st. But more inexplicable that this should be so
in New England, than in the South. What invites the negro to the
ballot-box? He knows that of all men it has promised him most and
yielded him least. His first appeal to suffrage was the promise of
"forty acres and a mule." His second, the threat that Democratic success
meant his re-enslavement. Both have been proved false in his experience.
He looked for a home, and he got the Freedman's Bank. He fought under
promise of the loaf, and in victory was denied the crumbs. Discouraged
and deceived, he has realized at last that his best friends are his
neighbors with whom his lot is cast, and whose prosperity is bound up in
his--and that he has gained nothing in politics to compensate the loss
of their confidence and sympathy, that is at last his best and enduring
hope. And so, without leaders or organization--and lacking the resolute
heroism of my party friends in Vermont that make their hopeless march
over the hills a high and inspiring pilgrimage--he shrewdly measures the
occasional agitator, balances his little account with politics, touches
up his mule, and jogs down the furrow letting the mad world wag as it
will!

The negro vote can never control in the South, and it would be well if
partisans at the North would understand this. I have seen the white
people of a State set about by black hosts until their fate seemed
sealed. But, sir, some brave man, banding them together, would rise, as
Elisha rose in beleaguered Samaria, and, touching their eyes with faith,
bid them look abroad to see the very air "filled with the chariots of
Israel and the horsemen thereof." If there is any human force that
cannot be withstood, it is the power of the banded intelligence and
responsibility of a free community. Against it, numbers and corruption
cannot prevail. It cannot be forbidden in the law, or divorced in force.
It is the inalienable right of every free community--the just and
righteous safeguard against an ignorant or corrupt suffrage. It is on
this, sir, that we rely in the South. Not the cowardly menace of mask or
shotgun, but the peaceful majesty of intelligence and responsibility,
massed and unified for the protection of its homes and the preservation
of its liberty. That, sir, is our reliance and our hope, and against it
all the powers of earth shall not prevail. It was just as certain that
Virginia would come back to the unchallenged control of her white
race--that before the