he black man through a period of a hundred years, we hold
the _government_ responsible.

What man can compute the dollars stolen from the black slave in the
shape of wages, for a period of a hundred years! What claim has the
slave-holder against the government for confiscation of property by
the side of the claim of the slaves for a hundred years of wages and
enervated and dwarfed manhood! A billion dollars would have bought
every slave in the South in 1860, but fifty billions would not have
adequately recompensed the slave for enforced labor and debased
manhood. The debt grows in magnitude the closer it is inspected. And
yet there are those who will laugh this claim to scorn; who will be
unable to see any grounds upon which to base the justice of it; who
will say that the black man was fully compensated for all the ills he
had borne, the robbery to which he had been subjected, and the
debasement--not to say enervation--of his manhood, by the great act by
which he was made a free man and a citizen.

But there is, or should be, such a claim; it rests upon the strongest
possible grounds of equity; while the conference of freedom and
citizenship was simply the rendering back in the first instance that
which no man has any right to appropriate, law or no law; and, in the
second, bestowing a boon which had been honestly earned in every
conflict waged by the Union from Yorktown to Appomatox Court House--a
boon, I am forced to exclaim, which has, in many respects, proved to
be more of a curse than a blessing, more a dead weight to carry than a
help to conserve his freedom; and to aid in the fixing of his proper
status as a co-equal citizen. I deny the _right_ of any man to enslave
his fellow; I deny the _right_ of any government, sovereign as the
Union or dependent as are the States in many respects, to pass any
regulation which robs _one man or class_ to enrich _another_.
Individuals may invest their capital in human flesh, and governments
may legalize the infamous compact; yet it carries upon its face the
rankest injustice to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the
common Parent of all mankind. There are those in this country--men too
of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the
masterly irony of _Junius_, speak of the black man as the "ward of the
nation"--a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous
and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among
them, to e