me and struck me with a pistol, and made a knot that you can see there now. By the time I made the light I catched the voice of them, and as soon as I could see by the light, I looked around and saw by the size of the men and voice so that I could judge right off who it was. By that time they jerked the case off the pillow and jerked it over my head and ordered me out of doors. That was all I saw in the house. After they carried me out of doors I saw nothing more. They pulled the pillow-slip over my head and told me if I took off they would shoot me. They carried me out and whipped me powerful.

Question: With what?

Answer: With sticks and hickories. They whipped me powerful.

Question: How many lashes?

Answer: I can't tell. I have no knowledge at all about it. May be a hundred or two. Two men whipped me and both at once.

Question: Did they say anything to you?

Answer: They cursed me and told me I had voted the radical ticket, and they intended to beat me so I would not vote it again.

Question: Did you know any of them?

Answer: Yes, sir; I think I know them.

Question: What were their names?

Answer: One was named John Thomson and the other was John Zimmerman. Those are the two men I think it was.

Question: How many were there in all?

Answer: I didn't see but two. After they took me out, I was blindfolded; but I could judge from the horse tracks that there were more than two horses there. Some were horses and some were mules. It was a wet, rainy night; they whipped me stark naked. I had a brown undershirt on and they tore it clean off.

By Mr. Van Trump:

Question: There were, then, two men who came to your house?

Answer: Yes, sir, that was all I could see.

Question: Were they disguised?

Answer: Yes, sir.

Question: How?

Answer: They had on some sort of gray-looking clothes, and much the same sort of thing over their face. One of them had a sort of high hat with tassel and sort of horns.

Question: How far did John Thomson live from there?

Answer: I think it is two or three miles.

Question: Were you acquainted with him?

Answer: Yes, sir.

Question: Where?

Answer: At my house. My wife did a good deal of washing for them both. I was very well-acquainted with their size and their voices. They were boys I was raised with...

Question: Did you tell anybody else it was John Thomson?

Answer: I have never named it.

Question: Why?

Answer: I was afraid to.

Question: Are you afraid now?

Answer: I am not afraid to own the truth as nigh as I can.

Question: Is there any difference in owning to the truth on the 12th of July and on the 1st of April?

Answer: The black people have injured themselves very much by talking, and I was afriad.

Question: Are you not afraid now?

Answer: No, sir; because I hope there will be a stop put to it...

Question: Do you think we three gentlemen can stop it?

Answer: No, sir; but I think you can get some help.

Question: Has anybody been telling you that?

Answer: No, sir; nobody told me that...

Question: Why did you not commence a prosecution against Thomson and Zimmerman?

Answer: I am like the rest, I reckon: I am too cowardly.

Question: Why do you not do it now; you are not cowardly now?

Answer: I shouldn't have done it now.

Question: I am talking about bringing suit for that abuse on that night. Why do you not have them arrested?

Answer: It ought to be done.

Question: Why do you not do it?

Answer: For fear they would shoot me. If I were to bring them up here and could not prove the thing exactly on them, and they were to get out of it, I would not expect to live much longer.

Benjamin Montgomery

I was enslaved the family of Jefferson Davis, one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Mississippi. Jefferson Davis was the president of the Confederacy. When I was first sold to the Davises, I tried to escape but was recaptured. On their plantation I learned to read and write, survey land, repair machines, navigate steamboats, and design buildings. I became a skilled mechanic and invented a steam-operated boat propeller. I applied for a patent but was denied because I was enslaved. Acknowledging my talents, the Davises made me the manager of the plantation store and eventually the entire plantation.

When the Union Army approached during the Civil War, the Davises fled, leaving me in charge. I tried to help lead the hundreds of enslaved people who stayed behind supervising production of corn and vegetables to feed the community. But after Union soldiers burned the plantation mansion, and Confederate troops burned our crops, it became clear that staying was too dangerous. I took my wife and four children to Ohio until the war ended.

At the end of the war, I headed back and along with formerly enslaved people, and newly freed refugees, began to farm the land. I leased the land from the Freemen's Bureau and quickly tripled my initial investment with a successful cotton crop. We were now free, prosperous, Black farmers on the land that only a few years ago we had worked as slaves.

When President Andrew Johnson pardoned Davis, the title for the land went back to him. But I had raised enough money to buy it from him. By 1873, my family was the third largest cotton producer in the Mississippi with an award-winning crop. But when I was appointed justice of the peace, our white neighbors were infuriated at the thought of a Black judge. The increasingly hostile racial politics, combined with falling cotton prices and floods, eventually led me to sell the plantation back to Jefferson Davis. But my son continued the family legacy by co-founding the Mound Bayou, a successful all-Black colony in Northwest Mississippi.

Primary Source:

Introduction: Like Garrison Frazier, the minister speaking in this document, Benjamin Montgomery believed land was central to the security and well-being of freedmen in the South.

Colloquy with Colored Ministers.pdf

[Introduction] The following is an excerpt from notes taken at a meeting in Savannah, January 1865, between black leaders and General William T. Sherman and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

On the evening of Thursday, the 12th day of January, 1865, [twenty men] of African descent met, by appointment, to hold an interview with Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War, and Major-General Sherman, to have a conference upon matters relating to the freedmen of the State of Georgia, to wit:

Garrison Frazier, aged sixty-seven years, born in Granville County, North Carolina; slave until eight years ago, when he bought himself and wife, paying one thousand dollars in gold and silver … being chosen by the persons present to express their common sentiments upon the matters of inquiry, makes answers to inquiries as follows:

1. State what your understanding is in regard to the acts of Congress, and President Lincoln's proclamation, touching the condition of the colored people in the rebel States.

Answer. So far as I understand President Lincoln's proclamation to the rebellious States, it is, that if they would lay down their arms and submit to the laws of the United States before the 1st of January, 1863, all should be well; but if they did not, then all the slaves in the rebel States should be free, henceforth and for- ever: that is what I understood.

2. State what you understand by slavery, and the freedom that was to be given by the President's Proclamation.

Answer. Slavery is receiving by irresistible power the work of another man, and not by his consent. The freedom, as I understand it, promised by the proclamation, is taking us from under the yoke of bondage and placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor, and take care of ourselves, and assist the Government in maintaining our freedom.

3. State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.

Answer. The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn in and till it by our labor-that is, by the labor of the women, and children, and old men-and we can soon maintain ourselves and have something to spare; and to assist the Government, the young men should enlist in the service of the Government, and serve in such manner as they may be wanted …. We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.

4. State in what manner you would rather live, whether scattered among the whites, or in colonies by yourselves.

Answer. I would prefer to live by ourselves, for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over….

5. Do you think that there is intelligence enough among the slaves of the South to maintain themselves under the Government of the United States, and the equal protection of its laws, and maintain good and peaceable relations among yourselves and with your neighbors?

Answer. I think there is sufficient intelligence among us to do so.

6. State what is the feeling of the black population of the South toward the Government of the United States; what is the understanding in respect to the present war, its causes and object, and their disposition to aid either side; state fully your views.

Answer. I think you will find there is thousands that are willing to make any sacrifice to assist the Government of the United States, while there is also many that are not willing to take up arms. I do not suppose there is a dozen men that is opposed to the Government. I understand as to the war that the South is the aggressor. President Lincoln was elected President by a majority of the United States, which guaranteed him the right of holding the office and exercising that right over the whole United States. The South, without knowing what he would do, rebelled. The war was commenced by the rebels before he came into the office. The object of the war was not, at first, to give the slaves their freedom, but the sole object of the war was, at first to bring the rebellious States back into the Union, and their loyalty to the laws of the United States.

Afterwards, knowing the value that was set on the slaves by the rebels, the President thought that his proclamation would stimulate them to lay down their arms, reduce them to obedience, and help to bring back the rebel States; and their not doing so has now made the freedom of the slaves a part of the war. It is my opinion that there is not a man in this city that could be started to help the rebels one inch, for that would be suicide. There was two black men left with the rebels, because they had taken an active part for the rebels, and thought something might befall them if they staid behind, but there is not another man. If the prayers that have gone up for the Union army could be read out, you would not get through them these two weeks.

7. State whether the sentiments you now express are those only of the colored people in the city, or do they extend to the colored population through the country, and what are your means of knowing the sentiments of those living in the country?

Answer. I think the sentiments are the same among the colored people of the State. My opinion is formed by personal communication in the course of my ministry, and also from the thousands that followed the Union army, leaving their homes and undergoing suffering. I did not think there would be so many; the number surpassed my expectation.

Kate Mullany

I was born in Ireland in 1845, but a few years later my family moved to the United States. When I was 19, my father passed away and my mother became ill, leaving me the main breadwinner of the family.

I worked 12- to 14-hour days with other young women washing, drying, and ironing clothes, using harsh chemicals, and earning less than $4 a week. When we asked for a pay increase, employers ignored us, so we started discussing how to organize to demand higher wages and better working conditions. We had seen how male workers in the National Union of Iron Molders went on strike to win their demands. In 1864, I went on strike for five and a half days with more with 300 women who worked across 14 laundry companies. We won a 25 percent increase in wages and organized the Collar Labor Union, the first female labor union in the United States.

The following year, the Collar Laundry Union organized again for increased wages and our pay went from $8 to $14 a week. We often worked with and supported male labor unions and donated large sums of money when they went on strike.

In 1868, I was invited to attend the National Labor Union (NLU) convention. I was appointed by President William Sylvis to be the assistant secretary, becoming the first woman officer in the NLU. I coordinated national efforts with various working women's association.

Our efforts gained support from suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and they helped us raise funds after we lost a difficult strike in 1869 to start our own collar manufacturing cooperative. But ultimately, I felt the most important rights for working women could be won only by organizing on the job with male workers. Anthony and her middle-class followers increasingly focused only on the right to vote. I was surprised when I went to speak to Anthony's Working Women's Association, to raise funds for our cooperative, that the women I met there did not at all seem like the working women I knew, who labored all day in a dirty shop.

Primary Source:

Introduction: We do not know exactly what Kate Mullany believed about woman suffrage, but she was active in the National Labor Union, headed by this document’s author, William Sylvis. Perhaps she shared his opinions.

Female Suffrage, from The Life, Speeches, Labors & Essays of William H. Sylvis;

Stop, gentle reader! Don't throw up your hands and roll up your eyes in holy horror, as you exclaim, "What! the Journal in favor of women voting?" Or, "has the editor gone clean stark mad?" Have patience, and read this article through before you pass judgment. After hearing what we have to say upon this subject, and then you should not think as we do, there will only be an honest difference of opinion.

Now, the man who does not love the ladies, should be ashamed to own he had a mother. We hope no such misanthrope -- no such libel upon human nature -- lives, who is so impious as to hold God's masterpiece, woman, in contempt. We do love the ladies, and the dear creatures must not blame us for what we cannot help. It is our love for them that prompts us to condemn the follies and extravagances of the present day, which go far to undermine health and morals, if they no not, to a great extent, divest her of all that a good man holds dear. The fashions of the age are doing much to drag her from the exalted position she occupies, and must, if pursued, lessen women in the high estimation in which they. have ever been held by American gentlemen. We say it is because we love them, that we venture upon this short homily as a prelude to our answers, which we design as a plea for justice to woman; for slavery to fashion is a vice, though of a lesser grade than those we shall name, which calls for reform. While pointing to the beam in the eye of the sterner sex, we hope they will pluck the mote from their own. But we do not intend to dodge the question.

Shall women vote? We answer, yes. We are in favor of limited female suffrage. We think our wives, sisters, and daughters should have a vote on all questions involving a moral issue. Upon all laws relating to Sunday labor, granting license to sell rum, the use of tobacco, a reduction of working-hours, or any question intimately connected with the domestic and social happiness of women, they should have a vote. Give them the right to set their seal of condemnation upon rum-selling, the filthy use of tobacco, or any other vice, and very soon these skeletons of too many households, which bring upon mankind untold misery, wil disappear from the land forever.

Women are deeply interested in all reforms which tend to better the condition of the human. race, and why should they not have a voice in the eradication of acknowledged evils? What class of the community suffers more from the curse of intemperance? They do not visit groggeries or indulge in bacchanalian revelry, but the misery which such vices entail comes home directly to the hearthstone. Who can estimate the deprivation, the suffering, the mortification, brought upon the loveliest portion of God's creation by whiskey drinking? And are women to be silent spectators of their progressive ruin, powerless for resistance, without the right to act or protest? The first law of nature--self-defence--is denied them, and they must remain passive victims of a curse which plucks every joy from the home circle, plants life's pathway with thorns, and sends them sorrowing to a premature grave. Give to women the right to emancipate themselves from a bondage which such vices fasten upon them, and, our word for it, they will prove as potent in reforming society as they are efficient in bringing happiness to the domestic circle. To this extent we are in favor of female suffrage.

Isaac Myers

I grew up in Baltimore and at the age of 16, I began to work as a caulker — sealing cracks between ships’ wooden planks. By the age of 20, I was supervising the caulking of some of the largest ships in Baltimore. In 1865, white caulkers went on strike. Joined by white ship carpenters, they demanded that Blacks working in the shipyards be fired. They were supported by the city government, which kicked out more than 1,000 Black workers. When Black workers met to respond, I proposed that we form a cooperative to buy a shipyard. We began raising funds and Black people from all over the country donated to our cause. We were able to purchase a shipyard and by the end of 1866 we employed more than 300 Black workers. As we expanded, we employed white workers also.

I set out to organize the growing number of Black labor organizations to fight for our rights and against discrimination. I was invited to speak at the National Labor Union (NLU) convention in the summer of 1869. I told white workers that Black workers were ready to join them in a common struggle. I encouraged the white unions to let Blacks in to their organizations and denounced actions like those in Baltimore where white workers went on strike against Blacks. Although we remained in separate local organizations, the NLU decided to welcome Black labor unions into the national federation.

I issued a call for a Black labor convention and more than 200 representatives met to form the Colored National Labor Union. We demanded legislation that would give Black people full equality and an educational campaign in the white unions to overcome the opposition to Blacks. I was voted president and toured the country encouraging Black workers to organize for our demands. But when our white allies in the NLU demanded that Black union members abandon the Republican Party and form a new Labor Reform Party, we disagreed. We feared that this would help to elect racist Democrats. As a result, after 1870, Blacks weren’t invited back to the NLU convention.

Primary Source:

The National Labor Union, founded in 1866, was the first national federation for labor in the United States. It was a relatively inclusive organization, but did not fully embrace black labor. Thus, Isaac Myers, a skilled ship caulker from Baltimore, spearheaded the creation of the Colored National Labor Union. The CNLU organized skilled and unskilled workers with the goal of improving their living and working conditions. Frederick Douglass became a member and was its most famous speaker.

Colored National Labor Convention proceedings 1869

Proceedings of the Colored National Labor convention: held in Washington, D.C., on December 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th, 1869. https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/591

Mr. Isaac Myers from the Committee on Platform, reported the following as the platform of the Convention, and it was read:

Whereas labor has its privileges no less than its duties, one of which is to organize, and. if need be, to furnish reasons for its organization: Therefore,

ISAAC MYERS HENRY LEE, HARRY S. HARMON REV. JOSS P. EVANS.

Wendell Phillips

I joined the abolitionist movement in the 1830s and soon became known as “abolition’s Golden Trumpet” because of my skills as a speaker. After the war, I became president of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and argued against other abolitionists who wanted to dissolve the society because slavery had been abolished. I believed that the work of abolitionists was not fully completed until Black people gained civil and political rights.

In addition to fighting to end slavery, I was an early champion of women’s rights. I wrote articles in support of the cause and aided activists in their petition campaigns for women’s suffrage. But I was also practical. I realized that the abolition of slavery made possible what only a few years ago seemed impossible. I knew that “These are not times for ordinary politics; these are formative hours. The national purpose and thought ripens in 30 days as much as ordinary years bring it forward.”

But I also realized that abolition would not be complete unless Black men were recognized as citizens and given the right to vote. I urged women’s rights activists to set aside women’s suffrage for a while to focus on working for an amendment that would allow Black men to vote. I resisted attempts to merge the movement for Black rights with the movement for women’s rights into a single organization and refused to mention or promote women’s suffrage in the American Anti-Slavery Society newspaper. I argued we must focus on “one thing at a time.”

In addition to championing the rights of women and Blacks, I understood that the next great question would be the rights of the laboring class and supported the movement to demand an eight-hour working day. And when the 14th and 15th Amendments were passed, I argued that they also granted citizenship to Indians and fought against the military removal of Indians from their land. I helped to organize public forums where Indians, such as Ponca chief Standing Bear, could tell their story and speak out against the country’s Indian removal and extermination policy.

Primary Source:

Introduction: Read the platform presented at the Labor-Reform Convention of September 4th, 1871, over which Wendell Phillips presided. The platform begins with "We affirm, as a fundamental principle" and ends with "shall aid in such importation."

"The Foundation of the Labor Movement" 1871

P. B. S. Pinchback

I was born free in 1837. My mother was a freed slave and my white planter father was my former enslaver. I was raised in Mississippi on my father's plantation, but when my father died, my mother and I moved to Ohio because she was afraid that the white side of the family would attempt to enslave us.

During the Civil War I fought as a Union solider in the all-Black 1st Louisiana Native Guard. I became one of the few Black soldiers to reach the rank of captain, but I decided to quit because of discrimination I faced from white officers. After the war, my family and I moved to Alabama, but quickly had to move again to New Orleans because of white supremacist violence.

It was in New Orleans where I decided to become politically active. In 1867, I was elected to the constitutional convention and played a role in crafting the 1868 Louisiana Constitution. Later that year I was elected state senator. Nearly half the Louisiana legislature was Black.

As a legislator, I championed the rights of those still in chains. Black political leaders across the South played an important role in the Cuban solidarity movement--an effort to support those leading the fight to end slavery in Cuba and support its independence from Spain. I was a leader of the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee. I helped to pass a resolution through the Louisiana legislature urging the U.S. Congress "to give material assistance" to help liberate enslaved Cubans. At the 1872 Convention of Colored Men in Louisiana, we placed defeating the "barbarous rule of Spanish authority in Cuba" alongside the effort to fight KKK violence.

In 1871, I briefly became the first African American governor when Governor Henry Warmoth was impeached. I also should have become the first Black U.S. senator from Louisiana, but the racist U.S. Senate refused to seat me. During my time in Louisiana politics, I served on the Louisiana State Board of Education and became the director of New Orleans public schools. I cared deeply about public education. In 1879, I helped found Southern University, a historically Black college.

Primary Source: Slavery in Cuba report by CASC 1872

“Resolutions presented at the Cuban Anti-Slavery Meeting,” December 13, 1872.

Introduction: As an activist fighting against slavery in Cuba, Pinchback would agree with the resolutions passed at the Cuban Anti-Slavery Meeting in New York City in 1872.

