tody; and said justice shall forthwith advertise said negro, or mulatto, and on the day and at the time and place, mentioned in said advertisement, the said justice shall, at public auction, proceed to sell said negro or mulatto, to any person, or persons, who will pay said fine and costs for the shortest time; and said purchaser shall have the right to compel said negro or mulatto to work for, and serve out said time. If said negro, or mulatto, shall not within ten days after the expiration of his, her or their time of service, as aforesaid, leave the state, he, she, or they shall be liable to a second prosecution, in which the penalty to be inflicted, shall be one hundred dollars, and so on for every subsequent offense, the penalty shall be increased fifty dollars, over and above the last penalty." This act came from a Judiciary Committee of the Legislature of Illinois, Mr. Lincoln's own state, in 1853; and was not repealed until 1865! It was reported from the above named committee by John A. Logan, the present Republican Senator of Illinois, who was the father and champion of it, and who, as the record shows, carefully guarded its severe and cruel provisions against all amendments offered and pressed for adoption. Mr. Lincoln's sentiments, however, as the great leader and spokesman of the Republican party, were in harmony with the object of this law. It is not known that he ever suggested a modification of it during his whole political career before the war, but on the contrary he said: "I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters of the free negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry with white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I suppose will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the superior and inferior, I, as much as any other man, am in favor of the superior being assigned to the white man.' "They the Southern people] are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not exist among them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, are should not instantly give it up. When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the facts. That it is very difficult to get rid of it, in

any satisfactory way, I can understand, and appreciate the saying, I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself. If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves and send them to Liberia.” Thus Mr. Lincoln asserted the great superiority of his own race over that of the negro, which, in the freedom of the latter, he held, should ever be observed in the distinctions of society, and in the administration of our Government. He believed that in the same society, and under the same government, you could no more elevate the one race to the line of equality, without degrading the other, than you could make black white. While his hand was forced to pen the proclamation of freedom for the African, to save those of his own race from ruin, his prayer still was, "Shield me and mine from that philanthropy which would blend the crystal eye, the elevated feature, the ambrosial and waving curl, the rosy skin, all the striking and glorious attributes that mark the favorites of nature, exhaling fragrance and redolent of beauty and of bloom, with the disgusting peculiarities, the wool and grease and fetor of the blackened savage of the southern deserts. The Saxon and the Celt, the Norman and the Dane, even the Tartar and the Hun, the Turk and Saracen, the races of Japhet and of Shem, may compound and melt and mingle into one people, when met upon the same soil; but the race of Ham must serve or separate." Such was the language of one who thought and felt with Mr. Lincoln, on the subject of the position in which the freed or free-born African should stand related to the white man under the same government. It surely was one of subjection, if not of bondage; one of servitude if not of slavery. For what else is he, though called a freeman, but a servant, who, according to the only Magna Charta granted him, is to be taxed without representation, governed without his consent, excluded from office, tried without a jury of his peers, and forbidden to marry in any race but his own? Such was the only colored freeman allowed to remain in this country by the political creed of Mr. Lincoln in 1860, the great Republican leader and apostle of human liberty.

The same man, and the same Republican party, in their platform of 1860, denounced John Brown for his raid upon Virginia to rescue the slave from his master, as among the worst of criminals. So, too, they pledged themselves at the commencement of the war,

by a resolution passed by Congress with but two dissenting votes, that they would not prosecute it for any purpose of freeing the slave; and declared during its progress to the end of it, through Mr. Lincoln, that the pledge had been kept, and that no slave had been freed except from necessity to save the white man and his govern

ment.

The terms of surrender were agreed upon, by. which both parties resumed their positions in a state of peace, under the Constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof. The laws of war, with their rigid rights and rules, no longer existed. That which war gave authority to do, peace now made illegal and void. Neither the people nor States of the South could now be treated as rebels or belligerents, for the simple reason that they were now in fact neither; the admission and recognition of which formed necessarily the very basis of the terms of peace. By that agreement no penalties were inflicted, or provided for; no rights under the Constitution were withheld by the victors from the vanquished; but on the contrary the latter, by the very terms of surrender, were bound to obey the Constitution, and therefore to aid in the execution of all its rights and obligations. The Republican party, in utter disregard of these terms, and of the Constitution, and of the pledges given in the resolution passed so unanimously by Congress at the commencement of the war, placed the Southern people and States under military law, treating them as captives of war and conquered provinces. This they did for party ends and purposes, but under a false profession that it was done to protect a race whose rights as freemen they had shamefully ignored and abused, within the circle of their own homes, and whose freedom in the South, Mr. Lincoln, as the head of the Republican party, had, as he proclaimed throughout the conflict, sought to avoid, and only consented to its accomplishment when driven to it to save his own race from the dangers and disasters of war.

