self-evident truths,
that when at some remote time some man, or faction, or interest should
arise, and say that none but rich men, or none but white men, or none
but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness, their children's children should look back to the
Declaration of Independence, and should take heart to begin again the
battles their forefathers fought, that thus truth and liberty and
righteousness and justice and all the Christian virtues might not be
lost in the land; and none might dare limit and circumscribe the
principles on which the temple of liberty was being built. Thus, by
these centuries of growth and life God said to our people, "I have given
you this key to your history, the union of liberty and an enlightened
faith--faith and freedom. Be true to these. This do and thou shalt
live." It seems plain enough. And yet, in this garden of liberty there
were sown tares. In the bosom of this free land the deadly foe of
freedom, slavery, was here. In slavery was the evident and necessary foe
of all that God had foreplanned for our Nation, because slavery denies
the rights of men. Men tried to deal with this problem; they tried to
circumscribe it; they said it was a local question, and Webster stood in
the Senate and boasted that he had never spoken of slavery on that
floor. How the way of liberty was choked, how the tree of liberty
withered! And then God spoke in the earthquake, and the fire, the war
came on, and the slave was set free; and it seemed as if again we had
come into sight of God's plan for the race, that liberty and Christian
faith should be the watchword of our national life.

Now again, at last, it seems as if that which we are accomplishing and
that which God has spoken in all these ages is again jeopardized, and as
if this human right shall be denied in the South. Men doubt whether
there is in the Negro more than the capacity of a subordinate race, and
say that to educate him is to lift him out of his sphere. Brethren and
friends, there is manhood in the Negro race. There was humanity in those
slaves who toiled their way over mountains and through swamps before the
war, with their eyes focussed upon the North star of freedom. And there
was humanity in those mothers who clasped their babes to their breast
and fled before the bloodhounds that they might escape the enslavers of
men. There was manhood in those one hundred and seventy-eight thousand
Negro s