Whereas, We have watched with deep interest the struggle going on in that island for the past four years between the Cuban patriots and the Spanish government; it is therefore

Charlotte “Lottie” Rollin

I was born in 1849 to a free wealthy black family in Charleston, South Carolina. Education was important to my parents and they sent my four sisters and me to attend schools in the North. After the war, my sister Katherine and I opened and taught at a school for freed people in Charleston. I wanted to pass the benefits of education on to newly freed Black men and women.

I became well known as a clerk in the office of a South Carolina congressman. My sisters and I ran a salon known as the "Republican Headquarters," and used our political influence to fight for equal rights. I loved the poetry of Lord Byron and believed in his verse that those "who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." For me, a Black woman, this meant I must fight for full suffrage and political rights for women. When my sisters and I were interviewed by the New York Herald because of our political influence, I proposed the Republican Party run me for vice president in the upcoming election.

In 1869, I went before the South Carolina House of Representatives to make my case for women's suffrage. In 1870, I organized the first women's rights convention in South Carolina and formed the South Carolina Women's Rights Association. At a speech during a Women's Rights convention in 1870, I declared, "We ask for suffrage not as a favor, not as a privilege, but as a right based on the grounds that we are human beings and as such entitled to all human rights." The following year I led a rally at the state capitol demanding women's suffrage and in 1872, I was chosen as a delegate to the national convention of the American Woman Suffrage Association.

Although I was able to win several white and black Republicans to fight to amend the state constitution to give women the right to vote, the measure proved too controversial. After a heated debate in the legislature, which even included a fistfight, women's suffrage was defeated.

Please refer to this introduction about Rollin Sisters.

Primary Source: Lucy Stone's Ohio Speech, 1872.

https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/blackwells-extraordinary-family/lucy-stone-speeches-and-writings/mss1288001975/mss1288001975-2/

Introduction: As a black advocate for women's rights, Rollin had more in common with white women like Lucy Stone, who always championed rights for both black men and all women, than with white women like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who believed women's right to vote (and by implication - white women's right to vote) should come first, if a choice had to be made.

Woman has been slowly learning what the language of the resolution asserts, that the rights of men and women are the same. They are the same, because men and women are human beings, having a common origin and a common destiny. Every right which inheres in one human being must inhere in all. The human right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This is secured to men, but it has never been known that it belongs to women in the same way. But slowly woman has been winning her way up through the centuries until they have gained everything but the last stronghold, the last lever of power, which is the ballot, and we are her to-day in this Convention to help forward the claim of the women towards this end.

A fort-night ago this Convention had not been announced, and here is gathered this large audience, and a larger one gathered last night. After the announcement of the Convention, the women said, "Let us carry up a petition to the Legislature asking for the suffrage, that they may know how much we care about this," and in ten days nearly two thousand names were secured to a petition which was this morning presented to your Legislature.

Some persons who are on the edge of granting the suffrage to woman, wonder whether it will be best; and yet if you will only consider every single thing that has been gained for woman has been found best. It is not more than three or four hundred years ago when it was an unheard of for woman to write a book, as it is now to take part in government. Literary women were called "blue stockings," and laughed at, and they generally hid their names. But women's books grew in popular esteem until now and to-day the book that has had a circulation larger than any other is "Uncle Tom's Cabin," written by Harriet Beecher Stowe. The world said, if women write books, they will neglect their families, and scold their husbands; but they wrote books, and the world was a great deal better for it. …

In the world of woman's work there was time when women had only three occupations, she might be a housekeeper, that was always honorable and useful, but not profitable; she might be a seamstress, always poorly paid, or she might be a teacher, always under paid. Women were not allowed to go to college, if they went to school and studied arithmetic as far as the rule of three that was enough for them. A wall of granite reaching up to the heavens shut women up to these three occupations. … When women asked to be doctors, they were hunted down just as the women speakers had been, and men were not ashamed to stigmatize them in the papers as "she doctors." But the first women physicians were women of large culture and great purpose, and were not cowards. They hold on, and proved that they could be physicians. Mrs. Fowler, a neighbor of mine, in New Jersey, clears fifteen thousand dollars a year as a doctor. She earns it. She goes into a family where a mother's child is sick and her sympathy is as good as medicine. So that field is won and the world is better for it.

Then in business, women worked at the needle and were so poorly paid that Henry Ward Beecher said the woman sews with only the need between her and hell. She laid down the needle and went to other kinds of work. Women have gone into shops and proved themselves competent to manage machinery. One-half the retail stores in the North are occupied by women as clerks or owners. You can hardly go into a store to ask for pins or tape but you will find a woman to wait on you. Sometimes a man six feet high who ought to be building railroads or planting States (Laughter.) Stores are owned and successfully managed by women. … The speaker referred to the case of Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago, who has been admitted as a lawyer but is not permitted to practice because it has been decided in that state that a woman can not make a contract; neither can a lunatic or a fool. [Laughter ] She appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, and we shall soon see whether woman are entitled to be lawyers.

Woman have done all these things and have not ceased to be womanly. Many years ago when the system was raised Margaret Puller said "Let woman do anything if she can do it well. If she can do it, let her be an artist or a sea captain."… There is no question whether they can be machinists, telegraph operators or artists. They have succeeded in all these fields of industry and the world is better for their having done so.

Now they had come to the last point and that is suffrage. That they cannot give themselves, because gentlemen hold the key that keep them out. Within only ten days past a petition has been signed by nearly two thousand women, asking the Legislature to give them this right.

Gentlemen have said when the women asked it, they would grant this right. They did not wait for the negro to ask to give them suffrage; they did not wait for rebels to ask to give them suffrage back again. In Ohio the women, the fools, the lunatics and felons are all on a level politically.

Chief Justice Chase said to her, "I see no end to the good that will come to the country by woman suffrage; upon the electors, the elected, and the women themselves. So she would say in the good words of the Chief Justice, "I see no end to the good either." [Laughter and applause.]

L.S. petition To Mass Legislature 1873 To the Honorable Senate and House of Representatives of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in General Court Assembled. We, the Undersigned, Citizens and qualified voters of the Commonwealth, respectfully pray,

1. That you will pass such an Amendment to the Constitution, to be submitted to the People, as will enable Women who are citizens of the Commonwealth, to vote at all elections, upon the same terms as are prescribed in the case of male citizens. 2. And also that you will enact such laws as will enable Women who are citizens as aforesaid, to vote for all municipal and other officers, which they are not prohibited from doing by the Constitution of the State. 3. And also that you will declare, by a suitable Act, that women who are citizens as aforesaid, may be elected or appointed to any office, in the same manner as male citizens may be elected or appointed to the same.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Although I am known mostly for my work fighting for women's right to vote, early in my career I worked against slavery. After the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, I helped form the Women's National Loyal League (WNLL) to work toward a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. The badge for the WNLL represented a Negro, half-risen, breaking his own chains. The enslaved were freeing themselves during the war and we wanted our badge to reflect that. The WNLL gathered more than 400,000 signatures to support the 13th Amendment.

After the war, I helped to form the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to campaign for the rights of both women and Blacks. But most male abolitionists, like Wendell Phillips, believed that it was the "Negro's Hour" and that now was not the time to demand women's rights. They called women's suffrage an impossible demand - but they knew that only a few years earlier the abolition of slavery was also seen as impossible. For them, the alliance that abolitionists had built with the Republican Party was more important than women's rights.

When both Black suffrage and women's suffrage were on the ballot in Kansas, local Republicans came out against women's suffrage. In response, Susan B. Anthony and I brought pro-slavery, pro-women's suffrage Democrat George Francis Train to Kansas to help us win Democratic votes. Train also provided funds for our weekly women's rights newspaper, The Revolution. But this alliance with a pro-slavery Democrat split the AERA. I hoped that the government would extend the rights of citizenship to both African Americans and white women, but when it became clear that in the 14th and 15th amendments only Black men would be granted those rights, I opposed their passage. For me it was inconceivable that educated white women would still be denied the right to vote while the U.S. enfranchised "Africans, Chinese, and all the ignorant foreigners the moment they touch our shores."

Until 1872, I held out hope that African Americans, women, and labor could unite to form a new third party. But I gave up on that hope.

Primary Source:

Introduction: In the antebellum period, certain activists in the abolitionist movement embraced women's rights as well. Others saw this as a distraction. This division of focus continued after the Civil War. In 1866, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others create the American Equal Rights Association to advocate for suffrage for both women and blacks. Some activists disagreed with the approach, arguing the focus - for the moment - needed to be on black male suffrage. Below are excerpts from a speech Stanton gave at the first annual meeting of the new organization.

Excerpt from: Address to The First Anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association, May 9, 1867.

Ira Steward

By the time I was 19, I was working 12 hours a day as a machinist’s apprentice. I started to advocate for shorter hours and was fired. I was against slavery, and the same principles that led me to oppose the oppression of Black laborers in the South led me to demand the eight-hour day for all workers. I believed that after the Civil War the laborer felt that something of slavery remained, and something of freedom had yet to come.

Many people in the North critiqued slavery by arguing that enslaved people consumed less than freeworkers and that hurt the economy. I pointed out that free workers were paid little and forced to work long hours, so they also consumed very little. Most workers worked from sunup to sundown. An eight-hour day for 10-hour pay would raise the standard of living for all. When I first started making these arguments, many thought an eight-hour day was impossible, as most workers didn’t even have a 10-hour day. But after the war, the idea spread rapidly.

In 1865, I took these arguments to the Union of Machinists and Blacksmiths and the larger organization of working people that we were a part of, the Boston Trades Assembly. Both organizations endorsed the campaign for an eight-hour day. I became the organizer and president of the Boston Eight-Hour League. Within a year, eight-hour leagues were established all over the country. By 1867, state eight-hour laws had been passed in Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, New York, and Connecticut. In 1868, Congress enacted an eight-hour day for government employees. These laws, however, weren’t enforced and had many loop-holes, so most workers still worked long hours.

I continued to fight for eight hours and used my position in the labor movement to support Reconstruction in the South — even as many in the North turned against it. In 1877, the Boston Eight-Hour League, that I helped form, was one of the only U.S. labor organizations to oppose the removal of federal troops from the South. Unfortunately, many white workers remained against Black rights and the labor movement remained divided by race.

Primary Source: The Eight Hour Movement, 1865 speech (Excerpt)

Ira Steward was raised in Jacksonian-era Boston, where he was drawn into radical political circles. He trained as a machinist, and by the Civil War he was a leading figure in the New England labor movement. Unlike most labor leaders of the period, Steward embraced a political strategy to improving the conditions of workers and dedicated much of his life to building a movement for imposing legal limits on the length of the work day. A single worker or a single employer could not reduce working hours without being undercut by others, but a legal limit on the work day would force a general readjustment of wages. The effort bore fruit first in Massachusetts, which adopted a ten-hour law for women and children in 1874. At the core of Steward’s argument for shorter hours was the belief that workers needed more free time to develop better tastes and habits (and to better appreciate their own collective interest) and needed to be paid more to become effective consumers of manufactured goods.

“Well,” says a workingman, “I should certainly be very glad to work less hours, but I can scarce’y earn enough by working ten to make myself and family comfortable.”

Sir, as strange as it may seem to you at first blush, it is a fact that your wages will never be permanently increased until the hours of labor are reduced. Have you never observed that those who work the hardest and longest are paid the least, especially if the employment is very disagreeable, while those whose employment is more agreeable usually receive more, and many who do nothing receive more than either?

You are receiving your scanty pay precisely because you work so many hours in a day, and . . . reducing the Hours for the masses will eventually increase their Wages. . . .

Think then of the difference which will soon be observed in a man or woman emancipated by the Eight Hour system from Excessive Toil! Not the first day nor the first week, perhaps, but in a very little while.

The first feeling may be one merely of simple relief; and the time for a while may be spent, as are many of the Sabbaths, by the overworked, in sleeping and eating, and frequently in the most debasing amusements. The use which a man makes of his leisure, depends largely upon the use which has been made of him. If he has been abused, he will be pretty sure to abuse his first opportunities. . . .

Leisure, however, is neither positively good, or bad. Leisure, or Time is a blank—a negative—a piece of white paper upon which we stamp, picture, or write our past characters. . . .

John Stuart Mill says: “The secret for developing man, is to give him many duties to perform and many inducements to perform them.”

Mankind will be virtuous and happy when they have full power to choose between good and evil, with plenty of motives for deciding right. . . .

My theory is, 1st, That more leisure, will create motives and temptations for the common people to ask for more Wages.

2d. That where all ask for more Wages, there will be no motive for refusing, since Employers will all fare alike.

3d. That where all demand more Wages, the demand cannot be resisted.

4th. That resistance would amount to the folly of a “strike” by Employers themselves, against the strongest power in the world, viz., the habits, customs, and opinions, of the masses.

5th. That the change in the habits and opinions of the people through more leisure will be too gradual to disturb or jar the Commerce and enterprise of Capital.

6th. That the increase in Wages will fall upon the wastes of Society, in its Crimes, Idleness, Fashions, and Monopolies, as well as the more legitimate and honorable profits of Capital, in the production and distribution of Wealth, and

7th. In the mechanical fact, that the cost of making an article depends almost entirely upon the number manufactured, is a practical increase of Wages, by tempting the Workers through their new leisure to unite in buying luxuries now confined to the Wealthy, and which are costly because bought only by the Wealthy. . . .

Without attempting to settle, definitely, how much common labor is worth—for it is a broad question—I will make the claim that no man’s compensation should be so low, that it will not secure for himself and family a comfortable home—education for his children, and all of the influence to which he is entitled by his capacity, virtue and industry. As the present system of labor does not pay a majority of workers enough, we may conclude that something is wrong; and whatever our speculations upon the system, it must be clear that the masses will not insist upon more pay, without additional motives and temptations; and that all who do the work of the masses must receive their pay. . . . Change and improve the daily habits of the Laborers and they will raise their own pay in spite of any power in the Universe; and this can only be done by furnishing them with more leisure, or time! . . .

A reduction of Hours means more than an Increase in Wages. It means a more equal and just Distribution of Wealth. For, to increase Wages, without increasing the cost of Production, is more equal Distribution of Wealth.

A better Distribution of Wealth, means, at the same time, the gradual eradication of Speculation, Idleness, Public Debts, Interest, Fashionable extravagance, Woman’s endless Drudgery and Low wages, Prostitution, Intemperance, Corrupt Legislation, Land Monopoly, Polygamy and War.

Human life will be lengthened, less time will be lost in attending the sick, woman will become far more healthy, as well as beautiful, and men, as well as women, will be placed more upon their good behavior. . . .

We are sometimes asked “whether we think a man ought to have as much pay for Eight as for Ten hours’ Labor?”

It would be fair to ask this if we had been paid all we have really earned in the Ten hour system; or if those wages would pay us all we shall actually earn in Eight Hours; even admitting, for the sake of argument (what we do not believe), that two hours’ less time would result in one fifth less production. . . .

Capitalists tell us that they will not employ Labor unless they can make satisfactory profits. Our space is too limited to expose the absurdity of such remarks. The next generation will laugh at them. We 3 shall content ourselves now, by matching them with other statements. Unless the working classes are paid sufficient wages, they will not be able to buy certain articles which manufacturers and merchants are so eager to sell Capitalists remember us as Producers, to be paid as little as possible; but not as Consumers, to be paid enough to enable us to buy their commodities. . . . . . .

We have decided that THEY are making too much money!

They cut down OUR Prices!

We shall cut down THEIR Hours!

We submit to their “cut down” because there are enough to take our places if we resign them but whenever we are united enough to try the Eight Hour experiment, in spite of the opposition of the Employers, they will submit by paying the regular Ten hour wages, simply because they cannot hire men if they have not. . . .

We have learned that we cannot bring the Wages up to the Hours that we labor; we purpose, therefore, to bring down our Hours—nearer, at least, to our limited Wages. . . .

Our decision is that we don’t care whether we can do as much or not!—that we can do enough—that the world has grown rich, and that the time has come to set in motion the great natural causes which will secure a better Distribution of Wealth. We shall treat the Wealthy classes as tenderly and considerately as a young man should treat his grandmother. We shall remember their habits, and their prejudices even; but we are going to take possession—we, or our children to come after us—of the vast Wealth our industry has created. Peacefully—without armed resistance or the spilling of blood, or the destruction of property—as the ruling classes have always done before us—when they could not dominate—following, loyally, established principles and precedents, we shall accomplish our purpose so gradually and acceptably that men will wonder why they ever opposed us. . . .

Lucy Stone

I was the first woman from Massachusetts to earn a college degree, and used my education to fight for justice. Like many women's rights activists, I started as an abolitionist before the Civil War. I spoke out against slavery and for women's rights at a time when women were often prevented from speaking publicly.

After the war, I traveled with Susan B. Anthony to try to convince abolitionist organizations to merge with the women's movement to campaign for equal rights for all. I was frustrated that many abolitionists, who I had worked with for years, felt the need to champion the rights of Black men first. Nevertheless, in 1866 we formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA). I helped lead the AERA's campaign in Kansas in support of two state referenda that would have given the vote to African Americans and women. I spoke to so many crowds in Kansas during the first three months of the campaign that I lost my voice and had to return home. But when I left, the campaign took an ugly turn and I was "utterly disgusted" when Anthony brought racist Democrat George Francis Train to campaign for women's suffrage and stopped championing the referenda for Black suffrage.

Unfortunately, this split between those who believed we needed to fight for Black rights first, and those who wanted to prioritize women's suffrage, only grew larger. I tried to argue both against abolitionists Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips, who believed that "the cause of the Negro was more pressing than that of woman's," and against women's rights advocates like Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who began to associate themselves with racists in the Democratic Party.

Ultimately, however, Stanton and Anthony went too far when they came out against the 15th Amendment that gave Black men the right to vote. I and others who believed that the 15th Amendment was an important step in the right direction parted ways with Stanton and Anthony and created the American Woman Suffrage Association to continue to fight state by state for women's right to vote.

Primary Source: Ohio Speech, 1872.

https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/blackwells-extraordinary-family/lucy-stone-speeches-and-writings/mss1288001975/mss1288001975-2/

William Sylvis

I was born in Pennsylvania and became an iron molder when I was 18. Iron molding was a dangerous job. We worked with hot metal furnaces and were paid little. We lived in company houses and shopped at the company store — everything we needed to survive we had to buy from our employer. It was wage slavery. In 1857, I joined the Philadelphia molders union when we went on strike to oppose a wage cut. We lost the strike, but I became a leader in the union. I believed that if workers could unite, they could fight for higher wages and improve their situation and society. In 1859, I became president of the National Union of Iron Molders.

Although the Civil War freed 4 million Black people from chattel slavery, I argued that they were now added to the millions of white wage slaves in the nation. I wrote that “we are now all one family of slaves together, and the labor reform movement is a second emancipation proclamation.” I tried to further unite working people by forming the National Labor Union (NLU), the first national federation of labor organizations in the United States. In 1868, I was elected NLU president.

