The recovery of civil and political rights under the Constitution, as
"denied or abridged" by the constitutions of the States, more especially
those of the old slave holding ones, will be a slow and tedious process,
and will come to the individual rather than to the race, as the reward of
character and thrift; because, for reasons already stated, it will hardly
be possible in the future, as it has not been in the past, to unify the
mass of the Afro-American people, in thought and conduct, for a proper
contention in the courts and at the ballot-box and in the education of
public opinion, to accomplish this purpose. Perhaps there is no other
instance in history where everything depended so largely upon the
individual, and so little upon the mass of his race, for that development
in the religious and civic virtues which makes more surely for an
honorable status in any citizenship than constitutions or legislative
enactments built upon them.

But even from this point of view, I am disposed to believe that the
Negro's civil and political rights are more firmly fixed in law and public
opinion than was true at the close of the Reconstruction period, when
everything relating to him was unsettled and confused, based in
legislative guarantees, subject to approval or disapproval of the dominant
public opinion of the several States, and that he will gradually work out
his own salvation under the Constitution,--such as Charles Sumner,
Thaddeus Stevens, Benjamin F. Butler, Frederick Douglass, and their
co-workers, hoped and labored that he might enjoy. He has lost nothing
under the fundamental law; such of these restrictions, as apply to him by
the law of certain of the States, necessarily apply to white men in like
circumstances of ignorance and poverty, and can be overcome, in time, by
assiduous courtship of the schoolmaster and the bank cashier. The extent
to which the individual members of the race are overcoming the
restrictions made a bar to their enjoyment of civil and political rights
under the Constitution is gratifying to those who wish the race well and
who look beyond the present into the future: while it is disturbing the
dreams of those who spend most of their time and thought in abortive
efforts to "keep the 'nigger' in his place"--as if any man or race could
have a place in the world's thought and effort which he did not make for
himself! In our grand Republic, at least, it has been so often
demonstrated as to becom