Part 22
Mr. Lincoln believed that the Constitution protected slavery in the States wherein it existed, and his aim was to let it alone where it had a constitutional right to exist. Not because he thought slavery right, but because of his respect for the law.
His original position was that, since slavery was protected by the law, the friends of freedom would have to abide their time and continue to create sentiment sufficient to change the law and thus overthrow the iniquitous institution. This is the only interpretation that can be put upon his doctrine. "The house divided against itself."
Is it reasonable to think that a man so thoughtful and sincere as was Mr. Lincoln could give a life to the advocacy of the freedom of the slaves, and in his heart not be in favor of their liberation. Mr. Lincoln often expressed ideas on the emancipation calculated to jeopardize his political future, which he would not have done but for the fact that in his heart of hearts he was committed to the cause of freedom.
The slaves hailed him as their savior, which he proved to be by emancipating 4,000,000 of them, and he will be held in loving remembrance by Afro-Americans as long as the world shall stand.
It is fitting that we assemble ourselves together on the anniversary of his birth to honor his memory, and tell of his noble deeds to the rising generation.
President Lincoln was truly a great man; a giant in intellect, a peerless diplomat, a fearless advocate of the rights of humanity and a wise ruler. In council he stood head and shoulders above the members of his Cabinet and other advisers, notwithstanding he was surrounded by some of the greatest scholars and statesmen of his time.
Allow me to apply to Lincoln the words of Wendell Phillips in his address "Toussaint L'Ouverture":
"Lincoln was greater than Cæsar; Cæsar fought to further his ambition and to extend a great empire. Lincoln was an advocate of principle, justice, and fair play. He was greater than Alexander; Alexander fought for glory--to conquer all the world, all at the sacrifice of happy homes and the desolation and ruin of countries. Lincoln sacrificed comfort and ease to save a nation and liberate an enslaved people. He was greater than Napoleon; Napoleon made wives to be widows, and children to be fatherless and homeless, and drenched Europe and Egypt in blood for fame and the desire to found a greater empire than the Roman dynasty; but Lincoln perished because he dared to defend an oppressed people."
When the last scarred veteran shall gather around the last campfire and shall rehearse stories of valor, he will close his tale of sorrow with the name of Lincoln.
When the last poet shall compose his last poem on America's greatest struggle,--yea of the victories of Vicksburg, Fort Donaldson, Lookout Mountain, Gettysburg, Appomattox, Petersburg, and the fall of Richmond, he will close it by paying a tribute to the memory of the sainted Lincoln.
When the last statesman of the world shall pronounce a farewell anathema upon the world's oppression, when he shall write the names of those foremost in the work of emancipation, after he shall have written the name of Moses,--long ere he reaches the name of Wilberforce or Clarkson, he shall have written high on the scroll of fame the name of Lincoln.
When the last flag bearing the "Stars and Stripes" shall wave over this great commonwealth, telling of its glory and tremendous influence, on the wings of the eagle upon the staff of that flag will be written for her to bear away on the eternal breezes the name of the immortal Lincoln,--the savior of his country, the Emancipator of its people.
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The dying legacy bequeathed to the American nation by the martyred Lincoln was a united country and a free people. It gave us a nation which to-day stands first in the galaxy of the nations of the world--in character, thought, wealth, and all the qualities which make for the highest civilizations--a glorious country, whose natural resources stand unsurpassed.
All honor to Mr. Lincoln, the nation's Chieftain, the giant of the conflict, the statesman of the age, the immortal Emancipator; and all honor to the men who wore the blue, both white and black; and all honor to the men and women who gave their sons to the cause and furnished the sinews of war; and all praise be to the God of Heaven who was behind the conflict controlling all.
If we would properly honor this great and good man we must finish the work which he so nobly began,--the lifting up of the Negro race to the highest point of civilization. This can be accomplished; first, by being good and loyal citizens ourselves, and by teaching our children to be the same.
The groundwork of our material advancement is industry. As a race we are generally industrious, but we need to become more skillfully so. Unskilled labor cannot compete with skilled labor, neither North or South. In the past you gave us certain positions as the result of sympathy, not because we could perform the work as skillfully as others.