Most labor unionists were white men. I urged the NLU and the organizations affiliated with it to allow women and Black workers into the labor movement. I argued that this was the only way to prevent these groups from being used as strike-breakers. If we could unite the working people of our nation, white and Black, male and female, I believed we could form a powerful third party and take on the power of Wall Street.

I didn’t support Reconstruction in the South and favored the soonest possible reconciliation between the North and the former Confederacy, but I did fight for the NLU executive committee to invite all persons in the labor movement, regardless of color or sex, to our convention in 1869. Unfortunately, I died before the convention. The convention encouraged the organization of separate unions for whites and Blacks and expelled women suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony for urging newspapers to hire women during a printers’ strike.

Primary Source:

Abuse of The Elective Franchise, from The Life, Speeches, Labors & Essays of William H. Sylvis;

The demoralizing tendency of our popular elections must be apparent to every reflective mind. Old men cannot fail to notice the vast difference between the elections of the past and present; and none can view the change without painful emotions of sorrow. The time was when the elective franchise was looked upon as the most sacred agency of liberty and law--the true source of power--from which the just principles of a free government were derived. But it is a sad truth to confess that, as time progresses, we are prostituting this proud privilege to the basest purposes. Instead of being used to obtain a fair expression of opinion, the ballot-box has become an instrument of fraud and unworthy ambition--a mere engine in the hands of designing men to secure place and power, at the sacrifice of every manly principle.

It is useless to deny the fact that office is struck off to the highest bidder, in spite of all the guards that have been thrown around the ballot-box. Money is the power which influences primary meetings, delegate elections, and nominating conventions; and money enters the canvass as the most potent element of success--for in its train follow lying, gambling, defamation, whiskey-drinking, and untold vices. To this evil may be traced the many defalcations and swindles which yearly deplete State and National treasuries. The honest poor man is excluded from position, and reckless demagogues fill our offices because they have money to squander on elections; and, when elected, instead of legislating for the best interests of the masses, they only pander to the whims and caprice of the depraved and purchasable, to whom they are bound hand and foot. The question is seldom asked as to morals and capacity; but is requisite to know how much a candidate is worth, and how much he will spend--the last two essentials overriding all considerations of merit and capacity.

Look at the men who are generally nominated for the higher places, such as congressmen, sheriffs, and other profitable offices. Show us one poor man - a workingman - who occupies such a position. True, there may be exceptions as bankrupts in business, or those made poor by corrupting the ballot-box; but where can you point to one thus honored who came direct from the ranks of labor? Yet it is conceded, and history proves it, that many of our wisest statesmen, in the early history of this country, came from the plough, the anvil, the loom, and the workshop. And who will deny that the same degree of talent, the same adaptation to public affairs, can be found today in agricultural, manufacturing, and mechanical pursuits? If this class of men, in the past, could make better laws, and administer them with greater satisfaction -- if there was less of sectional animosity and more of general harmony under their rule -- why would not the same character of men in the present age, having the same feelings and interests, prove just as beneficial, and accomplish the same amount of good? It is a change in the character of the men we elect to office which produces and has produced more than half the troubles that have fallen upon us.

But who is responsible for these abuses? We answer: the very class which this political corruption proscribes -- the producers. If workingmen were to withdraw their support from demagogues who make a trade of politics, and bestow it upon those whose feelings and sympathies are with them, they would not today be petitioning in vain for those reforms which are denied by the present heartless occupants of our National and State legislative halls. With the remedy in their own hands, they refuse to use it. Led away by the siren song of the party, flattered by the ambitious and cheated by the successful, they repeat the same folly every year, and heed no warning, let it come with what force it may. Is it not time that we look more carefully to the first cause of our grievances - partial legislation?. While we elect the rich "clever fellows" to office, steeped in fashionable vices, and wedded to opposing interests, can we hope to obtain that just consideration to which our votes entitle us? From year to year these men use us as stepping-stones to power; but where can we point to an act, or an effort, emanating from one of them, which looks like gratitude, or expresses a reciprocal feeling for all the favors we bestow upon them? We have talent, integrity, and sobriety in the ranks of labor sufficient for all offices, from the highest to the lowest; we are competent to make suitable selections; we possess the numerical strength to elect them, and can do so without committing ourselves to the dogmas, or participating in demoralizing practices of any party.

If we resolve to do this, we resolve to accomplish another great reform. We shall no longer patronize grog-shops and restaurants, contribute to "refreshments for head-quarters" and come home to our families, at late hours, in a questionable condition. We shall set a better example to our sons and daughters, elevate the moral standard of workingmen, maintain a purer ballot-box, and convince the world that popular elections involve duties too solemn to be made the pretext for gambling, bacchanalian revelry, or a display of the more brutal instincts. Let the workingmen win the glory of eradicating the abuses of the elective franchise, and they will also win the respect and admiration of every good citizen in the land. They will do more--for they at once place themselves in a position to administer to their own wants without detracting from the interests of others, while coming generations will hail them as their deliverers from a thraldom which "rendered our elections a curse instead of a blessing."

W. J. Whipper

I was born free in Philadelphia, the son of a prominent abolitionist. During the Civil War, I volunteered to fight in the Union Army and at the end of the war was part of the occupying force in South Carolina. I became a lawyer in 1865 and tried to help Black people who were denied their legal rights. I also taught in a Freedman's Bureau school to educate newly freed men, women, and children. I moved to Beaufort, a city in the South Carolina Sea Islands, and along with Robert Smalls founded the first Republican political organization in South Carolina.

I was elected to the 1868 state constitutional convention in South Carolina and took a leading role, supporting free public education for all South Carolinians and equality before the law. I introduced a resolution to make South Carolina the first state to allow women to vote. I argued that the legal system we were creating would rest on "insecure foundations" until "women are recognized as the equal of men." Now that slavery was abolished, and delegates were meeting across the South to rewrite state constitutions, I knew there was a huge opportunity. We could have built a legal system of equality for all regardless of race or sex. Unfortunately, most of my fellow delegates felt that women's suffrage was too radical, and the amendment was voted down.

After the convention, I was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives as part of the first ever majority-Black state congress and continued to support women's suffrage. I married Frances Anne Rollin, the daughter of the most prominent free Black family in Charleston. Frances and her sisters ran a salon known as the "Republican Headquarters" and she became my closest political advisor. Frances' sister Lottie chaired the first-ever meeting of the South Carolina Women's Rights Association, which I supported. I served as a South Carolina Representative until 1876 and when the Democrats took over the state government, I fought against their efforts to disenfranchise Black voters.

Primary Source: Missisippi Senator Hiram Revels spoke in the U.S. Senate during a debate about segregation in Washington, D.C. schools. Like Revels, Whipper believed equality in education was paramount to the future of black Americans.

Excerpt from Lift Every Voice, African American Oratory, 1787-1900

Introduction: Missisippi Senator Hiram Revels spoke in the U.S. Senate during a debate about segregation in Washington, D.C. schools. Like Revels, Whipper believed equality in education was paramount to the future of black Americans.

MR. PRESIDENT, I rise to express a few thoughts on this subject. It is not often that I ask the attention of the Senate on any subject, but this is one on which I feel it is my duty to make a few brief remarks.

In regard to the wishes of the colored people of this city, I will simply say that the trustees of colored schools and some of the most intelligent colored men of this place have said to me that they would have before asked for a bill abolishing the separate colored schools and putting all children on an equality in the common schools if they had thought they could obtain it. They feared they could not; and this is the only reason why they did not ask for it before.

I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase. For example, let me remark that it matters not how colored people act, it matters not how they behave themselves, how well they deport themselves, how intelligent they may be, how refined they may be—for there are some colored persons who are persons of refinement; this must be admitted—the prejudice against them is equally as great as it is against the most low and degraded man you can find in the streets of this city or in any other place.

This Mr. President, I do seriously regret. And is this prejudice right? Have the colored people done anything to justify the prejudice against them that does exist in the hearts of so many white persons, and generally of one great political party in this country? Have they done anything to justify it? No, sir. Can any reason be given why this prejudice should be fostered in so many hearts against them simply because they are not white? I make these remarks in all kindness, and from no bitterness of feeling at all.

Mr. President, if this prejudice has no cause to justify it, then we must admit that it is wicked, we must admit that it is wrong; we must admit that it has no the approval of Heaven. Therefore, I hold it to be the duty of this nation to discourage it, simply because it is wicked, because it is wrong, because it is not approved of by Heaven. …

Sir, this prejudice should be resisted. Steps should be taken by which to discourage it. Shall we do so by taking a step in this direction, if the amendment now proposed to the bill before us is adopted? Not at all. That step will rather encourage, will rather increase this prejudice; and this is one reason why I am opposed to the adoption of the amendment.

Mr. President, let me here remark that if this amendment is rejected, so that the schools will be left open for all children to be entered into them, irrespective of race, color, previous condition, I do not believe the colored people will act imprudently. I know that in one or two of the late insurrectionary states the legislatures passed laws establishing mixed schools, and the colored people did not hurriedly shove their children into those schools; they were very slow about it. In some localities where there was but little prejudice or opposition to it, they entered them immediately; in other they did not do so. I do not believe that it is in the colored people to act rashly and unwisely in a manner of this kind.

But, sir, let me say that it is the wish of the colored people of this District, and of the colored people over this land, that this Congress shall not do anything which will increase that prejudice which is now fearfully great against them. If this amendment be adopted you will encourage that prejudice; you will increase that prejudice; and, perhaps, after the encouragement thus given, the next step may be to ask Congress to prevent them from riding in the streetcars, or something like that. I repeat, let no encouragement be given to a prejudice against those who have done nothing to justify it, who are poor and perfectly innocent, as innocent as infants. Let nothing be done to encourage that prejudice. I say the adoption of this amendment will do so.

Mr. President, I desire to say here that the white race has no better friend than I. The Southern people know this. It is known over the length and breadth of this land. I am true to my own race. I wish to see all done that can be done for their encouragement, to assist them in acquiring property, in becoming intelligent, enlightened, useful, valuable citizens. I wish to see this much done for them, and I believe God makes it the duty of this nation to do this much for them; but at the same time, I would not have anything done which would harm the white race.

Sir, during the canvass in the state of Mississippi I traveled into different parts of that state, and this is the doctrine that I everywhere uttered: That while I was in favor of building up the colored race, I was not in favor of tearing down the white race. Sir, the white race need not be harmed in order to build up the colored race. The colored race can be built up and assisted, as I before remarked, in acquiring property, in becoming intelligent, valuable, useful citizens, without one hair upon the head of any white man being harmed.

Let me ask, will establishing such schools as I am now advocating in this District harm our white friends? Let us consider this question for a few minutes. By some it is contended that if we establish mixed schools here a great insult will be given to the white citizens, and that the white schools will be seriously damaged. All that I ask those who assume this position to do is to go with me to Massachusetts, to go with me to some other New England states where they have mixed schools, and there they will find schools in as prosperous and flourishing a condition as any to be found in any part of the world. They will find such schools there; and they will find between the white and colored citizens friendship, peace and harmony.

When I was on a lecturing tour in the state of Ohio, I went to a town, the name of which I forget. The question whether it would be proper or not to establish mixed schools had been raised there. One of the leading gentlemen connected with the schools in that town came to see me and conversed with me on the subject. He asked me, “Have you been to New England, where they have mixed schools?” I replied, “I have sir.” “Well,” said he, “please tell me this: does not social equality result from mixed schools?” “No, sir; very far from it,” I responded. “Why,” said he, “how can it be otherwise?” I replied “I will tell you how it can be otherwise, and how it is otherwise. Go to the schools and you see there white children and colored children seated side by side, studying their lessons, standing side by side and reciting their lessons, and perhaps in walking to school they may walk together; but that is the last of it. The white children go to their homes; the colored children go to theirs; and on the Lord’s day you will see those colored children in colored churches, and the white family, you will see the white children there, and the colored children at entertainments given by persons of their color.” I aver, sir, that mixed schools are very far from bringing about social equality.

Then, Mr. President, I hold that establishing mixed schools will not harm the white race. I am their friend. I said in Mississippi, and I say here, and I say everywhere, that I would abandon the Republican party if it went into any measures of legislation really damaging to any portion of the white race; but it is not in the Republican party to do that.

In the next place, I desire to say that school boards and school trustees and railroad companies and steamboat companies are to blame for the prejudice that exists against the colored race, or to their disadvantage in those respects. Go to the depot here, now, and what will you see? A well-dressed colored lady with her little children by her side, whom she has brought up intelligently and with refinement, as much so as white children, comes to the cars; and where is she shown to? Into the smoking car, where men are cursing, swearing, spitting on the floor; where she is miserable, and where her little children have to listen to language not fitting for children who are brought up as she endeavored to bring them up to listen to.

Now, sir, let me ask, why is this? It is because the white passengers in a decent, respectable car are unwilling for her to be seated there? No, sir; not as a general thing. It is a rule that the company has established, that she shall not go there.

Let me give you proof of this. Some years ago, I was in the state of Kansas and wanted to go on a train of cars that ran form the town where I lived to St. Louis, and this rule prevailed there, that colored people should go into the smoking car. I had my wife and children with me and was trying to bring up my children properly, and I did not wish to take them into the smoking car. So I went to see the superintendent who lived in that town, and I addressed him thus: “Sir, I propose to start for St. Louis tomorrow on your road, and wish to take my family along; and I do not desire to go into the smoking car. It is all that I can do to stand it myself, and I do not wish my wife and children to go there and listen to such language as is uttered there by men talking, smoking, spitting, and rendering the car very foul; and I want to ask you now if I cannot obtain permission to take my family into a first-class car, as I have a first-class ticket?” Said he: “Sir, you can do so; I will see the conductor and instruct him to admit you.” And he did admit me, and not a white passenger objected to it, not a white passenger gave any evidence of being displeased because I and my family were there. … Mr. President, I have nothing more to say. What I have said I have said in kindness; and I hope it will be received in that spirit.

reconstruction mixer/NYT Working Women's Assoc 12.22.1868.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Testimony about KKK.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Colloquy with Colored Ministers.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Myers Colored National Labor Union 1869.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Phillips, Wendell Speeches.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Cuban Anti Slavery meeting 1872.pdf

JOHNS

SLAVERY IN CUBA.

r^ A REPORT

OK THE

PROCEEDINGS OF THE MEETING, «

HELD AT

COOPER INSTITUTE,

NEW YORK CITY, DECEMBER 13, 1872.

Newspaper Extracts, Official Correspondence,

ETC., ETC.

CUBAN ANTI-SLAVERY COMMITTEE.

S. R. SCOTTROX, Chairman.

HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET, Secretaby.

OFFICE 3t;

^ ^ NO. 62 BOWERY (ROOMS 2 & 3),

' i NEW YORK.

/, 7

POWERS. MACGOWAN & SLIPPER, PRINTERS. >

StTN BciLDLNs, Cob. Nassau and Frank-Tobt Strbets, Nkw York

1 '

. .-'jJ

SLAVERY IN CUBA.

The Colored People of the United States, who have so re-

cently been invested with the rights of citizens of our Repub-

lic, have, very naturally, from our own experience of the evil

effects of slavery in this country, been particularly interested

in the condition of five hundred thousand of our brethren,

now held as slaves in the Island of Cuba, and have watched,

with painful interest, the struggle that has been going on in

that Island during the past four years, between the Cuban pa-

triots and the Spanish Government. Were it not for the fact

above alluded to, of our own condition in the past, we feel

ne*ertheleBS that as intelligent citizens, having the cause of

human freedom deeplj^ implanted within us, the information

we have from the daily journals and ofiicial correspondence,

both of our Government and the Government of Great Britain,

on the affairs of that island, would have suggested to us the

propriety of some movement on our part, in the interest of

freedom, humanity and christian civilization, which we believe

should be the especial care of all good people.

In the early part of December, 1872, the following call was

circulated for a meeting, which was held in the great hall of

Cooper Institute, at which time a committee was appointed

to publish the proceedings of said meeting, and other informa-

tion, and to take such action as the committee might deem proper, to forward the cause of liberty, in the Island of Cuba.

To the Colored Citizens of the United States :

Now that we are confirmed in the pogsession of our liberty, and have been so bountifully provided with all the requisites of Freemen, it ill be

comes us to sit idly by, while five hundred thousand of our bretliren groan

beneath the chains of slavery at our very doors, in the Island of Cuba. We would therefore ^nite our voices and strength in favor of their just

rights, and in behalf of the Cuban Patriots, who have already decreed and put in practice the doctrine of the equality and freedom of all men. \AV

view with abhorrence the policy of the Spanish Government during the

past four years in that island, both for the unnecessary and inhuman butcheries that have taken place under it« rule, and for the tenacity with

which they cling to the barbarous and inhuman institution of Slavery.

It is therefore resolved to hold a meeting at Cooper Institute, on the

evening of December 13, 1872, when proper action will be taken to ad-

vance the cause of freedom.

The meeting will be addressed by Rev. Henry- Highland Garnet, D.D., S. R. SCOTTRON, and others.

PETER W. DOWNING. J. C. MOREL. JOHN PETERSON. PHILIP A WHITE PETER W. RAY. JOHN J. ZUILLE. DAVID ROSELL. T. S. W. TITUS.

SAMUEL R. SCOTTRON

Agreeably to the duties and powers conferred upon them,

the committee have carefully compiled the following report of

the speeches delivered and resolutions adopted at that time,

also a brief synopsis of a meeting held in the city of Boston,

Mass., about the same time, together with extracts from leading

papers, official correspondence, etc., all more or less calcula-

ted to give our people the latest information in reference to

Cuba. The committee believe that the prompt and united

action of our people at the present time will hasten the long

wished for day, when the foul blot of human r^lavery and the

slave trade shall he forever removed and all the inhabitant?

of the western waters be absolutely free.

Cuban Anti-slavery Mkettxg, hkld at Cooper Institcte,

December 13, 1872.

The meeting was called to order by S. R. Scottron, who nominated Dr. P. W. Ray, of Brooklyn, as chairman, and

Chas. E. Pindell, of Boston, secretary.

The call for the meeting was read, after which the follow-

ing resolutions were presented :

Whereas, We, colored citizens of the United States, having become pos-

sessed of the rights of freemen, after many years' experience of the deg-

radation and evil effects of human slavery, remembering full well the

cruelrieBof family separation, of the lash, constant toil and pain, of inequal-

ity before the law ; we are therefore deeply impreesed with the condition

of the five hundred thousaud of our brethren in the Island of Cuba, who are now iu a stale of slavery, undergoing the same sad experience of our-

selves in the past, being separated mother from child, husband from wife,

brother from sister, and toiling constantly under the lash of the tyrant

master ; and

Wliereas, We have watched with deep interest the struggle j?oing on

in that island for the past four years between the Cuban patriots and the

Spanish Government ; it is therefore

Resohed, That it is with feelings of great apprehension and concern that

we view the indisposition or inability of the Spanish Government to enforce

any measure in favor of the abolition of slavery in the Island of Cuba, be-

ing aware that every measure in that direction has heretofore met with the

most violent opposition of the Spaniards in authority on that island.

