voice in the government of which he was declared a citizen.
The power of conferring suffrage limited or universal, was left as the
special privilege of the South. But the South proceeded to nullify the
Fourteenth Amendment as it had nullified the Thirteenth and sent her
captains of rebellion to make the nation's laws.

Impelled by the motive of self preservation, by the sheer necessity of
saving itself from those who would have destroyed it, and of saving to
the freedmen the simple inherent right of self-ownership, the nation was
forced to confer upon the Negro the right to vote by the adoption of the
Fifteenth Amendment. This step it is now popular to characterize as a
blunder or as an act of revenge designed to humiliate the South. If it
was, then the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery are
nameless crimes.

The period of Reconstruction has served as the text for discrediting
Negro Suffrage and is always the apt illustration that gives point to
the argument of those who attempt to prove the incapacity of the Negro
to exercise the right of suffrage. There is no doubt that the effort to
mould public sentiment away from Negro Suffrage has been generally
successful and this success has been achieved very largely through
misrepresentation in regard to the facts of Reconstruction. The great
body of active citizens have grown into full citizenship since the
Reconstruction epoch, are consequently ignorant of its true history and
quite satisfied to receive the information concerning it from those
whose interest and delight it is to resort to misrepresentation.

It is not my purpose to enter into a defense of Reconstruction, but
merely to call attention to the following facts:

(1) The attempt to reconstruct the rebellious states along lines of
Republican principles failed until the Negro was given the right to
vote. Those who had participated in the War of the Rebellion and to whom
the opportunity had been given to return to normal relations with the
Federal Government without the interference of the Negro, failed signally
and deliberately to do so in an acceptable manner. Negro Suffrage was
therefore an essential and beneficent factor in the work of
reconstruction.[8]

(2) The accepted history of that period has been written by those who
rode into power by murder and intimidation and to whose interest it is
to paint the history of reconstruction so dark as to hide their own
flagrant crimes. Their meth