Tricolor

“ Let us unite under one single banner, the tricolor, and if he who has carried it bravely thus far lets it fall from his hand, we will take it one from the other, twenty-four millions of us, and, till the last of us shall have perished under the banner of our redemption, the stranger shall not return into Italy. ”

“ The French negro’s superiority of deportment is partly due, no doubt, to the higher sense of equality he enjoys under the tricolor. The color line exists, but it is less direct, less tangible, more hidden than with us. ”

“ What voice did on my spirit fall,
Peschiera, when thy bridge I crost?
‘’Tis better to have fought and lost,
Than never to have fought at all.’
The tricolor—a trampled rag ”

“ On the banks of the Potomac, there’s an army so grand,
Whose object’s to subjugate Dixie’s fair land;
They say that we’ve split this great Union in two,
And altered the colors of Red, White and Blue.
CHORUS.
Huzzah! Huzzah! we’re a nation that’s true
And we’ll stand by our colors of Red, White and Blue.
Our banner is simple, and by it we’ll stand,
It floats from the Potomac to the great Rio Grande:
It waves o’er a people that’s gallant and true,
And they’ll die defending the Red, White and Blue. ”

“ This white flag, and not the bloody banner of brute force and brute passion which had been raised in other times, at home and abroad, to right political wrongs, was the drapeau of the Political Union, which he formed and headed in the metropolis of the Black Country. To this rallied men of all ranks and professions and occupations—members of Parliament, peers of the realm, clergy and ministers of all denominations, and the rank and file of the foundries, factories, and workshops of the district. ”

“ Every nation and people are proud of the flag of their country. England, for a thousand years, boasts her Red Flag and Cross of St. George; France glories in her Tri-color and Imperial Eagle; ours, the ‘Star-spangled Banner,’ far more beautiful than they,—this dear old flag!—the sun in heaven never looked down on so proud a banner of beauty and glory. Men of the Black Brigade, rally around it! Assert your manhood; be loyal to duty; be obedient, hopeful, patient: Slavery will soon die; the slave-holders’ rebellion, accursed of God and man, will shortly and miserably perish. ”

“ Origin of the Tri-color.
The badge of the Bourbons was a white banner. The insurgents, if we may so call the opponents, of all varieties of opinions, who assailed [Pg 60] the ancient despotism, at the siege of the Bastile, wore red cockades. But very many were in favor of monarchy who were also in favor of constitutional liberty. Blue had been, in ancient times, the royal color, and they adopted that. Others, who were in favor of the Bourbons, and advocated reform only, not revolution, adopted white, the livery of the Bourbons. ”

“ I concur in your remarks that if the black flag is once raised, there can be no distinction so far as our soldiers are concerned. No distinction in this regard as to color is known to the laws of war, and you may rest assured that the outrages we complain of are felt by our white soldiers, no less than by our black ones, as insults to their common banner, the flag of the United States. ”

“ First Negro
Yes, sir——
[The ebony faces with their cream white teeth showing in smiles and their wide rolling eyes make a striking contrast to the rugged face and poise of the President.]
Lincoln
Your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. On this broad continent, not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours——
First Negro
It's so—yes, it's so——! ”

“ For this fag of my country in triumph shall wave
O’er the Southerner’s home and the Southerner’s grave.
All bright are the stars that are beaming upon us,
And bold are the bars that are gleaming above us,
The one shall increase in their number and light;
The other grows bolder in power and might—
For this flag of my country in triumph shall wave,
O’er the Southerner’s home or the Southerner’s grave. ”

“ But now when Northern treachery attempts our rights to mar,
We hoist on high the bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
First, gallant South Carolina nobly made the stand;
Then came Alabama, who took her by the hand;
[Pg 136] Next, quickly, Mississippi, Georgia, and Florida—
All raised the flag, the bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
Ye men of valor, gather round the banner of the right;
Texas and fair Louisiana join us in the fight.
Davis, our loved President, and Stephens, statesmen are;
Now rally round the bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star. ”

“ That this great act was a Godsend and an immeasurable blessing to the colored race, I admit, but I declare in the same breath that it was dictated and performed more in the interest of the white people of the North and to aid them in conquering the rebellion than from love of or a disposition to help the Negro. The enfranchisement of the colored race also sprang from the necessities of the nation. ”

“ More than three hundred colored officers served in the volunteer army in the war with Spain. Two Northern States, Illinois and Kansas, and one Southern State, North Carolina, put each in the field as part of its quota a regiment of colored troops officered throughout by colored men. Ohio and Indiana contributed each a separate battalion of colored soldiers entirely under colored officers. ”

“ It is little less than amazing that the whites of the South should, after all that they went through during the period of reconstruction, have retained their kindly feeling for the Negroes, and not only retained but increased their loyalty to the Union. To the writer, it seems [Pg 50] one of the highest tributes to the white people of the South that their patriotism should have remained so strong after all they had endured. ”

“ Like America, our flag was fashioned to accommodate change without altering its fundamental design. The red and white stripes have remained constant, reminding us of our roots in the 13 colonies. The white stars on a field of blue, shifting in pattern as new States have joined the Union, celebrate our capacity for change. ”

“ And yet, with all this, the Negro has held the stage. In the South he is everything. You cannot discuss religion, morals, politics, social life, science, earth or sky, God or devil without touching the Negro. It is a perennial and continuous and continual subject of books, editorials, sermons, lectures and smoking car confabs. In the north and west while seldom in the center, the Negro is always in the wings waiting to appear or screaming shrill lines off stage. ”