Resolved, That after a careful survey of the situation, as collected from

official correspondence and other information and evidences of the condi-

tion and disposition of the respective combatants, it is our opinion that the

success of the Spanish arms will tend to rivet more firmly the chains of

slavery on our brethren, re-establishing it where it does not now exist,^ re-

storing the horrors of the African slave trade'and the Coolie traffic, and in-

definitely postpone the abolition of the worst of evils that ever disgraced

an enlightened and Christian age, that the success of the Cuban patriots

will immediately give to the whole inhabitants of the island, freedoiS and

and equality before the law.

Resolved, That the Spanish Government in that island, by their barba-

rous edicts and inhuman butcheries, have fully demonstrated their want of

human sympathy, and their inability to entertain that appreciation of the

rights of others which should appear conspicuous in the conduct of all

Christian people, and give us no hope, in the event of their success, of the

final freedom of the inhabitants of the whole island.

Resolved, That we, therefore, after four years' patient waiting, deem it

our duty, and do hereby petition our government at Washington, the Pres-

ident and Congress of the United States, to accord to the Cuban Patriots

that favora')le recognition that four years* gallant struggle for freedom

justly entitles them to.

Mr. S. R. ScoTTEON then addressed the audience in support

of the resolutions.

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentleoaen : Amotion for liberty

is always in order. In support of the resolutions which have

been offered for adoption, allow me to occupy your attention

with a few remarks in support of the assertions and recom-

mendations contained therein, and to show you the actual

necessity for our immediate action ; for the voice of five hun-

dred thousand enslaved appeals to us from the Gulf. The

cause of humanity demands our immediate attention. Citizens

of the Republic, you who know so well how to sympathize with

the downtrodden and oppressed, while you are enjoying the

blessings of freedom, the voice "f live hundred thousand of

our brethren in chains is heard, demanding an equal chance

in the race of life. The soil of Cuba is polluted with the

curse of human slavery. The exigency of the situation de-

mands our immediate action. Was not the fact before us, it

would seem impossible that the colored people of this country,

so lately possessed of their liberty and right to citizenship, could

refrain so long from giving some expression of their sentiment

on the question of slavery in the Island of Cuba. A desire to

abstain from pressing upon our government any measure which

might interfere with its foreign policy during the pendency

of the Alabama (j^uestion, and as good citizens should, ofter

no encouragement to a spirit that might create a breach of

our government's declared neutrality in the affaii-s of that is-

land, has no doubt been the cause of <jur silence. Four years

now have passed since the iirst blow was struck for freedom

in Cuba, since which time the cause of liberty has oft

trembled in the balance, l)ut by the grace of an overruling

Providiiuce staud> to-day in her majesty and asks nothing>f>f

the world but an equal chance with that of her oppressoi's,

in order to crown her galla.it etforts with victory. Shall the

four million in our own land, who have so lately Tasted of the

bitter fruit of slavery, stand idly by while a half million of our

brethren are weighed down with anguish and despair at their

unha|)py lot? or shall we rise up as one man and with one ac-

cord demand for them simple and exact justice t Indeed, we look back but a very brief period to the time when it was

necessary for other men to hold conventions, appoint com-

mittees and form societies, having in view the liberation of four

millions among whom were ourselves ; but, thanks to the ge-

nius of free government, free schools and liberal ideas, all the

outgrowth of an enlightened and Christian age, we are en-

abled in the brief space of ten years to stand, not only as tree-

men ourselves, l)ut with voices and with power to demand the

liberation of five hundred thousand of our brethren, who are

afflicted with the curse of human slavery. Although the task

before us seems weighted with difficulties, and those whom we propose to free are not within our grasp, being separated

from our own country and under the hand of a foreign gov-

ernment, nevertheless, all the these difficulties can be success-

fallj Burniounted, and the glorious blessings of freedom car-

ried to tlionsande of our fellow beings. In the rapid strides

made by our Government toward human equality in the past

few yeai-s, and the gradual extinction of caste prejudice, neces-

sarily concomitant of the institution of slavery, creates in me the sanguine hope, that the time is not distant when all men,

everywhere, will be free. Our own Republic, as the pioneer

of this great work, has placed herself foremost among chris-

tian nations and has commenced a work that will not be com-

plete till all nations, recognizing our later civilization, shall

be educated up to our own standard of even-handed justice to

mankind. President Grant, in his late annual message, very

wit^ely says, with reference to the Cuban revolution, " 1 can-

not doubt that the continual maintenance of slavery is among

the strongest inducements to the continuance of the strife.

A terrible wrong is the natural cause of a terrible evil."

Spain having pioneered African slavery on this continent

more than three centuries ago, and having clung to the in-

stitution in violation of treaty obligations and in defiance of

thf humanitarian precedents of all christian nations, still dis-

graces civilization and violates every just sentiment in the fu-

tile effort to continue its existence, in the remnant of her

possessions near our own country. The gallant Cubans, who have battled heroically under a banner which is the symbol

of manhood equality, have for more than a quarter of a cen-

tury, insisted upon the abolition of slavery both in Cuba and

Porto Rico. And among the first of the official acts of the

Cuban Republic was to declare the unconditional emancipa-

tion of the slaves within its jurisdiction (applause), and to

make constitutional promises that '' all inhabitants of the Re-

public are absolutely /'r(?(?," and for this freedom and the right

to govern themselves have they battled nobly, in the face of

the most disheartening obstacles that ever beset any people

in their struggle for liberty. Before entering upon this work

it became my duty to ascertain the exact position of the two

parties now striving for the mastery in the Island of Cuba,

and to make sure, with which party could we unite, to secure

immediate and unconditional freedom to the half million of

enslaved, who for years have tilled the soil of Cuba and

brought untold wealth to their S})anish masters and have

fastened the chains of slavery on themselves. This. question

has been plainly answered. The present laws and practices

of the Cuban Patriots gives us every assurance that they are

the party of freedom. As we ha%'e already said, they

immediately, at the outbreak of the revolution, declared

that '• all the inhabitants of their Republic are abso-

lutely free." We find from authentic and reliable

sources that an actual state of freedom exists among all

classes, that the colored inhabitants battle side by side with

the white, holding the rank of officers, and in num3rous

instances, colored officers commanding white troops. As an

evidence of the animus of the Spanish Government in this

connection, whenever these colored soldiers are captured in

battle they are immediately remitted to a condition of servi-

tude. In support of this assertion I will read an extract from

the speech of Senor Eduardo Benot, in the Spanish Senate,

October 18th, 1672. He says ; '' Spain has reserved to herself

" the sad privilege of upholding slavery ; but the fact is, my

" lords, that ever since April, 1SG9, the insurrectionists have " made a constitution, and in one of its articles is decreed the

" immediate abolition of slavery. The insurrectionists, from '' the very fact of being so, have set their slaves free ; but the

" Government, in virtue of the extraordinary proceeding of

*' appropriation, has been converting these freemen into

" slaves, an J their number has already reached the respectable

" total of 50,000 men or more. What then does the Govern-

*'ment intend to do with these 50,000 slaves, and why does *' Spain keep free men in slavery, thus making slaves of men ''that are free instead of o:ivinor freedom to slaves." The

laws and practices of the Spanish Government convince us

and the civilized world that they have not imbibed, in the

least, a taste for free institutions. Spain, true to her ancient

history as foremost among the most barbarous of all nations

who profess to have founded government on the divine pre-

cepts of our Lord, she clings tenaciously to an institution

which has always followed in the wake of her victories and

authority. She it was, who having grasped the islands of the

Gmf and a large portion of the American continent, intro-

duced such severities as killed off entirely the native inhabit-

ants of the islands, and almost every aborigiuee in the vast

continental territory under her rule, and when the native

element, under the pressure of hard taskmasters, inhuman

butcheries, and every species of inhumau treatment, had

melted away, Spain fell still deeper and filled her cup of in-

famy to running over by entering into the African Slave

Trade, in order to repeople the islands with Afric's more

hardy sons, and who are with her to-day. God grant it may be our province to divest her of this portion of her little

greatness, and she be made to respect the spirit of the age,

which can tolerate nothing but liberty. Now that our race

enjoy all the rights of freemen in our Republic and, as a con-

sequence, are respected as men everywhere, it is meet and

proper that we should use all our efforts to ameliorate the

condition of our brethren in other lands, and endeavor to

destroy slavery wherever it exists. Let the colored people of

America avail themselves of the sacred right of petition to

assist the struggling patriots of Cuba, and disenthrall from the

most tyrannical slavery five hundred thousand of our brethren

nowhtild as chattel slaves by the government of Spain. The

history of our government is full of instances of the sympathy

of the Republic being extended to people struggling for the

right of self-government. Notably and prominent as instances

stands out the conduct of our government toward the South

and Central American Republics, when they were endeavor-

ing to throw ofi" the Spanish yoke. These powers on the

central and southern portions of our continent, in relation to

Cuba, followed the precedent created by our own people, and

took occasion as early as' 1869 to concede the Cuban Republic

belligerent rights (applause), and in one case, that of the Re-

public of Peru, recognized the independence of the Cuban

Republic. International law, undoubtedly, prescribes a cer-

tain line of conduct in dealing with foreign governments dur-

ing a revolution ; much is required of the revolutionists in

order to entitle them to a favorable recognition. The prudent

statesman, no doubt, will exact the last requirement before he

will advocate their cause; but high above all other laws

stands that of right and justice. I hold that that is not law

which has not justice for its basis. I repeat, a motion for

freedom is always in order, and demands the su[)port of every

man. The philanthropist should not be swallowed up in the

statesman. Wherever oppression is—wherever a system of

human slavery exists—there exists a crime against God and

man, revolting to the inborn sense of every son of freedom.

There it is our right to strike, and, by our utmost endeavors,

secure the triumpli of freedom and equality. There is no dif-

ficult problem in this question of liberty a1)0ut which we may

tax our brains for one moment : indeed our own national

Declaration of Independence, in a l)rief but sublime passau'e.

rankiujz: with the sreatest utterances of the w*>rld's history,

declares "that all men are born with certain inalienable rights,

among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

It does not confine itself to any set of men in an}' particular

territory, but it says all men. Then, if all men are entitled

or endowed with certain inalienable rights, may not all men

combine in supjjorting the sained Surely an expression ot

sympathy is the least we can do toward so great a cause.

In the |)resent struggle in the Island of Cuba, we find, after

a most careful examination, there are just two parties—the

one endeavoring to establish slavery, and the (jther to estal-

lish freedom. (Applause.) I wish it were possible to present

yuu in detail all the facts which drive me to this ciun.hision.

I lii^ld in my hand a document prepared in (ireat Britain, tor

the use oi the British Parliament, giving the corrospondeTice

of the Foreign Office with the government of Spain. 1 will

read from page IP) of this pamphlet an address from the

'" British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society'' on this sul)ject

ADDRES3.

To the Bight Honorable the Earl Ghanville, K.G., Her Majesty's Stcretary of

State f&r Foreign Affairs.

My Lord,

It is with great regret that the Committee <jf the British and Foreign

Anti-Shivery Society finds itself obliged once more respectfully to call the

attention of Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Arltiird

to the ritate of the island of Cuba, in reference to slavi-ry and the Slave

Trade.

The Committee continues to receive information from various sources

on the deplorable condition of Cuba, and of the determination of the

volunteer or Spanish party to maintain slavery in the island at any cost,

and if triumphant to revive the Slave Trade. They observe that tliese

opinions are fully confirmed by statements in the Blue Books recently

laid before Parliament.

Under these circumstances, and in view of the fact that nearly every

slave in Cuba is entitled to freedom under British Treaty, the Committee had hoped to see some traces in the Parliamentary papers of a more vigor-

ous and direct moral intervention with Spain by Her Majesty's present

Government than they are able to discover.

From reliable information, received through America and from other

quarters, the C'omiiiittee believe that the Slave Trade han already recom-

menced, tliat some cargoet* of slaves are from time to time being landed in

small detachments on some of the remote jiarts of the island.

It is supposed in the United States that these slaves are brought to

Cuba from the East Coast of Africa, but on this point no official informa-

tion api)ears to have been published.

The Committee respectfully suggest that some good might arise

were Her Majesty's Government to extend the functions and increase the

powers of the Commissioner.s in Cuba.

At the same time the enormous price paid for the hire of slaves in

Cuba, is a temptation so great, that the only sure prevention is the aboli-

tion of slavery itself.

The facts disclosed or confirmed by the Parliamentary papers, that

the Spanish Government are powerless to control the volunteer or Sjjanish

party in Cuba, and that this party, if successful in crushing the Cubans,

will not only perpetuate slavery, but reopen the Slave Trade, emphatically

show that the time has arrived when her Majesty's Government are called

upon to assert its Treaty rights in insisting on the liberation of the

slave population illicitly imported, and who are virtually the wards of

Great Britain.

The present state of afiairs admits of no delay.

The Committee would respectfully but very earnestly entreat Her

Majesty's Government to invite the co-operation of the Government of the

Unhed States in friendly efforts to establish complete freedom and per-

manent peace in Cuba, which has been so long devastated by a ruthless

civil war, carried on between the partisans of slavery and the advocates of

freedom.

Signed on behalf of the Committee,

(Signed) JOSEPH COOPER, )

EDMD. STURGE, [ Honorary Secretaries.

ROBT. ALSOP, )

THOMAS PHILLIPS, Amniaut Hecretary.

27 Niic Broad Street, London, Juiy 10, 1871.

I believe tliis is sufficiently plain to need no comment. It

fully and explicitly states that the facts confirm them in the

opinion that, should the Spanish government succeed in

crushiiij^- the Cubans, it will not only perpetuate slavery^ but

reopen the slave trade. Tiien I would ask you. fellow-

citizens, does not the exigency of the situation demand imme-

diate action i la not the situation extremely perilous to

liberty i Have we not already stood still too long i< We are

driven to the irresistible conclusion that the interests of hu-

manity are inseparably connected with the cause of the Cuban

patriots. (Applause.) There may be those })erhaps, who are

opposed to introducing anything of a political nature in con-

nection with that of emancipation. This may be proper in

their minds; but shall we allow the cause of freedom to sutfer

that we might pursue a line of conduct very becoming to

statesmen, perhaps, but ill-becoming to philanthropists ? Xo ;

let us be resolved on one thing: loe must have J^reedom.

(Applause.)

Let me occupy your attention still further upon this subject

by reading from pages 24 and 39 of the same pamphlet the

opinion and conclusions of Earl Granville, who has particularly

interested himself in this question :

No. 38.

Ekvrl OrantilU to Mr. Layard.

Sir, Foreign Office, November 24, 1871.

The account given in your recent despatches of the position of the Slavery

question in Spain, and the apparently small prospect of further legislation,

are so discouraging and unsatisfactory, that Her Majesty's Government do not feel justified in maintaining any lonj^er the silence and reserve they

have hitherto observed upon a question in which they have a Treaty rtght

to interfere. I refer to the position of the negroes captured and held in

slavery in Cuba under the name of " emancipados " aiuc'i the date of the

Treaty by which both Spain and Enjrlaud mutually agreed, not only im-

mediately to set free all slaves captured by eitlier nation under the provi-

sions of the Treaty, but also, upon the requisition of either of the Con-

tracting Parties, to afford the fullest information as to the state and condi

tJon of the negroes, with a view of insuring the due execution of the

Treaty in this respect.

The 4th, 5th, and 6th Articles of Annex C to the Treaty provided that

regulations should be adopted with the humane object of improving and securing honestly and faithfully to the emancipated negroes, the enjoy-

ment of their acquired liberty, good treatment, a knowledge of the Chris-

tian religion, and their advancement in morality and civilization, and of

providing sufficient instruction for them in mechanical arts, in order that

they might gain their own livelihood as artizans, mechanics, or servants.

A register was, moreover, to be kept of the negroes (a copy of which

was to be furnished every six months to the mixed Commission), showing

the existence of the negroes emancipated under the Treaty, the disease of

such as had died, the improvement made in their condition, and the pro-

gress made in their instruction, both religious and moral, as also in the

arts of life.

These are the solemn obligations that were contracted by both England

and Spain in this Treaty. But how far have they been observed by

Spain ?

It has been officially reported that the so-called emancipados have, on

their arrival at the Havana, been hired out to the planters by the author!

ties for a money consideration, that their purchase and sale has been

openly carried on, and that, in the case of the death of a slave, an emanci-

pado, whose death was then reported, was made to assume the slave's

name, so that a large proportion of emancipados have been returned as

dead, wlio were really living and in slavery,

It is true that the Law of the 23d of June, 1870, gave to the emancipados

the long-deferred privilege of at once entering upon the full exercise of

tlie rights of free men, but it remains to be seen whetlier this provision

has been faithfully fulfilled, and in fact, the Cuban authorities can hardly

have interpreted it literally, inasmuch as subsequently to the promulgation

of the Law, the Captain General issued various separate Decrees granting

the liberty, which the law secured to all, to only a portion of the emanci-

pados.

I have thus shortly reviewed the history of the emancipados, and the

claims of Her Majesty's Government to intercede on their behalf You

are aware of the reasons that have induced Her Majesty's Government to

refrain from making any representation in favor of these unfortunate men

up to this time, and even to resist the pressure put upon Government both

in and out of Parliament to interfere in their behalf.

They have not hesitated to express their entire confidence in the solemn

assurances and pledges given by the late and former Spanish Governments

that the Law of the 23d of June was only the initiation of a more complete

and thorough measure of abolition ; and they were most unwilling to press

the Spanish Government unnecessarily in a course of policy which they

we* inaugurating spontaneously, which necessarily required time for its

development, and which Her Majesty's Government were confidentially

and repeatedly assured would shortly lead to the entire abolition of slavery,

and to the consequent freedom of the emancipados.

Two Sessions of the Cortes have passed since these promises were made,

and no further legislation has, to my knowledge, been attempted by the

Government. The difficulties arising from the state of affairs in Cuba

were alleged as a justification for this delay, and Her Majesty's Govern-

ment admitting the validity of the excuse, refrained from pressing the

question during the last Session of the Cortes.

But aflfiiirs appear to have completely changed since that time.

