loud
noise and courageously contend for what is theirs, usually enjoy the
respect and confidence of their fellows and get, in the end, what belongs
to them, or a reasonable modification of it.

As a consequence of inability to unite in thought and effort for the
conservation of their civil and political rights, the Afro-American
Negroes and colored people have lost, by fundamental enactments of the old
slave-holding States, all of the civil and political rights guaranteed
them by the Federal Constitution, in the full enjoyment of which they were
from the adoption of the War Amendments up to 1876-7, when they were
sacrificed by their Republican allies of the North and West, in the
alienation of their State governments, in order to save the Presidency to
Mr. Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio. Their reverses in this matter in the old
slave-holding States, coupled with a vast mass of class legislation,
modelled on the slave code, have affected the Afro-American people in
their civil and political rights in all of the States of the Republic,
especially as far as public opinion is concerned. This was inevitable,
and follows in every instance in history where a race element of the
citizenship is set aside by law or public opinion as separate and distinct
from its fellows, with a fixed status or caste.

It will take the Afro-American people fully a century to recover what they
lost of civil and political equality under the law in the Southern States,
as a result of the re-actionary and bloody movement begun in the
Reconstruction period by the Southern whites, and culminating in
1877,--the excesses of the Reconstruction governments, about which so much
is said to the discredit of the Negro, being chargeable to the weakness
and corruption of Northern carpet-baggers, who were the master and
responsible spirits of the time and the situation, rather than to the
weakness, the ignorance and venality of their Negro dupes, who, very
naturally, followed where they led, as any other grateful people would
have done. For, were not these same Northern carpet-baggers the direct
representatives of the Government and the Army which crushed the slave
power and broke the shackles of the slave? Even so. The Northern
carpet-baggers planned and got the plunder, and have it; the Negro got the
credit and the odium, and have them yet. It often happens that way in
history, that the innocent dupes are made to suffer for the misdeeds and
crimes of the guilty.