court against any white person." By this enactment, the meanest white
man may enter the home of the bravest black soldier, or wealthiest
colored citizen, may murder his sons, ravish his wife and daughters,
pillage and burn his house, commit any and every possible crime against
him and his, and yet, if no human eye but his own, or that of his
family, or his colored friends, witness the barbarisms, that black man,
the father, the husband, the land-holder, outraged beyond measure, has
no possible legal redress in the courts of Tennessee.

Then again, in case a free colored person is imprisoned and unable to
pay his jail fees, he may be apprenticed out to labor until the sum be
paid. And yet again, the courts may apprentice colored children as they
see proper. The law does not even say friendless or orphan children. Is
not that slavery under a new form? Thus, to leave those devoted black
men's lives, liberties and property to be protected by white men, whose
loyalty to the government is because it is a means to secure power to
themselves, not from any love of its republican principles, is to doom
them to all the ignominies and cruelties of slavery itself.

Let us not be deceived by the wicked wiles of politicians who tell us
that President Johnson can not give the right to the ballot to the black
loyalists of the South; for it is but the new "refuge of lies" to which
slavery resorts. The same men told us that Lincoln had not the power to
emancipate the slaves; that the government had no right to arm the
negro, etc. If President Johnson has constitutional authority, either
civil or military, to take away a man's right to vote, as a punishment
for disloyalty, he must have power to give a man the same right, as a
reward for loyalty; if the President may disfranchise a rebel soldier in
order to enable the loyal people of a State to organize a republican
form of government, he may also enfranchise a Union soldier to
accomplish the same purpose. If the President has not the right nor the
power to give the ballot to any person not entitled to it under the old
order of slavery, how will he organize South Carolina, by whose old
constitution no person was allowed to vote unless he owned ten slaves or
was worth ten thousand dollars? Of course nobody owns ten slaves, and
how many men, think you, who remained loyal at home, or how many
returned soldiers or amnestied civilians have the requisite ten thousand
dollars? In South Carolina,