Notwithstanding that a petition has been presented to Congress by the

Deputies from Porto Rico itself, submitting an admirable scheme for the

immediate and total abolition of slavery in that island (compensation to

the slave-owners being made from a loan to be raised or. the revenues of

the island, which show an annual tsurplus); notwithstanding the admitted

fact that, from the small number of slaves in the island, the feeling of the

planters, and the excellent labor regulations in force there, the emancipa-

tion of the slaves might be effected with ease and security ; notwithstand-

ing that petitions have been presented from other important places in

favor of the thorough and immediate abolition of slavery; and notwiih-

standing the exertions of a considerable number of able and determined

men, to whom all credit and honor are due—these efforts are likely to be de-

feated by the uncompromising opposition of the pro-slavery party in Cuba,

who are determined to resist, by all means in their power, the introduction

of any further measure for the abolition of slavery, and by the indisposi-

tion of the Spanish Government to grapple with the difficulties of the

question. T am unwilling to say a single word that could wound the sen-

sitiveness of the Spanish Government upon this subject, nor do Her Ma- jesty's Government pretend in the slightest degree to interfere in the

internal affairs of Spain, or to dictate any conrse of legislation to that Gov-

ernment, but they have a just claim, by virtue of the Treaty, to interfere

on behalf of the emancipados, and if the Spanish <Tovernment neglect to

take advantage of this opportunity of dealing with tlie ([uestiou of slavery

in Porto Rico, when their hands are so strengthened by the petition pre-

sented to Congress by the deputies from that island, and from other influ-

fntial quarters, Her Majesty's Government can only reluctantly come to

the conclusion that there is no further hope of any spontaneous action on

the part of the Spanish Government in dealing with the matter, and they

must consequently fall l)ack upon their Treaty right in fnvor of tiie

emancipados.

I leave entirely to your discretion the use that sliould be made of this

despatch, and the time and mode of communicating its contents to the

Spanish Government. I am, &c.,

(Signed) GRANVILLE.

P. S.— I transmit to you a copy of a despatch, received since the above

was written, from the Acting British Consul-General in Cuba, substan-

tiating the statements above made concerning the emancipados.

No. 45.

Acting Consul-General Crawfori to Earl Grantille.—(Received JSotember

13.)

(Extract.) Hanuui, October 21, 187L

I have the honor to acknowledge the recei[)t of Mr. Hammond's de-

spatch of the i;]th ultimo, enclosing a translation of 11 li'tirr from Gent-ral

Cordoba to Her Majesty's Charge d'Affairs at .Nfadrid, embodying the ob

servations of the Captain-General of Cuba, upon some of Mr. Dunlaps statements respecting the condition and prospects of the negroes called

"emancipados" in Cuba.

Upon careful revision of my Report upon this subject, contained in

my despatch of the 28th of July last, I do not find anything to rectify,

neither do I see that General Valmaseda's statements contradict that Re-

port, except as regards the use of the lash.

His Excellency cannot answer for the acts of the late administration,

and, as far as he is concerned, I have every reason to believe that he has

adopted all possible means to prevent coercion in the contracts entered

into by the emancipados ; but in the Island of Cuba it is extremely ditTi-

cult to guard against abuses, especially when it concerns an unfortuna'e

class of negroes. The horrible treatment of the emancipado.-^ forms, in-

deed, a very dark page in the history of this island.

W'hether the emancipado is allowed to exercise liis own free will in

the choice of a master, or not, does not in any way alter the injustice

practiced toward him in denying him his liberty—in Ijinding him to serve

for a term of years without the certainty of freedom, after all—and in

fixing hip wages at a minimum rate, in most, I may venture to say, in

every case, far below the average which is paid in this most expensive

country.

A negro who has been a slave, and who has obtained his free papers, is

permitted to act as any other free person. The emancipado, who never

knew an owner, cannot unf<»rtunately, do anything to free himself, and

yet he is better entitled to freedom, and is certainly quite as fit to take

care of himself as the former slave.

No matter the point we start from, or the way we look at the subject,

the unjust and shameful condition of the emancipado stares us in the face,

and the Spanish Government cannot put forward any tangible or honest

reason for keeping him in an indefinite state of servitude.

As regards the use of the lash, I beg to observe that, although it is

abolished by law, and although the reports received by the Captain-Gen-

eral tnay incline him to believe that the law is complied with, the inform-

ation which reaches me from time to time leads to a very difTerent conclu-

sion.

England, true to the spirit which she lias iml)ibed from the

immortal f'larkson and Wilberfovce—names wliicli, together

with Garrison, Phillips, Sumner, Greeley and Smith, of our

own country (applause^ shall ever be especially revered and

admired by all the frioiidsof freedom—has ]mrsued this ques-

tion witli energy and an earnestness becoming so great a

nation. She invites the cooperation of our goveinment in

securing to the five hundred thousand of our enslaved brethren

the blessing of freedom and a Christian civilization. Let us

hope that our government, which has also paid particular

attention to this question, will not turn a deaf ear to the

petition of five millions of her citizens, who have so lately

experienced the degradation and evil effects of slavery. (Ap-

plause.)

On motion, the resolutions were adopted, the audience

evincing their symjiathy by prolonged cheering.

EXTRACT OF THE SPEECH OF REV. IlEXRY HIGHLAND GAKXET, D.D.

Mr. (Whaleman: In the invitation that I received to at-

tend this meeting, and take part in its })roceedings, I recog-

nize the call of liberty, and the groans of five hundred

thousand of our enslaved'fellow-men. We who have passed

through the terrible ordeal of the struggle for freedom and

equal rights which in 1861 brought the two divisions of our

country into deadly conflict, and culminated in tlie complete

overthrow of despotism in the United States, are in hearty

sympathy with the patriots of Cuba, and we pray God that

He will orive strength to the arras of the defenders of freedom

and cause the propitious winds to sweep over that fruitful

island, tliat shall bear aloft in the skies the flag of the free.

(Loud applause.) In the annals of poetry, in which glow the

promises of the better days that are to dawn upon the earth, and

the prophecies that foretell the final reign of universal liberty,

there is none that gives greater assurance to the c-truggling

but invincible sons of freedom throughout the whole world

than is found in this stanza :

" Freedom's battle once begun,

Bequeathed from bleeding aire to son,

Though baffled oft is ever won."

I see before me to-night many native Cubans, who, driven by

the fierce fires of Spanish oppression, have sought and found

shelter in our free land. Permit me to assure you, my exiled friends, that I know that I am justified in saying to you

that this meeting, and millions of American citizens, bid'^ou

God speed in your noble cause ; and in their behalf I extend

to you my hand, pledging ourselves to stand united with you

in your efforts for the promotion of the interests of liberty,

and the univei-sal brotherhood of man. (Long continued

applause.) My sympathies were drawn to your cause when I

saw this article in the constitution of the patriots: " All tkr

people of Cuba are absolutely freeT But not now, for the

strong hand of tyranny is clutching the throat of liberty, and

the government of the island is not yours. But Cuba must

be free. God has decreed it, and the spirit of the age ap-

proves it. Slavery shall be blotted out from every island

in the Western Sea, as it has been banished from the AVest-

em Continent. The shores of our Republic shall not be

washed by the waves made bloody by Cuban slavery. (Loud

applause.) When the new and free flag of Cuba shall be

triumphantly unfurled to the breeze of heaven, bearing for

its motto " Impartial Liberty and Equality," then shall the

spirit of that article of your constitution, to which I have

reterred, be carried out. We regret that we cannot give you

that material aid we would wish to afford you, but we can do

one thing—we can create a public sentiment in this land that

will urge our government to acknowledge the belligerent

rights of the patriots of Cuba. The sympathies of the Gov-

ernment of the United States are strongly in favor of Cuban

libei'ty, and when the time shall come when, in conformity

with international law they can render Cuba the aid she

needs, I believe it will not be withheld. (Applause.)

Aside from humanitarian considerations, I think I may safely

say, that all the civilized nations that once maintained human slavery in the Western World, and have abolished it, are

utterly opposed to giving to Spain the monopoly of that

diabolical system. Let slavery and involuntary servitude

perish at once and forever from every inch of soil on the con-

tinent, and in Cuba and Porto Rico. I have twice visited

Cuba, and have witnessed the horrors of slavery as it exists

there, and allow me to state that the slavery recently abolished

in our country was mild when compared with the crime that

Spain to-day upholds in Cuba. I have seen slave ships enter

the port of Havana, and cargoes of miserable men and women, some dying and some of them dead, dragged and hurried

from the decks of slavers and thrown upon the shores.

(SH^me.) You cannot forget, Cubans, the immortal mulatto

poet of your country, the brave and heroic Placido. (Bravo,

and long continued cheers.) Like yourselves, you know that

he loved liberty, and freely offered himself on her sacred

altar. He was accused of being concerned in an attempted

insurrection, and was condemned to die the death ot a traitor.

When he was led forth to death, he cried :

" O, Liberty ! I hear tl»y voice calling me Deep in the frozen regions of the North, afar,

Willi voice like God's, and vision like a star."

(Great excitement among the Cubans, and loud cheers.) God grant that liberty from her home in " the frozen regions of the

North," may continue to call in trumpet tones until she shall

arouse every patriotic son of Cuba to unconquerable resist-

ance to slavery. As I have already said, we cannot give you that material aid we would wish to, for the reason that our

government holds diplomatic relations with Spain. I would that we had none. Some in this audience may remember the

story of the doctor in divinity who approached the door-

keeper of the United States Senate and undertook to enter

the diplomatic gallery, and was told that he could not do so,

" Wh}' can I not ? " said the preacher. *' Because," replied the

trusty guardian, " it is reserved especially for ministers." " I

am entitled to enter if that be the case, for I am a minister of

the Court of Heaven," said the persevering parson. The

doorkeeper finished the discussion by saying, "Absolutely

you catmot enter, for the United States hold no diplomatic

relations with tliat foreign government." (Great merriment.

If our relations with Spain retard the progress of liberty in

Cuba and Porto Rico, I had almost said that 1 am sorry that we

have any. Ilayti has disenthralled herself, and with her own

strong arm has l)roken the tyrant's power. All the nations

on the American Continent have done likewise, and when

Cuba shall have succeeded the last foul blot of slavery will be

removed from our portion of the globe. Let us pray, and

work, and success will at last crown our efforts.

At the conclusion of Mr. Garnet's ;ipeech, the following

resolution was adopted :

Resolced, That a committee of nine be appointed—to include the Chair-

man of the meeting—to publish the proceedings of the meeting and oPter

information in reference to Slavery in Cuba ; to secure r'^oma to be used

as headquarters, where information can be had, and to adopt such other

measures as the committee shall deem advisable, to promote the cause of

freedom in the Island of Cuba.

The following committee was appointed :

4^ Samuel li. ScorrRox New York.

Rev. II. II. G.VKXET, D.I) Xew York.

^ Peter W. Downing New York.

T. S. W. Trrcs New York.

, John A. Gr.yy Washington, D. C.

IsAi.vu C. Wears Pliiladeli>hia, Pa.

^ Dk. Peter W. Ray New York.

J, Chas. E. Pindeli Boston.

John J. Zljlle New York.

The following poem was then read by M. P. Whittom

Rejoice, O Cuba, for Afric freed,

Thy cause espouse in freedom's fight.

And succor give in sorest need

In thy manly struggle for the right

The strife for right that's only won

By the truly brave who no dangers thun.

To earn the fiat, 'tis well done,

Rest thou with peace in freedoin'H light.

No freedom's won through seas of gore,

.And widows moan and orphans wail ;

Yet all these woes and countless more

Are nobly borne when foes assail

Man's sacred rights. Nor shot nor shell.

Nor cannons roar death's dreadful knell ;

Nor noble blood of him who fell

Can stay the right, it must prevail.

And now the Queen of the Spanish Main,

Our aid requires, aid of the free.

She longs to join the glad refrain

Four millions sung in sixty-three,

That shook the nation—aye, all earth ;

That waked mankind to freedom's birth

And echoes sent of freedom's worth

To the beautiful isle of the southern sea.

Ah, then oppression's seal was broke ;

Then freedom dawned on Cuba's strand

Then freemen armed with right,awoke

To battle wrong. An immortal band

All strong of heart, though of numbers few ;

Stern patriots, men who dared to do

With only one grand point in view.

To drive oppression from the land.

Then can we stand so tamely by

And see brave noble Cuba bleed,

Or can freedom newly born thus die

To satisfy foul Spanish greed ;

Has the stain that dimmed Columbia's sheen

Forgotten been with memories green,

Ah ! none can thus manhood demean ;

Her cause is ours. She must be freed.

By four long years of bitter strife.

By noble deeds, by pain and woe.

By sacrifice of home and life,

By cruelties of a treacherous foe.

By blood of murder<;d youth. By all

The miseries tlat to man can tell

She speaks, and we must heed the call.

And give the aid we can bestow.

Bj five hundred thousand souls in bond

She speaks; she must not speak for naught,

Four millions freed can but respond

To show that rights, once dearly bought.

Are still in grateful hearts enshrined.

With memories that together bind

This cause with hers and all maukind.

Who love the right by freemen wrought.

Why falter then, God leads the right,

He marshals all who would be free;

Then to the vanguard in manhood's might.

And hasten Cuba's liberty ;

Then to four million free'd we'll add

Five huudred thousand more made glad.

And Cuba placed in freedom's train

By fire purged of cilavery's stain,

By Columbia's side shall take her place.

Twin champions of a fallen race ;

Thus right shall victory's triumph grace

In the gem of the Carribean sea.

In the early part of the eveninix a circular was distributed

by agents of tho Spanish Government, warninp: the coloird

people against interfering in the affairs of Cuba, stating that

"The abolition of slavery in the Spanish Antilles is a tact

already decreed."—The circular was signed, Jose Ferrer De CouTO.

The Secretary, Mr. Chas. E. Pindell, after reading the circu-

lar, said he did not know the author of the circular, when

an excited young Cuban in the audience arose and inf'ornied

him. " Mr. Speaker," said he, '' he is a Colonel of a volunteer

reo^iment that helped to oppress the Cubans in Havana, and

he is the author of the ' Negro in Slavery,' the most pro-

slavery book ever written."

Mr. Pindell proceeded to disprove the statements made in

the circular and quoted from EV Cronista, of which Mr. De Couto is editor, numerous advertisements for the sale of

slaves, to show that it was a paper in favor of the inhuman

institution.

Mr. Pindell was followed by Mr. John J. Zuille and Rev.

Chas. B. Ray, after which the meeting adjourned.

MEETING IN BOSTON, MASS.

Shortly after the meeting in New York, a meeting was

held in Boston, Mass., and, as the following will show, was at

the solicitation of several of our mcist prominent citizens.

To the Priends of Human Liberty :

We the undersigned citizena of Massachusetts thankful for the abolition

of American Slavery, view with liorror the fact that five hundred thou-

sand of our brethren groan beneath the chains of slavery at our very doors,

in the Island of Cuba.

We therefore unite our voices, and hereby pledge ourselves to use our

energies in favor of their just rights, and in behalf of the Cuban Patriots,

who have already decreed and put in practice the doctrine of the "equality

and freedom of all men." We view with abhorrence the policy of the Span-

ish Government during the past fouryears in that Island, both for the unne-

cessary and inhuman butcheries that have disgraced civilization under its

rule, and for the tenacity with which they cling to the barbarous and inhu-

man institution of Slavery.

It is therefore Resolved, that we hold a Public Meeting, at the Menonias,

oa. Monday Evening, December 23d, to take the necessary and proper ac-

tion to advance the cause of universal freedom, and we respectfully invite

the co-operation of the public.

William C. Nell, Lewis Hayden, J Milton Clark, Cambridge,

William H. Dupree, John C. Dunlop, Peteh H. Nott,

Charles Palmas,

Richard S. Brown, Richard Cosby,

Joseph P. Hawkins, J. J. Moore, William B. Hopkins,

Thomas Downing, S. A. Hancock,

William H.Pltinell,

E. C. Rdhler, S. T. Birmingham, M. D.

George H, Queen, Springfield.

William H.W. Dkrby.

Albert E. Patrick,

{^Signed)

John J. Smith,

George L. Ruffin,

Charles L. Mitchell,

James M. Trotter,

John B. Bailey,

William M. Colson,

Albert B. Cosby,

Charles E. Pindell,

Peter Hawkins,

Peter B. Bell,

John H. Cutler, Exeter, N. H.

J. J. Fatal, Cambridge.

Jeremiah P. Harvey, Lynn.

E. J. Jones, Cambridge.

George H. MncHbLL, New Bedford,

Daniel W. Howland, New Bedford.

William H. Montague, Springfield.

Anthony J. Clark, Worcester,

Horace B. Proctor, Lowell.

John W. Williams, Concord, N. H.,

and others.

The meeting was called to order by Mr. James M. Trotter,

and was organized by the selection of Charles E. Pin dell, as

President, J. M. Trotter, Vice-President, and Peter H. Nott

as Secretary. Prayer was otfered by Mr. "Williams, a student

from Andover. Mr. Pindell, on taking the chair, delivered

the following address :

Now, that we are confirmed in the possession of our liberty,

and have been so bountifully provided with all the requisites

of freemen, it ill becomes us to sit idly by, while five hun-

dred thousand of our brethren are held in bondage in the

island of Cuba ; it only remains for us to rise as a people in

our might, express our abhorrence to the abject slavery in

which our brethren are held, and their freedom will speedily

follow.

Having assembled here, this evenincj, as our call reads, to

take the necessary and proper steps to advance the cause of

universal freedom, and to discuss matters relating to the ex-

istence of slavery in Cuba, and to the war the Cubans have

so gallantly waged for the past four years against their heai;t-

less and inhuman oppressors, for the purpose uf throwing ofi

the yoke of Spain, gaining their independence, and estab-

lishing a Kepublican form of Government in and for Cuba,

it may be interesting to you to be informed of a few facts in

relation to their patriotic course, as well as the grossly in-

human, and barbarous course pui-sued i)y tiie Spanish Gov-

ernment.

In 1817, the Spanish (Government entered into a treaty

with Great Britain, by which, for the sum of four hun(h'ed

thousand pounds to be paid by Great Britain, Spain agreed

to put a stop, on and after May SO, 1820, to the traffic in

slaves which Spaniards were carrying on from the coast of

Africa. Great Britain honestly fulfilled her part of the treaty,

but Spain continued to tolerate the importation of slaves into

Cuba, although, occasionally, royal orders were issued by

Spain in which the Captains General were urged to prose-

cute more severely any clandestine importation ot slaves.

The otficers, being aware of the spirit of their Government,

finding that the traffic was a source of wealth to themselves,

took good care /wt to too strictly enforce the orders of their

superiors. Such gross, open, and scandalous violations of the

treaty caused a new one to be drawn up between England

and Spain on the 28th of June, 1835, for the jturpose of end-

ing the trade in Africans, and Spain engaged to pass a law

within two months alter the ratitication of the treaty to

severely ])unish any of her subjects who should be detected

engaged in the infamous traffic. Notwithstanding the fact

that Spain solemnly promised to pass the law in two months,

(2)—the law" was not passed in ten years, and the slave trade

continued in the meanwhile. The inefficiency of the law that

i^a,9 passed, and the remonstrances of the British Government

obliged Spain, in 1865, to pass a new law

—

apparently more

severe than the former, but, as is characteristic of the Span-

ish Government, it, like its predecessors, was not enforced, for

the slave trade continued to flourish until the loyal and pa-

triotic Cubans, goaded to madness by the bad faith of the gov-

ernment, the treachery of the officials, and the continuance of

the inhuman and infamous traffic, resorted to the means that

were inaugurated by the American patriots in 1775, when

such martyrs as our Crispus Attacks resolved to lay down

th^r lives to save their country from foreign oppression.

