Charles C. Cook

“ Silence has its part in our fight and many times the cause has been lost because of failure to observe it, but it is not silence in respect to wrongs. Neither upon battlefields nor in the mad clash of passions and ambitions that mark the control of states is victory won or success achieved by a boisterous parade of the plan of attack. In the subtle operation of American political methods, silence is the sphinx that baffles the most astute and insinuating politician. The silent vote is a greater dread to the party leaders than was the sword to Damocles. ”

“ Outside of the slave states, equal participation in the government by all citizens has been the foundation stone of the Republic. For a brief moment slavery was dead, and all men were freemen. But slavery is alive again, and if its growth is not resisted, will again be restored in all but name. The words of Calhoun deserve to be called a prophecy. "Without political and social equality," he said, "to change the condition of the African race would be but to change the form of slavery." ”

“ Is there need of a statute of limitations to stop a political party from withdrawing the promises upon which it has encouraged millions of trusting people to build for forty years? Can it be honestly claimed that three-fourths of the States of the Union gave the ballot to the slave just out of the slave pen, with the implied condition that if he failed to prove himself able from the outset to resist temptation to childish indulgence and childish dishonesty, seduced as he was by the Northern men whom gratitude bade him trust and follow, he should lose it forever? ”

“ No one feels more the importance of emphasizing our duties than I do,—I think I have done about as much of it as anybody,—but among the duties that I have always emphasized, and still emphasize, is the duty of standing up squarely and uncompromisingly for our rights. When we are contending for the truth; when we are resisting the encroachments of those who are seeking to despoil us of our birth-right as citizens; when we are keeping up the agitation for equal civil and political privileges in this country, are we not in the line of duty? ”

“ Of all the complex elements of American citizenship, the Negro is the solitary victim of legal, social, industrial, and political discrimination. He alone is singled out by the law for disparagement which fact encourages and enforces the multitude of civil and industrial discriminations and injuries that tend to deprive him of the respectability due not only to a citizen but to man. To the tax levy, to the obligation to bear arms for the common defense as well as to all other mandates of the government, he is equally amenable with other citizens ”

“ The policy of white domination is stripped to unblushing nakedness, and confident of the fear of those who remained for two hundred years enslaved, the South narrows the issue to one of physical courage, inviting the Negro to wrest from her the power, which stands between him and justice, freedom, happiness. It is not then in the ignorance, laziness, and vice of the Negro, that the white South trusts, for the continuance of her policy, but in his defencelessness. ”

“ What does justice to the Negro demand? Our reply is simple,—the fulfillment of the promise, which was treasured up in the hearts of four million men as they passed through the doors of slavery into the light of freedom;—the promise, which they have left to their children as their one priceless inheritance: "The guarantee by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude and of justice, and must be maintained"—this was the promise of the Republican party in 1868. ”

“ Above, the upper world, ever turning to law and punishment to crush those who threaten this floor, upon which they stand from beneath, ever appealing to the prejudices of their class to persecute into submission those whose sense of justice or generosity threatens the crust from above. Beneath, the under world, sweating, spawning, gathering from its own misery and the dregs of vice and luxury from above poison, and shaping from its own eager thousands of ambitious men,—yes, and after the boldest men of the class above, fangs, that it may become all that revolution is wont to be. ”

“ It would seem, on first view, that the Negro who complains so bitterly against political restrictions in the South would rush to the freer conditions of the North as a gas from a denser to a rarer medium. But political and civil freedom offered by the North are more than off-set by industrial restrictions and by the inertia of a population devoid of the pioneer spirit. The warm blooded, warm hearted child of the tropics is chilled alike by the rigid climate and frigid social atmosphere that prevail in the higher latitudes. ”

“ It was, in fact, this struggle of the free states to reduce to a minimum the peril to its industrial democracy which grew out of the slave representation clause of the Constitution, and the resistance of the slave states to such a movement, which produced the war between the sections. This war ended in the destruction of slavery and as the North supposed and intended, in the total destruction of this right of the South to count five slaves as three freemen in the apportionment of representatives among the several states in the newly restored Union.
But wrong does not die under a single stroke. ”

“ Doubts, weariness, exhaustion even will not stop the rapidly revolving wheels. Only in the wake of such frenzied progress there will follow rest, the rest of death. Study the wreckage in the South in the trail of slavery, black, and what is far worse, white illiteracy, brutality, wretched sloth. Observe the turning of defeat in the struggle into despair, then stagnation upon which forms a film, a scum, a crust which becomes strong enough to defy efforts to break it. ”

“ I believe that we ought to vote, and I vote on every public question when the privilege is accorded me. I believe that our leaders ought to give us the opportunity to vote and let us stand forth as men, whether successful or not, willing to do all within our power to be full-fledged citizens. Certainly our attitude ought never to allow the white people to say: the Negro cares nothing for the franchise and does not exercise it when he does have the opportunity. ”

“ Whatever opinions may be entertained contrary to the doctrine and increasing practice of government by the consent of the governed, the fact is undeniable that as man has gained and exercised the right of participation in government, special privilege for the few has had to give way to the condition of equal opportunity for all. Abuses have been swept away and the door of opportunity has been opened for all. Thus has the ballot proven to be man's sure and effective weapon of defense against tyranny and proscriptive government. ”

