, and should exhaust all the powers of the United States
government to maintain these essential rights of citizenship within
the limits of all the states, in as full and complete a manner as
it will guard and protect the unquestioned rights of citizens of
the United States within the domains of the most powerful nations
of the world. Surely a citizen of the United States has as much
right in any one of the states as he would have in a foreign land,
however remote or however powerful its government may be. Protection
at home in the secure enjoyment of the rights of person and property
is the foundation of all human government, without which its forms
are a mockery and with which mere forms of government become a
matter of indifference. Protection goes with allegiance, and
allegiance ceases to be a duty when protection is denied.

"I can appreciate the great change that has occurred in the southern
states, the natural antagonisms which would raise by the emancipated
slaves mingling in the same community with their former masters,
with equal civil and political rights with those who had held them
as slaves; I can pardon the prejudices of race, of caste, and even
of local ties; and the American people have, I think, waited with
great forbearance, waited patiently for the time when constitutional
rights would be respected without regard to race, or color, or
creed, or party. If the time has come, as alleged in the papers
before me, when members of the Republican party, through whose
agency largely the existence of the government has been maintained
intact over the broad extent of our country, cannot express their
free opinions, cannot enjoy their constitutional rights, are murdered
at the ballot box without fear on the part of their murderers of
punishment, and driven from their homes by outrage and terror, and
that white and black alike are subject to ostracism and injustice,
and as a party are disfranchised in large portions of the regions
where in war they asserted and maintained the powers of the national
government, then indeed is patient inquiry demanded, and a full,
open, and manly assertion that the rights and equalities of citizens
shall be maintained and enforced at every hazard.

"If the Copiah resolutions are the creed of the Democratic party
in the south, then indeed the war is a failure, and we must expect
again the fierce sectional excitement, deepened by injury and
disappointment. Written in the light