In 1865, an association was formed by the express permis-

sion of the Captain General, its object being to aid the com-

plete and final suppression of the illicit trade known as the

African Slave trade, " and its members bound themselves on

their honor, not to acquire possession in any shape, directly

or indirectly, from the date of their joining the association,

of any African negro landed on the island subsequent to the

19th day of November, 1865." The Spaniards, mostly slave

traders, were greatly alarmed ; they accused the members of

the association of being i-evolutionists, and induced the Cap-

tain General tu withdraw the permission he had granted ;

finally the Commissioners from Cuba and Porto Kico, elected

by the city councils of those islands, and sent to Madrid to

report upon the reforms which their constituents claimed, de-

manded, on the 29th of January, 1869, that the African

Slave trade should be declared piracy.

They obtained not the slightest encouragement, as Spain has

always maintained that the institution of slavery is indispensa-

ble in the Antilles to keep them dependent; if, after the revo-

lution in 1868, any compromise has been proposed by the Span-

ish Government it is to be attributed more to the fear ol the

• 24

invincible valor of the Cnbau patriot army than to their de-

sire to do a christian act by according justice tD an oppressed

people.

The Cubans have ever been opposed to the traffic in slaves,

and have always availed themselves of every fair and honor-

able means to protest against its continuance, and never un-

til the feelings of the Cuban patriots had become wrought

upon to such an extent that forbearance ceased to be a vir-

tue, and as a dernier resort, did they resort to arms—and

the confusion caused thereby had l^ecome general over the

Island and the Cuban army—embracing as it did the most

wealthy, influential and able men on the island—did Spain,

then thoroughly frightened, attempt to interfere with the

slave trade. Prior to the uprising of the Cuban patriots,

many wealthy Cubans, who, trom their honorable positit)ns,

dared to openly protest against the traffic, were summarily

exiled as dangerous innovators, and their estates of course

confiscated, thus furnishing the hest proofs of the deceit of

the Spanish Government in the fulfillment of its treaty ob-

ligations. '^

I might cite innumerable instances of the most respectful

protests against the traflSc being treated with silent contempt

and the signers thereto being alterwards arrested upon some

trumped up charge and without a fair trial banished from

the island.

Having thus cursorily reviewed the history of Spanish

misrule in the Island of Cuba, and some of the causes wliich

lead to the piesent revolution, I shall leave it to those gen-

tlemen who are to follow me to give you an account of the

barbarities ])ractised upon five hundred thousand of our

brethren by their Spanish masters.

Fellow citizens, the groans of the downtrodden and the

blood of many thousands slain on the altar of Liberty appeal

to us for aid ; let us not, at this hour, be deaf to their appeal,

but extend to them that syitipathy that will cheer them on to

renewed eti'orts, and trust that the great Giver of all good will

bring tliera safely through the sea of trouble, and place them

side by side with the four million in our own land who, after

many years of affliction, stand to-day on the common plat-

form of man's equality and rights.

Mr. AVilliams followed with an eloquent address, in which

he said that in 1866 many men went about New Orleans and

gathered up a number of colored men who had recently been

diseharo;ed from the army, and under the guise of taking them

to the Border States, they were shipped off to Cuba. He felt his soul galled as he contemplated the condition of affairs

in that island. Of the 1,128,000 inhabitants, 658,000 were

colored men, and most of them were slaves. And what a

slavery ! It had well been said that the terrors of American

slavery, great as they were, had been even less than that

which their brethren were there enduring now. lie coun-

seled action, that the great cause for which they struggled in

this country might be made successful there. (Applause.)

It was said that it was a negro war through which we had

just passed, but the sequel had shown that freedom and slav-

ery could not exist together, and the results which followed

the four years of struggle with us must be reached again in

the Queen of the Antilles. The groaii^s of the colored men under the yoke in Cuba had so far only been registered in

heftveu, but he hoped the day would soon come when every

one of them might enjoy every privilege of freemen. He asked

if our Government might not make investigations as to

whether there were not colored men there kept in slavery

who were once citizens of this countiy.

The following resolutions were then offered by Mr. Wil-

liam H. Pumell and adopted

Resolved, That we call upon the American people to urge the authorities

at Washington to extend such lawful aid as is in their power to the patriots

of Cuba in their struggle to advance the common interest of man as will

be the case when the oppressed Cubans shall be freed from the yoke of

Spanish tyranny, for the rightful owners of that island are the inhabitants

thereof, and the people of these United States, who for their own protec-

tion should possess themselves of that fair domain.

Resolved, That as citizens of Boston we here pledge ourselves to use all

lawful means in our power to fur'Jicr the cause of the struggling Cubans to its full and complete triumph.

During the whole of the proceedings great interest was mani tested by the audience. The meeting adjourned at a

late hour.

EXTRACTS FROM LEADING PAPERS AND OFFICIAL CORRESPONDENCE.

[From the Evening Mail, New York, Friday, December 13, \^^2.'\

SLAVERY IN CUBA.

We are glad to see that our colored citizen3 are roused to a sense of

their obligation to those of their race—nearly half a million— retained in

slavery in the island of Cuba. Their meeting at the Cooper Institute to-

night will result, we trust, in a serious movement, and not in mere words,

to fall into the sack of oblivion as soon as uttered. Eight hundred thou-

sand colored freemen, with honor to themselves, cannot stand silent or

patient under the consciousness that within one hundred miles from the

shores of the United States there are more than four hundred thousand

of their race held in slavery.

Several "circumstances make it opportune and fitting that our colored

fellow citizens should take this prominent position touching slavery in

Cuba. As we took occasion to point out some days ago, the government

of the United States is absolutely responsible for the past forty-six years

of slavery in Cuba. This Is not to be denied in the face of history. The Moret law, which our President, in his last message, courtequsly charac-

terized as a "feeble step" toward emancipation—even that is not tc^go

into force in its " feeble," inefiFectual way, declares Prime Minister Zorilla,

"so long as a single Cuban remains in revolt against Spanish authority."

That is to say, as by the Moret law the beginning of gradual emancipation

was placed a quarter of a century in the future, so long as one Cuban

choses to keep in revolt, even the contingency made so remote by the

law, is made still more remote, and more than fifty thousand infanta will

be annually born into slavery. The strange avowal of the Spanish .Minis-

ter, an avowed liberal, cau only be comprehended under the light of a fact

recently revealed in tlie S{)anish Havana journals, that the rich Spanish

slave holders on the island, having an agent at Madrid, Don Manuel ('arlo,

to represent their interests and defeat all efforts looking to the subversion

of slavery in Cuba, have recently furnished him with a fund of about half

a million of dollars, to be used for the purposes of his mission. Those

who head this subscription are leaders of the Spanish party in Cuba, like

Zuleta. Their voices and their money are sufficiently powerful at Madrid

to sway the action of the government, and defeat any etfort which the few

Spanish abolitionists in the Cortes may attempt. The slave holders cannot

be overcome at Madrid. Nothing whatsoever looking toward emancipa-

tion within this century is to be hoped for from the Spanish government.

Were they to attempt it, the slave holders would revolt, and therefore

their dictation, made palatable by gold, is as subserviently accepted by

Zorilla as by Sagasta.

While the Spaniards in Cuba liave obdurately clung to slavery, on the

other hand, the native slave holders, like Aldama, at once accepted the

action.of the revolutionary government at Quaimaro, which put an unqual-

ified end to slavery in the island. The native Cubans are all sympathy

with this course," even those who, at bottom, may not wish to lose the pre

sent profits of slave labor, but who have the intelligence to understand

thtit the spirit of the age cannot longer tolerate human slavery. The logical conclusions from these facts are too apparent for our colored people

to overlook. Their race in Cuba will remain in slaverj' unless the native

Cubans, black and white, succeed in their present efforts to throw off

Spanish authority.

[From the New York Sun, Decembur 10th, 1872]

SYMPATHY FOR THE CUBAN PATRIOTS.

There are now in Cuba more than three hundred thousand Africans

held in the most cruel slavery. The continuance of their bondage depends

on the perjfetuation of Spanish rule over the island. The Cuban patriots

are all abolitionists. The revolution which began in the Eastern Depart-

ment more than four years ago, and has never ceased to be maintained

with hope and determination, has actually freed more than sixty thousand

Buch slaves ; and when it spreads over the Western Department, it will

free them all. The Constitution of the republic of Cuba prohibits slavery

altogether, and guarantees equal civil and political rights to all citizens

without regard to race or complexion ; and for four years, without arms,

without ammunition, without medical supplies, amid sufferings intolerable,

and barbarities that no pen can describe, the Cubans have been fighting to

put this Constitution into force.

In this unprecedented struggle the American Government, though in

the hands of Republicans who have pretended to be hostile to human slavery, has steadily exerted all its powers to put down these heroic aboli-

tionists, and to preserve the authority of Spain, and with it slavery and

the African slave trade in Cuba. And while our Executive and Congress

take this course, scarcely any of the thousands of able and accomplished

philanthropic men and women in this country, who of yore labored for

the abolition of slavery, and felt in their inmost souls the evils and abomi-

nations which that institution imposes upon its victims, have expressed

any sympathy with the abolitioiiists of Cuba, or by thought, word, or deed

done anything to encourage or aid them in the prosecution of their holy

task.

But now there are signs of a better state of feeling among us. The colored men of this country, themselves formerly slaves, or the descend

ants of slaves, seem at last disposed to take up the burden of their brothers

in Cuba. A m-eting is to be held at the Cooper Institute in this city on

Friday evening, in which a number of our most cultivated and estimable

colored people are to take a prominent part. On behalf of the Cubans, we welcome their sympathy and their assistance. They do not come forward

a moment too soon. We will not say that it is a shame to them that they

have not spoken before, for we know how much they are influenced by

the Government and by the official action of the Republican party. God grant that their efforts now, tardy as they are, may not be fruitless ! for if

ever there was a cause which appeals to humanity, and which should

awaken a living response in every heart, it is the cause of freedom and

equal rights in Cuba.

[From the New York Herald, December, 15, 1872.]

SPAIN AND CUBA—THE FREEDMEN OF THE UNITED STATES RISING TO THE MAIN QUESTION.

The meeting of our colored citizens at Cooper Institute on Friday evening

last, called to take action in reference to the " irrepressible contiici" in the

island of Cuba, was the beginning of a movement on the part of a political

element in the United States, which, on the main question involved in refer-

ence to the action of our government, (an wield the balance of power. The black population of this country embraces seven hundred thousand voters,

and upon an issue which, outside of Spain and Turkey, commands the sym-

pathies of the civilized world, these seven hundred thousand colored voters

have only en masse to define their position in order to determine the action

of Congress and the administration. Nor can it be questioned that the

voice of this Cooper Institute meeting is the voice of all our citizens of Afri-

can descent, including especially those four millions lately relea.sed from

the shackles of slavery, and invested with all the rights and priviU ges of

civil and political equality.

What, then, is the position which these colored citizens have assumed in

behalf of their brethren in the island of Cuba? Tliey declare themselves

on the side of " the Cuban patriots, who have already decreed and put in

practice tie doctrine of the equality and freedom of all men." 'i hey "* view

with abhorrence the policy of the Spanish government for the last four

years" in the island of Cuba, " both for the unnecessary and inhuman butcheries that have taken place under its rule and for the tenacity with

which they cling to the barbarous and inhuman institution of slavery."

Our colored citizens further declare that " it is our opinion that the success

of the Spanish arms will tend to rivet more firmly the chains of slavery on

our brethren, re-establishing slavery where it does not now exist and re-

storing the horrors of the African slave trade and the Coolie irafBc," and

that, on the other hand, " the success of the Cuban patriots would immedi-

ately give to the whole inhabitants of the island freedom and equality be-

fore the law." And the line of action asked of the President and Congress,

after four years of patient waiting, is " to accord the Cuban patriots that fav-

orable recognition to which these four years' gallant struggle for freedom

entitles them." In other words, the fr«!edinen of the United States, in be-

half of their enslaved brethren in Cuba, ask tlie concession of belligerent

rights to the Cuban insurgents.

It appears, too, that agents and supporters here of the Spanish authori-

ties were cjuick to take the alarm from this movement of our colored citi-

zens, for at this meeting a printed circular was scattered about ihe hall

addressed " To tlie Colored Citizens of the United States," and warning

them of the folly of supporting the Cuban rebels. To this circular was ap-

pended the name of the editor of the Spanish paper El Cronista, Jose Fer-

rer de Couto, and his appeal is that of a loyal Spaniard deeply in earnest

and really frightened. He warns our colored citizens of " some cowards"

from Cuba, who have come here to live upon their wits and to induce white

and black Americans to go to Cuba in their places ; he says that these Cu-

ban" are now agitating the abolition of slavery in the island, " when the

Spanish government has just decreed abolition on a plan a great deal bet-

ter organized and much more advantageous than the one which made so

many victims in the Southern States of this Republic;" that " those hypo-

crites who talk to you about fraternity and of rights" and all that, " have

all their lives lived oflTDOthing but the labor of negroes," and that our col-

ored people ought not to be deceived by these Cuban " loafers." nor allow

" the rogues now appearing before you to put you down as fools." Mr.

Pindell, however, answered this circular apparently to the satisfaction of

the meeting, in quoting from El Cronista numerous advertisements for the

Bale of slaves ; and an excited young Cuban clinched the nail by proclaim-

ing the publisher of this Spanish document as the author of the " Negro

in Slavery," the "most pro-slavery book ever written."

We discover here that there were some Cubans at this meeting, from

which we may infer that they are at the bottom of this movement ; but even

conceding the accusations against these men as cowardly and unscrupu-

lous adventurers, their participation in this colored meeting does not shake

the argument on the main question of African slavery in the island of Cuba.

Nor will the plea avail that *' the abolition of slavery in the Spanish An-

tilles is a fact already decreed and introduced by the government at Ma-

drid," and iliat for the colored citizens of New York " to take action now upon the subject is the most ridiculous and uselese step to whi'-h they

could induce you who want to prey upon your savings by similar nonsense."

The idea here is that these penniless Cubans are aiming to collect money

from our colored citizens on false pretenses ; but it does not appear that

these colored men entertain any filibustering designs. Their plan of action

is to appeal for official intervention in behalf of liberty in Cuba. They do

not propose, and we presume they will nut be led into, the folly of subscrib-

ing^ioney for Cuban filibustering expeditions. They ask the concession

of belligerent rigiits in behalf of the Cuban insurgent cause because they

think tliis concession in poiut of law would be riglit and because it embraces

liberty and equality to the half million African slaves of the island.

This i.s the main question to our citizens of African descent. The free-

dom which they now enjoy they wish to be enjoyed by their brethren else-

where; and while the British government is striking at this relic of barba-

rism—negro slavery—in Africa, in consequence of the astounding disclo-

sures of Livingstone and Stanley, these black citizens of the United States

call for the intervention of their government for the extinction of the evil

in Cuba, and by such action as they hold to be within the law of nations.

We dare say, too, that this Cooper Institute movement is due more to the

suggestions touching slavery in Cuba,' thrown out in the President's late

annual Message, than to the intrigues of Cuban emissaries. We suspect

thai our colored citizens have seized the idea from General Grant's opinions

that slavery in Cuba htill prevails; that the civil war in the island still

goes on ; that there is no prospect of its early termination, one way or the

other, from present indications, and that meantime we can only hope that

the present liberal government of Spain will put an end to this curse of

slavery. Upon these hints, we apprehend, our colored citizens have come

forward and defined their position. They may have been further inspired

by tlie encouraging remarks of General Banks in Congress, on the bill pro-

viding for those half a dozen improved ships of war. But, in any event,

let the freedmen of the United States, submit their ultimatum to Congress

and to the President in a flood of petitions on this subject. Let them keep

up their fire hot and heavy, and decisive action will follow.

Public opinion throiiorhout the civilized world would justify a proclama- tion from Washington, of belligerent rights to the Cubans, or even armed intervention there, in the cause of humanity and civilization. But there

are other measures through which we may bring the Spanish government to terms and thus give the finishing blow to slavery in Cuba—sdch meas-

ures, for instance, as a peremptory demand for reparation and indemnity in

consequence of the Spanish outrages in Cuba upon American citizens, and

upon our a)mmerce in the Gulf, committed during the last four years,

resting our cause upon the troubles arising from Cuban Slavery. Doubt-

less, too, a resolution from the House of Kepre^entatives, asking of the

President such official information a* he may possess as to the decrees and

purposes of the Spanish government in reference to the abolition of slavery

in Cuba, would operate to bring the Cabinet of King Amadeus to reason.

It is reported that Senor Zorilla has recently declared that Spain would move no further upon this matter of slavery in Cuba, until the last insur-

gent shall have surrendered. If so, the dominion of Spain in the island is

the dominion of slavery. And, indeed, as the abolition of slavery is the

corner stone of the insurgent constitution for Cuba, we cannot doubt that

the removal of slavery involves the independence of the island. So it is

understood and accepted by our colored citizens, and, from their strength

in our body politic, they have only to pour in their petitions upon Congress

and the President, in order to command a hearing and definite and decisive

action.

PARTIOULAKLY INTERESTING.

[From the New York Ilerald, Monday, January 20, 1873.

SPAIN AND CUBA—AN EXTRAORDINARY LOAN—THE COSTS OF THE INSURRECTION—THE EMANCIPATION QUESTION.

Leaving, for the present, as it stands the diplomatic question of veracity

pending between our Secretary of State, Mr. Fish, and Senor Zorilla, Prime

Minister of Spain, in reference to the remarkable despatch of the former of

the 29th of October last on the abolition of slavery in the Spanish VVest

Indies, we turn to the consideration of another remarkable official commu- nication—that which we published yesterday from our Minister at Madrid

to Mr. Fish, bearing the date of August 16, 1872, on the finances of the

Spanish Cuban government, and on the frightful costs and loss of life re

suiting from the insurrection for Cuban independence. This despatch, it

appears, has been shown by Mr. Fish to several members of the Dip'omatic

Corps and of the Senate, as justifying his note aforesaid on slavery in

Cuba, which Senor Zorilla says he has not received. We are obliged to the

Secretary of State, in any event, for the production of this August despatch

from Madrid, because of its important official disclosures touching the con-

dition of Cuba.

