and violent disregard of political morals and
human rights, as by comparison to render almost beneficent the
realization of the perils which the imagination of the assailants
pretends to fancy.

There may be those who see in this assault nothing more than a supreme
effort of a benign civilization to save itself from utter ruin. It is,
however, to be borne in mind that the apostles of this civilization
which is of a peculiarly local type, have ever asserted that its
maintenance and future glory are inseparably connected with the
subjection of the Negro. Always they have spoken the language of
tyranny, which, in spite of its embellishments and jugglings, amounts to
this: the social well-being and political privileges of the Negro are
inconsistent with the economic interests and political ambitions of a
few southern white men. Into this language all of the feigned social
perils and political nightmares of southern planters and politicians
easily resolve themselves.

There may be those who indulge the hope that the final triumph of this
assault will have a salutary effect upon the social status of the Negro.
Their hope is due in no small measure to their ignorance of the history
of the character, spirit, and dominant purpose of the assailants. That
history furnishes the best key to an understanding of the present
assault upon the political rights of the Negro.

Forty years ago the slave power plunged this nation into war for the
avowed purpose of perpetuating Negro slavery. Alexander Stevens, on his
return from the convention which had erected the Southern Confederacy,
addressing a large assembly at Savannah, uttered the following
significant words:

"The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating
questions relating to our peculiar institution--African slavery as
it exists among us--_the proper_ status of the Negro in our form of
civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and
the present revolution."

Referring to the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and the leading statesmen at
the time of the formation of the Federal Constitution, that Negro
Slavery was in violation of the laws of Nature, wrong in "principle,
socially, morally and politically," he continued thus:

"Those ideas were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption
of the equality of races. Our constitution (the Confederate
Constitution,) is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas. Its
found