“ The one true plane of equalisation is that of mutual service, each race doing for the other all it can. The old negro and the white man stood more surely on this plane than do their descendants, yet not more surely than all must wish their descendants to stand. My regard for the negro, my pride in what he has really accomplished under the hammering of civilisation, call, in his behalf, for a race pride and reserve in him which shall match the Anglo-Saxon’s. ”

“ The pales in the arms are kept closely united by the chief and the chief depends on that Union & the strength resulting from it for its support, to denote the Confederacy of the United States of America & the preservation of their Union through Congress. The colours of the pales are those used in the flag of the United States of America; White signifies purity and innocence, Red, hardiness & valour, and Blue, the colour of the Chief signifies vigilance perseverance & justice. The Olive branch and arrows denote the power of peace & war which is exclusively vested in Congress. ”

“ First Negro
Let our great leader show us the way——
Lincoln
The Colony of Liberia is an old one, and it is open to you. I am now arranging to open another in Central America. You are intelligent and know that success does not so much depend on external help as on self-reliance. If you will engage in the enterprise I will spend the money Congress has entrusted to me for this purpose. I ask you to consider it seriously, not for yourselves merely, nor for your race and ours for the present time, BUT FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND.
First Negro
We will, sir——! ”

“ The national colours are blue and red, placed horizontally. The white was long ago banished from the flag. The arms of the republic are the palm-tree surmounted by the cap of liberty and adorned by a trophy of arms, with the motto, “L’union fait la force.” ”

“ He argued that, living as the negro did beneath the American flag, known as the flag of freedom, studying American history, and listening on the outer edge of great Fourth of July crowds to eloquent orators discourse on freedom, it was only a matter of a few years before the negro would deify liberty as the Anglo-Saxon race had done, and count it a joy to perish on her altar. ”

“ Many mulattoes have a mixed ancestry reaching back to the beginning of civilisation in North America; for the Negro slave appeared practically as soon as the white colonist. Many Negroes mixed (and are still mixing in Oklahoma) with the Indians, and one is to-day often astonished to see distinct Indian types among them. I shall never forget a woman I saw in Georgia—as perfect of line as any Greek statue—erect, lithe, strong, with sleek straight hair, the high cheekbones of the Indian, but the lips of the Negro. She was plainly an Indian type—but had no memory of anything but Negro ancestry. ”

“ To our reproach it must be said, though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks [Footnote: Where Jefferson makes use of the word Black, in this extract, it is rigidly confined to the Negroes originally from the coast of Africa, or their descendants.] , whether originally a distinct race, or made so by time and circumstances, are inferiour to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. ”

“ Were the negroes instructed in their duties to themselves and to each other, their obligations to their masters and their God, and were these instructions exemplified by the consistent lives of their masters, with the natural religious tendencies of the negro race, the South would become the very garden of the Lord. ”

“ The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river is the thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. ”

“ It has seven long red stripes and six long white stripes, making thirteen in all, for the thirteen colonies. As I look at the stripes they mind me of the long way our Colonies are taking to their freedom. Then, in one corner of the flag is a large piece of blue cloth, and sewed to it with Mistress Betsy’s tiny stitches are thirteen stars. The stars are for our Colonies, too. Like stars, they will shine. ”

“ The question before you is bigger than the South. It is bigger than the Republic. It is bigger than the Continent. It may involve the future of civilization.
"The employment of these negro troops, clothed in the uniform of the Union, marks the lowest tide mud to which its citizenship has ever sunk. The profoundest word in history is race. The ancestral soul of a people rules its destiny. What is the ancestral soul of the negro? The measurement of the skull of the Egyptian is exactly the shape and size of six thousand years ago. Has the negro moved upward? ”

“ Sifting down the mass of conflicting definitions, it appears that to a Caucasian, a Creole is a native of the lower parishes of Louisiana, in whose veins some traces of Spanish, West Indian or French blood runs.19 The Caucasian will shudder with horror at the idea of including a person of color in the definition, and the person of color will retort with his definition that a Creole is a native of Louisiana, in whose blood runs mixed strains of everything un-American, with the African strain slightly apparent. ”

“ Prichard, Researches into the Physical Hist. of Mankind, 4th ed., 1841, vol. i, p. 269, after reviewing the question of the unity of the American race, remarks: “It will be easy to prove that the American races, instead of displaying a uniformity of color in all climates, show nearly as great a variety in this respect as the nations of the old continent; that there are among them white races with a florid complexion inhabiting temperate regions, and tribes black or of very dark hue in low and inter-tropical countries; that their stature, figure and countenances are almost equally diversified. ”

“ It is a remarkable fact that those of Palenque furnish the most striking likeness to those of the Mississippi Valley. [278] There is, perhaps, no means of ascertaining of what color the pre-historic Americans were, certainly not of the Mound-builders; but judging from the great variety of tints and shades that prevail among the wild tribes of North America alone, we may conclude that no argument in favor of an American race can be based upon color. ”

“ The Negro was invested with absolute power, and turned loose. He selected his rulers. The entire weight of the government—an immense force—was under the misapprehension, born of the passion which then reigned, thrown blindly in the Negroes’ favor; whatever they asserted was believed; whatever they demanded was done; the ballot was given them, and all the forms established by generations of Caucasian patriots and jurists, and consecrated by centuries of Caucasian blood, were solemnly set up and solemnly followed. The Negro at least then selected his own rulers. ”