V\'e are thus informed of an official publication of a decree, accompanied

by a Report of the Colonial Minister, authorizing the Treasury ot the island

of Cuba to issue bonds amounting to sixty millions of dollars, at eight per

cent, interest, and pledging for the payment of interept and principal of the

loan the proceeds of tlie war tax, estimated at five inillions a year, and the

surplus derived from all other sources of revenue, ordinary and extraordi-

nary. It next appears in the report of the Colonial Minister that the Cuban

Treasury owes the Bank of Havana fifty millions of dollars ; that twelve

millions of this sum were borrowed to pay the expenses of the several ex-

peditions against St. Domingo and Mexico, and that the remaining thirty-

eight millions have been advanced by the bank towards the expenses of

the Cuban insurrection. The whole fifty millions, it further appears, was

advanced by the bank in paper money, the universal plan in times of war ;

but the large addition, ten millions, thus made to its paper money, has, it

appears, brought things financially to a crisis in that section of the island

held by the Spanish forces. This, too, is one of the inevitable consequences

of a protracted war.

But it further appears that the amount raised in Cuba by taxes and im-

posts during the last fiscal year was twelve millions, which deserves a mo-

ment's attention. The whole population of Cuba is within a million ; but

we will say it is one million. Of this aggregate the black element num-

bers half a million, of which four hundred thousand are slaves. One-

fourth at least, we suppose, of the white element is actively identified with

the insurrection, which leaves a white population of some three hundred

and eeventy-five thousand, men, women and children, or fay seventy-five

thousand taxpayers, to raise these twelve millions of money, and with the

island suffering all the evils from a protracted and still existing civil war.

Of course under this condition of things there is a financial crisis. This

loan of sixty millions is intended to clear off all the accumulations of colo-

nial debts to the Bank of Havana, first, for the amount advanced for the

Spanish contingent to the late Emperor Napoleon's Mexican expedition ;

secondly, for the sum advanced to meet the expenses of the Spanish expe-

dition for the reconquest of St. Domingo, and then ten millions are to be

paid into the Cuban Treasury for the prosecution of the war against the

insurgents and for the other current expenses of the next fiscal year.

But after meeting all these requisitions there will be thirty millions of

paper money due the Havana Bank, and to raise this sum the embargoed

estates on the island are to be leased for a term not exceeding six years,

and the proceeds, with cer ain Treasury credits and the income from Crown

property, are to be applied to this redemption. But as these sources of

revenue have not hitherto produced anything, weapprehend that the bonds

issued upon such collaterals are not likely to command a high i>remium

in the market. Subscriptions are to be invited to the loan in Havana,

Madrid, Paris and London. New York is not to be favored with these at-

tractive bonds, and doubtless she is excluded from the favored cities for

very vrood reasons. The loan is to be managed by fitteen commissioners,

but the Captain General may suspend at pleasure any action of theirs on

the subject. In the presence of this inviting scheme let our Credit Mobi-

lier and Credit Foncier enterprises hide their diminished heads ; but let all

inclined to venture into tliis- Spanish-Cuban loan of cixty millions first

read up the rise, decline and collapse ot the South Sea Bubble.

Such as we have presented it is substantially the official exhibit of the

finances of Spanish Cuba. It is, too, in this condition of affairs, as our

Minister at Madrid puts it, that, after a four years' war without quarter.

" Spain is about to appeal to the civilized world to lend monejr on a pledo'e

of the revenues of the island," and for the purpo3ea of perpetuating Afri-

can slavery andcompelling the unwilling allegiance " of a large majority

of the sorely oppressed native population." lu tbis relation a statement is

produced from the Imparcial, a semi-otficial journal o'' Madrid, that ' from the beginning of hostilitie-* in Cu'ia 13,600 insurgents have been killed in

battle (acciones de guerra) and 43,500 taken prisont-r-, and tliat 69,940 in-

surgents have voluntarily eurrendered." As it is believed that the pris-

oners captured in battl? were shot as fast as caught, the total number of

insurgents slain in this island war may be set down at fifty-seven thou-

sand. And yet, though some two years ago Mr. Secretary Fish repre-

sented the insurgents as reduced to a few bands of stragglers in the swamps and mountains, which would doubtless soon be subjugated, there are prob-

ably not less than twenty thousand insurgents in the lield to-day, and

better armed and equipped than at any other time since the proclamation

of the revolution.

Tne Spanish side of this war account as presented in this ofiBcial des-

patch ot August last from Madrid to Mr. Fish is equally suggestive of the

stubborn fact that the efforts of Spain to subdue these Cuban in-iurgents

have involved a greater sacrifice on her part of men and money than any

other conflict against any of her revolted colonies from Mexico to Peru.

It was know^n at Madrid, from official sources, that ia Auifust last the

Spanish army in Cuba exceeded a hundred thousand men ; that its aver-

age yearly loss in the island, largely from the climate, has been at least

fifteen thousand men, and that its aggregate lops may be safrly set down as

at sixty thousand men fjr the four years of this dt-Btruclive war. The worst of it is that even with the subjugation of ihe insurgents ti.e i'slacd,

from the waste and demoralizing effects ot this war, e.«pecial]y upon the

slave population, can never more be a valuable po.-ses.'^iou to Spain.

Nevertheless, the Spanish government is evidently imprer^i-ed with the

idea thai with the suppression of this insurreclioD, and with the prolonga-

tion of her Cuban system of African slavery—the most terrible system

known to the civilized world—Cuba may again become the financial main-

stay of poor Spain. There can be no pr< fit to Sptin frim Cuba witli the

abolition of slavery. The examples of Jama ca under slavery and under

emancipation, and of Hayti and Dominica, estibli^h this prop )sition.

When SenorZorilla, therefore, declares that Spain will do nothing toward

the practical abolition of slavery in Cuba until the last of the insurgents

shall have laid down his arms, he means that, as Cuba would be value-

less to Spain without slavery, she will maintain it while si.e holds the

island. Spain means to bold the island, if she can, and to nixke it

again, under her slavery system, if possible, what it was before the

war—a source of golden revenues, and not an island gene to decay, like

St. Domingo and Jamaica, under emancipation.

But in this des-gn the moral sense of the civilized world is all against

her. She stands now almost alone amorg civilized States as the uphnlder

of this abomination of human slavery. But in her de^p.-rate < xtr^ mities

she cannot yet think of relinquishing the rich profit^i she hopes to re-

cover from the system in Cuba. Hence the diplomatic hedging of Senor

Zorilla. He may not, however, have seen that disputed desp..tcli ot Mr.

Fish. If not, can anythina: be easier than the sending him another

eopy of that interesting paper on emancipation in Cuba? Preeident

Qr&Dt, in our judgment, struck the keynote (or the emancipation of the

island in those brief remarks in liis late annual Message on the ques-

tion of the emancii)ation of the i^laves thereof. The insurgents, in pro-

claiming their revolt, proclaimed the abolitii n of slavery, because they

foresaw the consequences to iSpain, and our government, in taking up

th« hint and in pushing the cause ot emancii)ation at Madrid, next to the

proclamation of belligerent rights for the CubauF, is doing the best thing

it can fairly do for the cause of Cuban independence.

Upon this point we call again upon the four millions of emancipated

blacks of the United States to prosecute in every city and town of the

Union the agitation which they inaugurated recently in Cooper Institute

for an active diplomatic intervention on the part of our government in be

half of the liberation of the four hundred thousand slaves of Cuba ; for in

the united voice of the colored voting element of the United States, seven

hundred thousand strong, there is a power in behalf of liberty to the slave

which cannot be disregarded at Wathington.

SPANISH SLAVES.

An Eloquent Appeal to M. Zorilla hy English, French, Dutch and Polish

Members of the Paris Anti-Slavery Conference—An Absolute and Im-

jnediate Emancipation Necessary.

[From Le SiecU.]

Some members of the International Anti Slavery Conference sent to

M. Zorilla, President of the Council of Ministers of His Majesty the King of Spain, an address, in the most eloquent and pressing terms, in favor of

an immediate emancipation of the slaves in the islands of Cuba and Porto

Rico. The following is the text :

—

MONSIEIIB THE PRESIDENT—We, the undersigned, members of the

International Anti-Slavery Conference, which met in Paris in 1867, who to-day, with other friends of humanity, associated to take part in the work

oi abolishing slaver}', see, with sorrow, that this criminal institution still

exists in the isles of Cuba and Porto Rico.

When, in 1868, the provisional government declared the right of the

Spanish people to political liberty, we had, for the time being, the hope

that it would recognize, at the same time, the still more sacred right of

the slaves in the Spanish colonies to personal liberty, and that, following

the noble example of the provisional government of France in 1848, imme- diate and absolute emancipation would be decreed. That hope has not

been realized. Against our expectations in this respect, the new constitu-

tion adopted by the Cortes in 1869 completely ignored the existence of

slavery, and the governmeat was constantly opposing the efforts of the

abolitionist party to do justice to the slave population of the Spanish

Antilles. In the meanwhile the major part of the Porto Ricans claimed

immediate emancipation. There was also a very considerable number in

Cuba in favor of the absolute abolition of slavery, without counting the

insurgents, who had so decreed.

The Spaaish people liave alao demanded for five years pa^Jt, in the most urf^ent manner, that the government abolish flavery. The govern- ment also has recognized the necessity of considerini^ this great question, the emancipation of the slaves, notwithstanding this it has again recently declared that it would not entertain the matter before the insurrection in

Cuba was entirely put down. But in admitting that, that this declaration has for the government some little force in regard to Cuba, it cannot be applied to Porto Rico, ff)r there is no insurrection in the latter place, the authority of the Mother Country i.s recognized and re.^pt'Cted, and the col-

onists have representatives in the Assf^mbly to defend their interests.

It is not for us to point out the probable results of a decision as op- posed to justice and reason as it is opjmsed to wise policy. We come, therefore, we simple friends of humanity, to ask the government to decree immediate emancipation as an act of justice which we owe to the slave

population of these two isles. Not only humanity, religion, and a wise policy should dictate this act of justice, but still more the glory and the honor of the nation which ia at stake. Spain is the last Christian nation

whose escutcheon is stained by the emblems of slavery. Is not the effac-

ing of this taint worthy of a great and supreme effort?

The .statesman who sliall accomplish this will acquire for himself an imperishable renown and for his country a glory that shall never be

effaced. You, sir, undertake this task and complete it I

We have the honor, sir, to respectfully salute you.

Guizot, Martin, Laboulaye, Monod, Hroglie, De Presserse, Julius^H.

Wohbers (Utrecht), President for Holland ; Joseph Cooper, London, and A.. Chameroozow, Secretary of the Conference.

Paris, December 17, 18T2.

LETTER FROM (JEN. THO.MAS JORDAN.

The President has be«-n deceived with regard to the actual scope of the

law for the ostensible abolition of slavery in <'uba, although he terms it

but a feeble step toward emancipation. Really it was no step at all to-

ward emancii>ation, Imt a carefully c<mtrived step toward the postponement

of the very beginning of gradual emancipation in tiie island for a quarter

of a century.

Enclosed is an article which establi.-hes that the L'nited States is re-

sponsible for forty-six years of slavery in the Island of Cuba.

The Cubans in good faith abolished slavery in the outset of their revolu-

tion, and their former slaves are fighting bravely in the ranks of the

Cuban army, not in separate organizations, as in the United States, but in

the same companies side by side with the white people, and I have seen

white men commanded by blacks. Indeed for the last month of my ser-

vice in Cuba my own escort was commanded by a colored officer by my selection ior his bravery and intelligence, and he commanded white men.

There is not a slave in Cuba today who is not held in slavery by Spanish

bayonets. THOMAS JORDAN.

New Yokk, December 4, 1872.

[From ths AhqIo-Ameiican Times.']

THE CUBAN STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM.

The following inferestiner translation from the Spanish bLows the truth

of the statement upon which we last week based our article on Cuba, that

the Cuban.s were fighting in the cause of Liberty, tlie equal liberty of all ;

the emaiicijiation of their slaves, and freedom for themselves. Emancipa-

tion is not a cry forced on them by the war, but a principle long contended

for, even when England was on the other side. And this is a fact which

reflects nn small credit on the people, of which Cubans have aright to be

proud, and which tells strongly in proof of their fitness for self-govern-

ment :

[translation.]

It is tlie Cuban Governnient, and not the Cubans, who will have to an-

swer before God and civilization for the crime of inhumanity whicli Spain,

to the shame of the nineteenth century, continues to perpetrate in the is

land, as the following proofs will show :—In 1794 the merchants and mu- nicipality of Havana solicited through their deputy, the celebrated native

of Havana, Dr. Francisco de Arango, the creation of a Board of Fomento Works, to encourage the commerce and agriculture of the country, and

more especially immigration of white laborers. In 1811 the same Dr.

Francisco de Arango, as representative of tlif* Corporation of Havana in the

C/onstituent Cortes of Cadiz, delivered a memorable speech in favor of the

white population, from which we quote the following extract:—"'Allow

us to seek as many whites as we can for our works and our threatened

safety. Even Portugal itself, our companion in error and misfortunes,

calls to Brazil white men of all nationalities, and promises them tolerance

for their religious principles. We, for our part, only tolerate black in-

fidels, of whom the majority die in their infidelity, and we cannot consent

to receive Christian white men, excepting they be Spaniards." In 1817

and 1819 the Corjmrations of Cuba again solicited measures favorable to

the immigration of white laborers. In 1832 the Havana Committee of

Public Works, composed for the greater part of the estate holders, obtained

special funds to forward the colonization of white men, but unfortunately

the Government seized the funds, and turned them to their own uses. It

must be borne in mind that tiie Committee of Public Works, the munici-

palities, and thf various economic societies of the island, whenever they

have been consulted on the matter, have openly pronounced again.st the

slave trathc and in favor of any measure which should transform slave

work to fr<t- labor. But we now arrive at an epoch when all collective

effort had to l)e abandoned by the colonial corporations having for their

object the encouragement of free immigration and the opposition to

slavery, la 1S;;4 arrived at the island the Captain-General, Don Miguel

Facon, the greatest despot who ever aflSicted unhappy Cuba. The island

had been declared in a state of siege since 18S5, when an invasion of the

united forces of Mexico and COflumbia was feared. The danger had frassed,

but the country remained subject, legally, to the effects of the declaration,

although these effects had been greatly modified by the pood sense of suc-

cessive Governors. But General Facon arrived to prove that the 8tat« of

siege was no dead letter. His will aad that of his succesBors, wae.the only

law which in future the country had to obey, and woe to him who should

dare to discuss or oppose it. The first victim under this state of things

was Don Jose Antonio Saco, one of the most eminent scientific and literary

men in the country, who was banished from Cuba without form of trial,

for having published some articles destined to demonstrate the necessity

of putting an end to slavery in his country. Somewhat later it was the

turn of Don Domingo Delmonte, one of the richest slave-owners in the

island, and at the same time an eminent writer, who was expelled

from the country, and died in a foreign land, in consequence of the author-

ship of a memorial favorable to the abolition of slavery being attributed to

him, and his being on friendly terms with the Engli.sh Consul at Havana.

In 1844 Don Benigno Gener had to go into exile, to avoid the persecution of

which he was the oliject, for having drawn up and presented a memorial,

signed by ninety-iliree Cuban planters, of Mantaiizas, beggiug the Qovem-

nient to use all the means in their power to put an end to slavery. The

signatories of the petition were threatened with very serious punishment,

if ever they again took up the question. Don Gasper Betancourt Cisneros,

a rich planter of Puerto Principe, and a great promoter of the immigration

of wliites, was summoned by <ieneral O'Donnell, and threatened to be shot

if he insisted in his propaganda. At about the same time, Don Jose de la

Luz Caballero, tht- " Havana Philosopher," and one of the most eminent

men in <""uba, celebrated for his vast knowledge, and his public and private

virtues, had to appear before a mixed Commission, being accused of com-

plicity in the conspiracy of black slaves and freedmen, which was then

the subject of the nay, and in which it wa^ attempted to implicate itf»ny

Tvibans who were known as holding opinions contrary to slavery and the

slave traffic. Don Manut-l Martini z Serano, a lawyer and rich <"uban plan-

ter, died in pri.sou under the accusation of being an abolitionist, he having

drawn up a report to the Economic Society of the Havana, in which grave

penalties were demanded against the violator.-^ of the treaties respecting

the slavf trade, entered into with Great Britain. Since the time of Gene-

ral Eacon the great tactic employed in Cuba by the ({overnors and their

satellites has been to mix up the adversaries of slavery and the slave trade

with the revolutionists and annexationists, and thus the slave dealers could

continue in their infamous traffic without opposition, until the time of

General Dulce, when, through certain fresh liberty being conceded to the

Havana press, t'le journal hi Siglo, the organ of the Cuban element in the

country, was able to attack the slave trade, and manifest the abolitionist

tendencies of tlie majority of the inhabitants ; this being the reason of the

fury and implacable hostility of the slave-dealers to this newspaper, which

they characterized as beiug eminently revolutionary. The year 1H06 ar-

rived, in which the " Reporting Commission " was convened in Madrid to

propose the reforius advisable in the Antilles, and before this Commission,

the Cuban and Porto Rican Commissioners proposed with the greatest

energy that the traffic in slaves should be treated as piracy, and that

slavery should l)e abolished in both islands. It must not be forgotten

that the first measure adopted by the Chambers of " Free Cuba " has been

abolition of slavery.

Our readers are aware that years ago England paid to the Spanish Gov-

ernment C400,000 in compensation for the loss alleged to be incurred by

merchants and estate owners in Cuba by the stoppage of the slave trade.

The treaty apreSment stipulated that the slave trade was to be suppressed,

and the money to be distributed, bo as to make good any loss incurred by

Spanish pubjects. The Spanish Government never paid a penny of that

money, nor ever stopped the slave trade. It simply appropriated the

British gold, and let all the obligations remain a dead letter. That will

explain thip extract from the Olohe of Tuesday " on the Slave Trade in

Cuba," and the pointed way in which Lord Granville writes

In December last the Spanish Minister assured Earl Granville that the

Spanish government, and, indeed, the whole nation, was firmly resolved to

deal with the question of slaver}- in their colonies, but that the Cuban insurrection being still unsuppressed, the primary object of the nation at

this moment was effectually to extinguish that insurrection. The question

was brought before the British Cabinet, and Earl Granville then wrote to

Mr. Layard at Madrid ;

"The Spanish government must be aware of the strong feeling which

existed in this country on the subject of slavery. It was not with us a

question of merely making a representation on a matter which we had at

heart, but also of insisting on the execution of positive treaty engage-

ments. The assurances now given by the Spanish government were merely

a repetition of those constantly given on former occasions. V\ ith regard

to Cuba, it could not be a matter of indifference to attract or repel the moral

sympathies not only of this country but of the United States. But even

admitting hypothetically the correctness of the view held by the Spanish

government with regard to Cuba, the same arguments which might be sup-

posed to hold good in this instance were quite inapplicable to Puerto Rico.