Slavery throughout the South was abolished, and the present rights of its colored population secured by the adoption of the three late amendments to the Constitution; which could not have been done without the concurrent consent and action of the Southern States. Why should not the colored freemen of the South now greatly prefer to act in political harmony with the Southern white men, who are their real friends, and with whom they are iden

tified in having the same country to live in, and the same interests to protect, rather than to depend upon a sectional party of the North, who have never sought to aid them except for selfish ends and party purposes? In a letter dated Montgomery, Ala., Sept. 20, 1880, from James A. Scott, a colored man, who has been for four years editor of the Montgomery Advance, addressed to Col. F. A. Conkling, of New York, brother of Roscoe Conkling, and published in the New York Sun, among other things says: "The Republican partisan press is now teeming with abuse against the people of the South, alleging that colored men are bull-dozed,' their votes not fairly counted, and their rights and privileges openly denied. Such, sir, is not the fact. Colored men, after calmly and quietly reviewing the events of the last ten years, have very naturally asked themselves, What have we gained by our blind adhesion to the Republican party? We have held none of the offices, but on the contrary men have induced us to place them in power, and have grown rich, and left us to our fate; we have received nothing at their hands; we are dependent on the white men of our State for our bread, for our subsistence, for the schooling of our children, for all that we have; we go to them in trouble and distress, and are always treated kindly. They are all in all to us, and why should we oppose them in politics?' Reasoning in this way, the colored men of the South are voting by the hundreds with the white people, and are openly avowing themselves to be Democrats." Why had they not better trust such friends and neighbors, than Northern Republicans, who, as we have seen, have represented their race as "despised" in the North, and where, just eight years before the war, a measure had been enacted so barbarous as the Illinois law of 1853? That act of Mr. Logan, the present Republican leader in Illinois, was founded alone in prejudice against color and race. It did not discriminate the least in favor of the intelligent and upright negro, who had served his state or country in peace or war. Good old Edom London, if he had lived and moved to Illinois, between 1853 and 1865, might have been sold the twelfth time, at auction on the block, under its savage sections. He was an old revolutionary colored soldier, of Massachusetts, who had entered the army of that state, at Cambridge, for eight months. Afterwards he was sold to his tenth master, with whom he lived five weeks, when he enlisted again for three years in the armies of '76. His last owner received all of his bounty, and part of his wages.

In 1806, the old hero became poor, and chargeable to the town in which he resided. That town struggled through all the courts of Massachusetts, from the Justice to the Supreme Court, to shift the responsibility for the scanty support of that old soldier, to one of the numerous towns in which he had sojourned as the slave of eleven masters. In this noted case of Interpleader among the towns of that negro-hating, but professed negro-loving, Republican state of Massachusetts, the burden of supporting this aged veteran of '76, so long shunned and dreaded by the different towns, was at last fastened upon one of them by the decision of the case of Whichendon Town v. Hatfield Town, reported in 4 Mass. Reports. Edom London was no common character, compared even to the great and good of the earth. His heroism was of the higher life among heroes. Forgetful and careless of the chains he wore himself, he sighed and sought for the liberty of others. He fought on the fields of fame, for no glory to win, no honors to wear, for himself. Robbed of his rewards, and of the wages he won, by those for whom he bled, he lived a beggar for his bread, a pauper among a people he had sought to save. In his day of want, there was no well-to-do gentleman in the land of Sumter who would not have pensioned him on sight. But beggared and breadless, as he was made by those whose liberty he had bought with his blood, and shameful as the strife was among the towns to shun his support, we thank God he died in Massachusetts before he reached Illinois, where he might have been sold at auction, on account of the color of his skin, under the law of Mr. Logan, the present Republican Senator from that state, and leader of the Republican party in the Northwest.

Nothing can be more hypocritical and unjustifiable than the effort made by the Republican party since the war to defeat and render odious the Democrats, because they still maintain the old. time-honored doctrine of State Rights, as held by Jefferson and Madison. In their platform of 1860, the Republican party adopted the following resolution: "That the maintenance inviolate of the rights of the states, and especially the right of each state to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of powers on which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depends; and we denounce the lawless invasion, by armed force, of the soil of any