The sentiment which actuated you to help us was a noble one, but that kind of sentiment is a thing of the past; now we are required to stand or fall according to our merits. When goods are to be manufactured, machines constructed, houses and bridges built, clothing fashioned, or any sort of work performed, none but skilled workmen are considered; there are a great number of employers that care but little about the color of the workmen; with them the question is, Can he do the work?
We must continue the struggle for our civil and political rights. I have no sympathy with that class of leaders who are advising the Negro to eschew politics in deference to color prejudice.
Does it make for permanent peace to deny to millions of citizens their political rights when they are equal to the average electorate in intelligence and character? Fitness, and not color or previous condition of servitude, should be the standard of recognition in political matters. Indeed the Negro should not be denied any civil or political right on account of his color, and to the extent this is done there is bound to be disquietude in the nation.
We have already seen that temporizing with slavery at the formation of the Union resulted in a hundred years of strife and bitterness, and finally brought on devastation and death. And may we not profit by this bitter experience? The enlightened American conscience will not tolerate injustice forever. The same spirit of liberty and fair play which enveloped the nation in the days of Mr. Lincoln and that was recognized by his astute mind, clear to his mental vision and so profoundly appreciated by his keen sense of justice and which he had the courage to foster against all opposition is abroad in our land to-day, will ultimately triumph.
Mr. Lincoln was the first to suggest to his party the enfranchisement of the Negro. He wrote Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, advising that the ballot should be given to the colored man; said he, "Let in, as for instance, the very intelligent and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks. They would probably help in some trying time in the future to keep the jewel of liberty in the family of freedom."
It seems to me right and proper on this memorable day, when the nation has stopped to consider the work of the man above all others who started the Negro on his upward way, that we should appeal to the enlightened conscience of the nation, to unloose further the fetters which bind the black man, especially the industrial bands placed upon him in the North. I appeal to the white people of the South, the sentiment-makers of that section, to create sentiment in favor of law and order, and that they demand a cessation of lynchings. I appeal to the legislature of the South to allow the civil and political door of hope to remain open to my people, and in all things which make for quietness and permanent peace, let us be brethren.
The Negro should no longer be considered a serf, but a citizen of this glorious Republic which both white and black alike have done so much to develop.
Mr. Edwin D. Mead, in the _New York Independent_ of January 21, 1909, says, "Has the country been faithful to Lincoln's memory and task? Has the evolution of emancipation been pushed with proper persistence and earnestness? Are we ceasing our discrimination against men because they are black? It is not a question put by North to South. It is a question put to Springfield, Illinois, the old home of Lincoln himself, as directly as to men in Maryland busy with their pitiful disfranchising chicanery." To the still lingering cry of "black men down" this salutary Commemoration rings back, the "all men up," whose echoes after forty years were growing faint in too many American hearts.
Had they not grown faint in many, the recent words of Justice Harlan, so like Lincoln's own, upon the Berea College decision confirming the Kentucky law that, however, they themselves desired it, and even in private institutions, a black boy and a white boy may not study together the rule of three or the law of gravitation, the Golden Rule, or the Emancipation Proclamation,--would have aroused a vastly profounder and louder response.
"If the views of the highest court of Kentucky be sound, that commonwealth may, without infringing on the Constitution of the United States, forbid the association in the same private school of pupils of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin races respectively, or pupils of Christian and Jewish faith respectively. Have we become so inoculated with prejudice of race that any American government professedly based on the principles of freedom and charged with the protection of all citizens alike can make distinctions between such citizens in the manner of their voluntary meeting for innocent purposes, simply because of their respective races? If the court be right, then the State may make it a crime for white and colored persons to frequent the same market-places at the same time or to appear in an assemblage of citizens convened to consider questions of a public or political nature, in which all citizens without regard to race are equally interested; and other illustrations would show the mischievous, not to say cruel, character of the statute in question, and how inconsistent such legislation is with the principle of the equality of citizens before the law."
Mr. Mead further says that Abraham Lincoln was called upon to make his memorable and mighty protest with reference to a single race. In our time the problem becomes vastly more complex and pressing.