There, indeed, the facilities for successfully dealing with the question were

exceptional. Her Majesty's government did not wish to meet Parliament

unprovided with any explanation of the delay in abolishing Spaaish

slavery other than a mere repetition of the assurances which they have so

often received, but which have hitherto invariably remained unfulfilled.

If any material advance were made in the matter, such as the abolition of

slavery in Puerto Rico, it would readily be accepted by her Majesty's gov-

ernment as an earnest that the Spanish government intends at no distant

day fully to carry out the pledges frequently and formally given to Her Majesty's Minister of the total abolition of slavery in all the Spanish

colonies."

The British Consul-General at Havana explodes the deceit of the Eman- cipado Contract. He shows that the laborer remains a s'ave of the worst

kind, without the guarantee even of the sort of consideration wliich owner-

ship imparts. He informs Earl Granville that the Madrid government is

really powerless. It may issue proclamations, but they will be set aside

in Cuba by the anti-Cuban faction there, now the real rulers of that dis-

tracted land.

SECRETARY OP STATE, HAMILTON FISH, TO MINISTER D. E. SICKLES.

Department of State, Washington, Onober 20, 1872.

Sir : The present Ministry in Spain has triven assurance to the public

throiio;h their organs of the press and have confirnied the assurance to you

personally fas you have reported in recent dispatches) of their intention to

put in operation a series of extensive reforms, embracing among them some

of those which this Government has been earnest in urging upon their

consideration in relation to the colonies which are our near neighbors.

Sustained as is the present Ministry by the large popular vote which has

recently returned to the Cortes an overwhelming majority in its support,

there can be no more room to doubt their ability to carry into operation

the reforms of which they have given promise than there can be justifica-

tion to question the sincerity witli which the assurance was given. It

seems, therefore, to be a fitting occasion to look back, upon the relations

between the United States and Spain, and to mark the progress which may

have been made in accomplishing those objects in which we have been

promised their co operation. It must be acknowledged with regret that

little or no advance has been made. The tardiness in this respect, how-

ever, cannot be said to l)e in any way imputable to a want of diligence,

zeal, or ability iu the Legation of the United States at Madrid. The De-

partment is persuaded that no persons, however gifted with those qualilaea

and faculties, could have better succeeded against the apparent apathy or

indifference of the Spanish authorities, if, indeed, their past omission to do

what we have expected should not be ascribed to otlier causes.

The Spanish Government, partly at our instance, passed a law providing

for the gradual emancipation of slaves in the West India colonies. This

law, so far as this Department is aware, remains unexecuted, and it is

feared that the recently issued regulations professedly for its execution

are wholly inadequate to any practical result in favor of emancijjation, if

thev be not really in the interest of the slaveholder and of the continuance

of the institution of slavery. While we fully acknowledge our obligation

to the general rule which requires a nation to abstain from interference in

the domestic concerns of others, circumstances warrant partial exceptions

to this rule. The United States have financipated all the slaves in their own

territory, as the result of a civil war of four years, attended by a vast eflFu-

pion of blood and expenditure of treasure. The slaves in the Spanish pos-

sessions near us are of the same race as those who were bondmen here. It

ie natural and inevitable for the latter to sympathize in the oi>pression of

their brethren, an<l especially in the waste of life occasioned by inhuman

punishments and excessive toil. Nor is this symi)athy confined to those who

were recentlv in b<Midage among us. It is as universal as it is natural and just.

It rests upon the instincts of humanity, and is the recognition of those rights

of man which are now universally admitted, (governments cannot resist a

conviction so general and so righteous as that which condemns as a crime

the tolerance of human slavery, nor can governments be in fault in raising

their veice against the further tolerance of so grievous a blot npon

bmmanity. Tou will oonsequently, in decisive but rtepctful tein)P,remon-

ptp&te against the apparent failure of Spain to carry into full effect the act

referred to. We acknowledge that this may be a difficult task. The re-

proacheB.open or c^ivert.of those whose supposed interests may be affeoted

by it, to say nothing of other underhanded proceedings, must be trying to

the patience and highly embarrassing to the statesmen who may be the

best disposed toward the measure. All, however, who countenance luke-

warmness or neglect in carrying it into effect must, more or less, be liable

to the charge of duplicity or bad faith—a charge which every man of honor

in high station ought to endeavor to avoid.

By the enactment of the law of July, 1870, the Government of Spain

Ib practically committed to the policy of emancipation. It is true that the

law was far from bt^ing as comprehensive a measure as was hoped for by

the friends of emancipation both in Spain and throughout Christendom,

but it was regarded as the entering wedge and the first step toward the

extermination of a great wrong, and as the inauguration of a measure of

justice and of peace, whereby Spain, to her high honor, declared herself in

harmony with the general sentiment of modern civilization, and with the

principles of tinquestioned human rights. It is so manifestly due to that

sentiment and to those principles that their recognition as thus evidenced

be made practical and effective by the enforcement of the law that it can-

not be questioned that Spain, with the pride and the honor that mark her

history, will no longer delay the execution of the law and the observance

of the pledge to humanity and to justice which is implied in the enact-

ment.

l^iere is another view which may be taken of this subject. The Span-

ish Government and the Spanish people are understood to be almost

unanimously adverse to the independeace of Cuba. It will not be denied

that the resistance to the enforcement of the emancipation law proceed."

almost entirely from those interested in slave property in the Island of

Cmba, who have, through the successive ministries to which the Govern-

ment of Spain has been intrusted since the enactment of the law la

July, 1870, been enabled hitherto to delay and defeat its execution by pre-

venting the promulgation of regulations effective for the end to which

the law was directed. Aji important law is thus nullified through

the influence and agency of a class in Cuba who are most loud

in profession of devotion to the integrity of the Spanish terri-

tory and to the continuance of Spanish dominion over the

island. The example of disregard to laws thus set cannot be

without its influence. If Spain permits her authority to be virtually

and practically defied in that island by a refusal or neglect to carry in-

to effect acts of the home Government of a humane tendency, is not this

tantamount to an acknowledgment of inability to control ? If she refuses

to enforce her authority in one instance, why may it not be spurned in

others, and will not her supremacy, sooner or later, become nominal only,

with no real advantage to herself or her colonies, but to the serious detri-

ment of both, as well as those t>f other powers whose relations, whether of

neighborhood or commerce, giv« them special interest in the welfare of

those possessions? It is represented that the grasping cupidity of 8u^r planters in Cuba, has succeeded in enabling them virtually to annul their

contracts with Coolies for a limited term of service, coupled with the privi-

lege of returning to their homes at it» close, and that these unfortunate

Asiatics, under regulations for an enforced reengagement when their for-

mer term may have expired, are being reduced to the same abject condition

as the African slaves. If this be true, it is impossible for the Government of any civilized country to be indifferent to so atrocious a proceeding.

Tou will mention this subject to the Spanish Minister for Foreign Affairs,

and will not conceal the view which we take of it.

The insurrection in Cuba has now lasted four years. Attempts to sup-

press, so far futile, have been made probably at a sacrifice of more than

100,000 lives and an incalculable amount of property. Our commercial and other connections with that island, compel us to take a warm interest in its

peaceful and orderly condition, without which there cannot be prosperity.

Cuba being separated from this coun'ry br a narrow passage, the temp-

tation for reckless adventurers here to violate our laws and embark in hos

tile expeditions thither is great despite the unquestioned vigilance of this

Government to maintain its duty and the efforts with which the approaches

to the island have been guarded by the Spanish cruisers. The said prox-

imity has led Cubans and others, partisans of the insurgents, to take up

their abode in the United States, actuated by the hope that that proximity

would enable them advantageously to plot and act for the advancement of

their cause in the island. We certainly have reason to expect that the

great strain upon our watchfulness to thwart those schemes occasioned by

the long duration of hostilities in Cuba sliould have some determination

through a cessation of the cause which hitherto has been suppos^ed to make it necessary for the discharge of our duties as a neutral.

Ever since the insurrection began we have repeatedly been caUed upon

to discharge those duties. In the performance of them we are conscious

of no neglect ; but the trial to our impartiality by the want of success on

the part of Spain in suppressing the revolt is necessarily so severe that un-

less she shall soon be more successful it will force upon this Government the

consideration of the question whether duty to itself and to the commercial

interests of its citizens may not demand some chenge in the line of action

it has tlms far pursued.

It is intimated, and is probably true, that the corruption which is more or less inseparable from such protracted contests is itself a principal agent

in prolonging ho.^tilities in Cuba. The extortions incident to furnishing

supplies for the troop.-J, the hope of sharing in the proceeds of insurgent

or alleged insurgent property, would, of course, be put an end to by the res-

toration of tranquility. These must be powerful agencie-- in fettering the

arm which ought to strike home for peace, for order, and the quiet enjoy-

ment of the citizen. It is reasonable to suppose, too, that the saving of

the public money which nmst result from a termination of the conflict

would alone be a sufficient incentive for a patriotic government to exert

itself to the utmost for that purpose.

Besides a measure for the abolition of slavery, and assurances of the

speedy termination of the contest in Cuba, we have been assured that

extensive municipal reform would be introduced in the colonies, and that

their government would be liberalized. Certainly the Spanish govern-

ment, with its experience of the past, and with the knowledge which it

cannot fail to have of the tendencies of the age, can never expect peaceably

to maintain the ancient colonial system in those islands. The abuses of

that system press heavily upon the numerous educated natives of the same

.t^-

race, and, if not reformed, must be a constant source of bitter antipathy to

the mother country. The repeated assurances of the intention of the gov-

ernment to alwlish slavery and to grant liberal reforms in the administra-

tion of the island, are admissions by Spain of the wrong of slavery and of

the existence of evils which need reform, but are still allowed on the illog-

ical and indefensible ground that concession cannot be made while resist-

ance continues.

A nation gives justification to resistance while admitted wrongs remain

unredressed ; resistance ceases to be justifiable when no wrongs are either

admitted or alleged. Redress wrongs and resistance will cease.

Spain is too great a power to fear to do what she admits to be right be-

cause it is asked vehemently, or because its attainment is sought im-

properly. She need not apprehend that the reforming of abuses and of

wrongs, which she admits to exist and declares herself ready to correct,

will be attributed to an unworthy motive ; while delay in removing admit-

ted wronfj, which it is within her power to remove, places her in a false

position and goes far to justify and to attract sympathy to those who are

sufferers from the unredressed wrongs.

Spainitself has been the scene of civil commotion, but prisoners taken in

arms have not been put to death as they are in Cuba, nor have amnesties

been regarded as dangerous in the Peninsula. Why should they be so

regarded in the colonies? or why should concessions be dishonorable in

Cuba that are not so considered at home ? The suggestion that they would

be is the offspring of the selfishness of those interested in prolonging the

cotatest for private gain.

A just, lenient and humane policy toward Cuba, if it would not bring

quiet and order and contentedness, would at least modify the judgment of

the world that most of the evils of which Cuba is the scene are the neces-

sary results of harsh treatment and of the maladministration of the Colonial

government.

We are aware that many citizens of the United States, owners of estates

in Cuba, have suffered injury by the causeless seizure, in violation of treaty

obligations, of those estates, and by the appropriation of their proceeds by

those into whose bands they had fallen. Though in some one or two in-

stances the property has been ordered to be restored, so far there has been

no indemnification for the damage sustained. In other instances, where

restitution has been promised, it has been evaded and put off in a way

which cannot fail to excite the iust resentment of the sufferers and of their

government, whose duty it is to protect their interests.

The decree of 31st August last, prescribing regulations for the proceed-

ings concerning sequestrated property in Cuba, so far as it recognized the

embargo or confiscation of the property of those charged with complicity

in the insurrection, as a judicial proceeding, in which the parties are

entitled to be fairly heard, may be regarded as a concession to the frequent

remonstrances of this Government as well as to the requirements of justice.

But unless the action of the Board to be constituted under that decree

exhibit a very different measure of promptness and of activity from that

which has been given to the remonstrances of this Government against the

proceedings whereby the property of citizens of the United States baa

heretofore been seized, the organization of the Board will serve only to

increase the very just cause of complaint of this Government. . It is hoped

that it will not be allowed to bfcome the means or the excuse of further

pn^crastination, or of delaying beyond tlie extreinest limits of patii n<'e,

which have already be^n reached, the decision upon the many cases wbioh

have been the subject of protracted diplom»tic correspondence. There

will readily occur to you several ^ases which need not be specifically

enumerated, which have been referred backward and forward between

Madrid and Havana to the very verge of the exhaustion of all patience.

In the meantime the property of citizens of the Cnited States has been

held in violation of the treaty between this country and Spain.

In some of these cases you have been promised the release of the em-

bargo. It is expected that the tardy redress thus promised will not be

f urtlier delayed by any alleged necessity of reference to this newly con-

stituted board.

It is hoped that you will present the views above set forth, and the

present grievances of which this Government so justly complains, to the

Government to wliich you are accredited in a way which, without giving

oftV.nse, will leave a conviction that we are in earnest in the expression of

those views, and that we expect redress, and that if it should not soon be

afforded Spain must not be surprised to find, as the inevitable result of

the delay, a marked cliange in the feeling and in the temper of the people

and "of tlie Government of the United States. Believing that the present

Ministry of Spain is in a sutficiently confirmed po.sition of power to carry

out the measures which it announces and the reforms which have been

promised, and to do justice by the removal of the causes of our well-

founded complaints, and not doubting the sincerity of the assurances whkh have been given, the United States look confidently for the realization of

those hopes, which have been encouraged by repeated promises, that all

causes for estrangement or for the interru[)tion of those friendly feelings

which are tratiitional, as they are sincere, on the part of this Government

toward Spain, wiil be speedily aud forever removed. I am, etc.,

HAMILTON FISH.

reconstruction mixer/Ira Steward Eight-Hour Movement.pdf

AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT Keith E. Whittington

Supplementary Material

Chapter 6: Civil War and Reconstruction – Political Economy

Ira Steward, The Eight Hour Movement (1865)1

“Well,” says a workingman, “I should certainly be very glad to work less hours, but I can scarce’y earn enough by working ten to make myself and family comfortable.”

You are receiving your scanty pay precisely because you work so many hours in a day, and . . . reducing the Hours for the masses will eventually increase their Wages.

. . . Think then of the difference which will soon be observed in a man or woman emancipated by

the Eight Hour system from Excessive Toil! Not the first day nor the first week, perhaps, but in a very little while.

. . . Leisure, however, is neither positively good, or bad. Leisure, or Time is a blank—a negative—a

piece of white paper upon which we stamp, picture, or write our past characters. . . . John Stuart Mill says: “The secret for developing man, is to give him many duties to perform and

many inducements to perform them.” 1 Excerpt taken from Ira Steward, The Eight Hour Movement: A Reduction of Hours is an Increase of Wages (Boston: Boston Labor Reform Association, 1865).

Mankind will be virtuous and happy when they have full power to choose between good and evil, with plenty of motives for deciding right.

. . . My theory is, 1st, That more leisure, will create motives and temptations for the common people

to ask for more Wages. 2d. That where all ask for more Wages, there will be no motive for refusing, since Employers will

all fare alike. 3d. That where all demand more Wages, the demand cannot be resisted. 4th. That resistance would amount to the folly of a “strike” by Employers themselves, against the

strongest power in the world, viz., the habits, customs, and opinions, of the masses. 5th. That the change in the habits and opinions of the people through more leisure will be too

gradual to disturb or jar the Commerce and enterprise of Capital. 6th. That the increase in Wages will fall upon the wastes of Society, in its Crimes, Idleness,

Fashions, and Monopolies, as well as the more legitimate and honorable profits of Capital, in the production and distribution of Wealth, and

. . . Without attempting to settle, definitely, how much common labor is worth—for it is a broad

question—I will make the claim that no man’s compensation should be so low, that it will not secure for himself and family a comfortable home—education for his children, and all of the influence to which he is entitled by his capacity, virtue and industry. As the present system of labor does not pay a majority of workers enough, we may conclude that something is wrong; and whatever our speculations upon the system, it must be clear that the masses will not insist upon more pay, without additional motives and temptations; and that all who do the work of the masses must receive their pay. . . . Change and improve the daily habits of the Laborers and they will raise their own pay in spite of any power in the Universe; and this can only be done by furnishing them with more leisure, or time!

. . . A reduction of Hours means more than an Increase in Wages. It means a more equal and just

Distribution of Wealth. For, to increase Wages, without increasing the cost of Production, is more equal Distribution of Wealth.

. . . We are sometimes asked “whether we think a man ought to have as much pay for Eight as for

Ten hours’ Labor?” It would be fair to ask this if we had been paid all we have really earned in the Ten hour system;

or if those wages would pay us all we shall actually earn in Eight Hours; even admitting, for the sake of argument (what we do not believe), that two hours’ less time would result in one fifth less production.

. . . Capitalists tell us that they will not employ Labor unless they can make satisfactory profits. Our

space is too limited to expose the absurdity of such remarks. The next generation will laugh at them. We

shall content ourselves now, by matching them with other statements. Unless the working classes are paid sufficient wages, they will not be able to buy certain articles which manufacturers and merchants are so eager to sell Capitalists remember us as Producers, to be paid as little as possible; but not as Consumers, to be paid enough to enable us to buy their commodities. . . .

. . . We have decided that THEY are making too much money! They cut down OUR Prices! We shall cut down THEIR Hours! We submit to their “cut down” because there are enough to take our places if we resign them

but whenever we are united enough to try the Eight Hour experiment, in spite of the opposition of the Employers, they will submit by paying the regular Ten hour wages, simply because they cannot hire men if they have not.

. . . We have learned that we cannot bring the Wages up to the Hours that we labor; we purpose,

therefore, to bring down our Hours—nearer, at least, to our limited Wages. . . . Our decision is that we don’t care whether we can do as much or not!—that we can do

enough—that the world has grown rich, and that the time has come to set in motion the great natural causes which will secure a better Distribution of Wealth. We shall treat the Wealthy classes as tenderly and considerately as a young man should treat his grandmother. We shall remember their habits, and their prejudices even; but we are going to take possession—we, or our children to come after us—of the vast Wealth our industry has created. Peacefully—without armed resistance or the spilling of blood, or the destruction of property—as the ruling classes have always done before us—when they could not dominate—following, loyally, established principles and precedents, we shall accomplish our purpose so gradually and acceptably that men will wonder why they ever opposed us. . . .

. . .

U.S. History 2

reconstruction mixer/Colloquy with Colored Ministers.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Myers Colored National Labor Union 1869.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Phillips, Wendell Speeches.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Cuban Anti Slavery meeting 1872.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Ira Steward Eight-Hour Movement.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Sylvis Elective Franchise.pdf

reconstruction mixer/Sylvis Woman Suffrage.pdf

reconstruction mixer/LiftEveryVoice.pdf