ple of the United States for the accommodation of the newly adopted citizens; that they who had been inferior under the Constitution are now, by these amendments, equals in the eyes of the law; that the nation henceforth recognizes only individual rights and merits; and that the new system throws citizens upon their own resources, irrespective of color, starting them unhandicapped in the race of life.
The judgments of the Supreme Court, recorded with an iron pen, and indelibly engraved on American Jurisprudence, declare that caste-constructionists must not forget, that before these amendments, citizens of African descent had the rights, immunities, and privileges of freedom; that long before charters and communities the rights of man existed; that these rights, immunities, and privileges are not conventional, and not revocable except by a violation of those natural laws which are as eternal as the right to exist; that the citizen is not the creature of the state, that he is older than nations and will survive when they perish; that the law of humanity is more primeval than the law of these amendments; that the former condition of slavery was incapable of being introduced into our civil society (until the invention of the cotton-gin made slave-labor valuable) on any reason economic, moral, or political, but only by and through absolute fraud; that by natural, revealed, civil, and common law, the stigma of color is no stigma fixed upon the soul; and that if it be a stigma, if it be a brand of discrimination, it is a stigma or brand which attaches to the "figure of God cut in ebony."
Upon every page of these imperishable decisions does this august tribunal record that his color does not reach the soul, the mind, or the heart of the new citizen; that civilization and intelligence are only what the race requires to fit it for high places; that, although nature has marked God's children from Africa "with the shadowy livery of the burnished sun," they must nevertheless go forth to connect themselves with other citizens, to form alliances by means of trade and business, and that their property, life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are involved in the unrestricted privileges of civil intercourse; that their rights of labor and education, of purity and refinement, are of little