But, however complex, there is but one way of solving it--the simple, Christian, fraternal way. It is well for us that the Lincoln centennial comes to say this to us persuasively and commandingly.
ADDRESS ON THE OCCASION OF THE PRESENTATION OF A LOVING CUP TO HON. JOSEPH BENSON FORAKER, UNITED STATES SENATOR[39]
BY HON. ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKE
[Note 39: Delivered, in appreciation of his service on behalf of the members of Companies A, B and C, 25th Infantry, March 6th, 1909, at Metropolitan A. M. E. Church, Washington, D. C.]
_The Honorable Joseph Benson Foraker, and Colored Citizens:_
A little more than two years ago the country was startled one November morning by a Presidential order for which there is no precedent in the history of the government. It was an act not only without precedent, but, as it appeared at the time to many Americans and as it appears to them now for that matter, not warranted either by law or justice. The punishment which that order inflicted on a whole battalion of American soldiers, without trial of any kind seemed unmerited and cruel in the highest degree, and a wanton abuse of executive power.
The history of this case is known of all men, thanks and yet again thanks and love without limit to the illustrious man whom we have met to honor to-night. For it is now and it must forever remain the history of the Black Battalion and of Senator Foraker. It is the history of the most masterly and heroic struggle in defense of the rights and liberties of the individual citizen against executive usurpation and oppression which this country has witnessed for a generation.
The act of the President, while it affected the rights of all Americans, bore with peculiar hardship, with crushing injustice, on the one hundred and sixty-seven men of the Black Battalion who were discharged from the Army without honor and on a mere assumption of their guilt in the "Brownsville" affray.
That act was a sad blow to the colored race of the country likewise, and fell upon them with cruel surprise. For they are people without many friends and are hard pressed in this boasted land of the free and home of the brave. They are hard pressed in every part of the Republic by an increasing race prejudice, by a bitter colorphobia which forgets that they are weak, forgets their claim at the hands of a Christian nation to just and equal treatment to the end that they may do and become as other men with a race and color different from their own. Blows they are receiving thick and fast from their enemies whose name is legion, blows against their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the South and in the North. We are accustomed as a race to such blows. Cruel as they are and hard to bear, yet they do not take us by surprise. For we have learned by long and bitter experience to look for them from a people who loudly proclaim, in season and out, their belief in the principles of democracy and of Christianity. But when an old friend turns against us, and strikes too like an ancient enemy, such a blow is more grievous to bear, and seems crueler than death itself. The blow of an old friend is always the unkindest blow of all. One is never prepared for it, and when it falls the wound which it inflicts cuts deeper than flesh and blood, for the iron of it enters the soul itself. And so it happened to us, when, two years ago, the cruel wrong of that executive order was done to our brave boys in blue by the hand of a trusted friend, the apostle of the "square deal."
Who can describe the shock of that first terrible amazement, the hot indignation felt by a race at the huge injustice, at the Draconian severity of that order which expelled from the American Army one hundred and sixty-seven men without trial of any kind and on a mere suspicion of their guilt, and which made them forever ineligible to employment thereafter in any department of the National Government, whether on its civil, military, or naval side, and the deep consternation which filled the homes of every colored man in the land--North and South alike? I for one can not describe those feelings, although I experienced in unison with the race at the time the amazement, the indignation, and the consternation which swept us together and caused us to feel and speak and act as one man under the wrong done us by the hand of an old friend whose golden words of hope and fair play we had sometime written in letters of light on the tablets of our hearts. It is no slight matter for any man, whether he be President or private citizen, so to wound the sense of right of a whole race, so to shock its faith in the justice and righteousness of its rulers and government, as that cruel blunder of the President of the United States produced among the colored people of the entire country.