“ The ballot therefore is the symbol of the sovereignty of the people. If we are to be sovereign citizens of the Republic therefore, this right to vote must be preserved. The old despotic idea of government was, that some people were born to rule, and that others were born to be ruled; and the idea that exists in the minds of some people in this country, in democratic America, in face of the affirmation of the Declaration of Independence, that all men are born free and equal, is that in this country, there are some people who are born to rule, and others who are born to be ruled ”

“ Throughout the republic, every man identified with the Negro race, though he may not be personally or locally subjected directly to the humiliations and wrongs which oppress and degrade the great mass of his kind, feels their bitter sting and resents them. In public assemblies, upon the public highways and common carriers, in the drawing room and around the secrecy of the fireside, the fact of injustice is the one inevitable and irrepressible theme of conversation and reflection ”

“ Just at the time North Carolina and Maryland seemed most secure to us we found ourselves deprived of our rights; and it may be safely stated that whenever on a specific occasion the Colored vote exerts the balance of power over any considerable area, there disfranchisement may be feared. We need to fear disfranchisement because it is founded upon the spirit of injustice and that same spirit fosters it. So palpable is this, that the South bewails the fact. ”

“ It makes all the difference in the world: the difference between a sovereign citizen of the Republic, and one who has been stripped of his sovereignty; between one who has a say in what is going on, and one who has not; between one who is ruled with his consent, and one who is ruled without it. If we are just as well off without the ballot, how is it that the white man is not just as well off without it? ”

“ In this issue which remains that of the comparative "hideousness" of the slave-holder and the slave, every foot added to the social separation of the Northern employer and employee is a stroke in the knell of political equality for the Negro.
It is a mistake, therefore, to assume that there is active in the country a spirit of freedom strong enough to set us free; a power employed in doing justice, strong enough to do justice to us. ”

“ The Negro, they say, is ignorant, lazy and vicious. Slavery, so far as its effect on the slave is concerned, was a beneficent institution, raising him from his previous savagery to a plane of humble usefulness. There, however, his incurable inferiority destines him forever to remain. This, the South insists she has settled in wisdom and kindliness. The North, so runs her speech, misunderstanding the South and the Negro, unjustly forced on the Civil war, to compel her to change her domestic institutions. ”

“ Entrenched in the South to-day is an aristocracy based on race. The whole tendency of things down there is to de-citizenize the blacks, to reduce them to a state of permanent political and industrial subordination to the whites. This is aristocratizing the republic with a vengeance. For with the right to vote, the right to a voice in making the laws, denied to any class of people in an industrial republic like ours, such class must go from bad to worse in the struggle for bread, for existence, in competition with more favored classes. ”

“ Yet the repeal of the Fifteenth amendment would not relieve those apostles of disfranchisement of the odium of violating the spirit of truly American democracy and of setting at naught that mighty decision on human rights that was rendered by the bloody arbitrament of war—Disfranchisement of whatever sort, if designed to embarrass a citizen because of his race, must always "strain the conscience of our best people." ”

“ The peaceful succession of government is a boon not enjoyed by all the peoples of the world. It is an event which deservedly appeals to the enthusiasm and civic pride of the nation. From all corners of the state have come delegations of citizens representing all classes, who come not only to honor and grace by their presence the event but, I believe, to pay honest and manly tribute to a man who is beloved and trusted by the whole American people. ”

“ Far be it from me to imply that the Supreme Court will never decide the State constitutional clauses to be in violation of the national constitution; but as Von Holst has said: "The wit of man is not equal to the task in the shaping of political life of inventing forms which may not be employed as weapons against their own legitimate substance or contents." The law, it might be added, without strong-siding conscience, is a mere magician's handkerchief, and surely we can no longer think of ante-election promises embodied in the Republican party platform as binding obligations. ”

“ But there is grave danger in leaving to time the execution of justice. The evil grows, the power of correcting it diminishes. Early in its course injustice may be stopped, later perhaps not at all. The future course of the party with regard 'to the supreme and sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections and to have that ballot duly counted,' is gravely complicated by the rapid and momentous changes taking place in American society. ”

“ Aristocratic privilege, intrenched in power, has grudgingly given way to the demands of manhood rights, and manhood suffrage, and even to-day, in the attempt to rehabilitate itself, it is bold enough to make the ridiculous assertion that the right of suffrage, even in a republican form of government, is not a natural and inherent right of citizenship, but merely a privilege to be granted or withheld at pleasure by a select few for whose assumed authority no power on earth or in heaven is responsible. ”

“ Self-dependence will not only strengthen our own defenses, but it has a value yet higher—it strengthens the Republic. Appealing as we now do to central authority, embodied in the Republican party, we help unconsciously to build up centralized power. This disadvantage of our faithful adherence to that party must be confessed. By striving to obtain land and independent businesses, and towards municipal political privileges, we will increase our responsibilities, our interest in good government and our stake in the democracy of America,—and by so doing become sturdier defenders of the Republic. ”

“ How else than by manfully pressing on to a broad humanity, can the Republic, reconstructed with freedom as its corner-stone, remain? As the old cords fail to hold together the more distant and divided political and ethnic units of population, there must be woven new bonds of sympathy,—at least, of toleration, else some must be hung with chains. ”