We lifted up our voice as the voice of many waters from one end of the land to the other in loud protest against the wrong, in stern denunciation of it, and the press of the North came nobly to our assistance and swelled the volume of our protest and denunciation. But alas, all this volume of protest and denunciation on the part of the race and of the press would have passed over the nation and the Government like a summer storm of wind and rain--so little do our outcries against injustice and oppression excite the attention and sympathy of the Republic any more--had there not arisen in the Senate of the United States a man for the hour, had not God raised him up to defend his little ones against the slings and arrows of a sleepless energy, of an almost omnipotent power seated in the highest place of the Government. It was the genius, the grandeur of soul of a great man who was able to gather into thunderbolt after thunderbolt all the sense of outraged justice on the part of race and press, and to hurl them with marvelous precision and overwhelming might against that cruel executive order and the hosts of words and messages and other hordes of blood-dyed epithets which the President marshalled and sent forth from time to time in defense of his Draconian decree. If there was sleepless energy in the White House, there was an energy just as sleepless on the floor of the Senate. The almost omnipotent power wielded for the destruction of the Black Battalion by the formidable occupant of the executive mansion was met and matched, ay, overmatched again and again by an omnipotence in discussion which a just cause and genius as orator, lawyer, and debater of the first rank could alone have put into the strong right arm of the brave redresser of a race's wrongs on the floor of the Senate. For more than two years he carried the case of the Black Battalion in his big and tireless brain, in his big and gentle heart, as a mother carries under her bosom her unborn babe. God alone knows what sums of money, what deep thought and solicitude, what unflagging energy, what unceasing labor, he spent in his holy and self-imposed task to right the wrongs of those helpless and persecuted men. In the Senate their case pursued him like a shadow, and at home it sat with him like a ghost in his library, and slept for a few hours only when the great brain slept and the generous heart rested from the pain which was torturing it. Sir, did you know what love went out to you during those tremendous months of toil and struggle, and what prayers from the grateful hearts of ten millions of people?
Yes, he was one man against the whole power of the Administration and all that that meant. Perhaps we do not fully understand what a colossal power that was to confront and grapple with. Almost single-handed he met that power and threw it again and again in the arena of debate. Every speech he made in behalf of his clients, whether on the floor of the Senate or outside of that body, was as terrible as an army with banners to the enemies of the Black Battalion who had now, alas, become his enemies too, and who were bent on the destruction of both, the defender and the defended alike. But he did not hesitate or quail before that power and the danger which threatened his political life. As the battle thickened and perils gathered fast about his head he fought the fight of the Black Battalion as few men in the history of the Republic have ever fought for the weak, for a just cause against organized power and oppression in the high places of the Government. Senator Foraker was one man, but Senator Foraker was a host in himself. We know this, but the enemies of the Black Battalion know it better than we do, for wherever they appeared on the field of action during those two years, whether with their sappers and miners or assaulting columns, there they found him alert, dauntless, invincible--their sappers and miners hoisted with their own petard, their assaulting columns routed and driven to cover before the withering, the deadly fire from the flashing cannon of his facts, his logic, his law, and his eloquence. Sir, God knows that I would rather have fought the fight which you fought so gloriously than be a Senator of the United States, day, than be President of the Republic itself. For it is better to be a brave and just and true man than to be either Senator or President, or both.
"Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends." This is what Senator Foraker has done for the Black Battalion and for the principles of law and liberty which underlie their case. He has given his political life, his seat in the Senate, all the honor and power which were his had he chosen to defend the order of the President, discharging those one hundred and sixty-seven men without trial of any kind from the Army which their valor had helped to make glorious--instead of the soldiers whom he did not know but whose pitiful case, whose unjust and cruel punishment, enlisted the sympathy of his great heart and the masterly labors of his tireless brain. Yes, I repeat, and do not let it ever be forgotten by us as a race, that Senator Foraker might to-day be his own successor in the United States Senate had he chosen to play in the "Brownsville" affair the part of defender of President Roosevelt's wanton abuse and usurpation of executive power, instead of taking the side of the Black Battalion and the fundamental principle of our law and Constitution that each man accused of crime is entitled to trial before he is condemned and punished. He chose the side of the weak, of justice, and the Constitution in this great struggle, and not that of power and the Administration. This was the sin which brought upon him all the wrath of that power and of that Administration, but of which all good men and true absolve and for which they honor him, and for which, besides, a grateful race enshrines him in its heart of hearts. For he preferred to suffer affliction with the Black Battalion and to suffer defeat for the Senatorship rather than enjoy power and office as the price of his desertion of the cause of those helpless men.