Tricolore

“ The emblem of a patriot’s love, The symbol of a Nation’s faith, We swear each fold that floats above, To hold and guard it until death. Soon may we see Amongst the free Our Tricolor, a standard brave! Green, white and gold, Proudly unrolled, Triumphant over Ireland wave! Our own young flag, Our dear young flag, Our Tricolor. Our brave young flag, Long torn and tried; Now side by side, True hearts uphold, Our brave young flag. ”

“ Citizens, I will reject even to death this banner of blood, and you should repudiate it still more than myself, for this red flag you offer us has only made the circuit of the Champs de Mars bathed in the blood of the people, while the tricolor has made the circuit of the world, with the name, the glory, and the liberty of your country. ”

“ It was concession to the fears of the timid, and to the vanity of the French people. The tricolor is a French flag— not the banner of humanity. It is because the tricolor has been identified with the victories of France that it appeals to the vanity of the vainest of people. They forget that it is the flag of a revolution which failed, and of an empire which was one perpetual outrage to humanity. Whereas the red is new; it is the symbol of an energetic, thorough-going creed. If it carries terror with it, so much the better. The tyrants and the timid should be made to tremble. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The one passion of my soul is to save the Union. In answer to the question you ask me about the equality of the races I enclose you a newspaper clipping reporting my reply to Judge Douglas at Charleston, Sept. 18, 1858. I could not express myself more plainly. Have this extract published in every paper in the South you can get to print it.”
The General paused and turning toward the negroes said, “Now listen carefully to every word. Says Mr. Lincoln, I am not, nor ever have been in favour of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races! ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I regret, sir, that my section, hindered with this problem, stands in seeming estrangement to the North. If, sir, any man will point out to me a path down which the white people of the South, divided, may walk in peace and honor, I will take that path though I take it alone—for at its end, and nowhere else, I fear, is to be found the full prosperity of my section and the full restoration of this Union. But, sir, if the negro had not been enfranchised, the South would have been divided and the republic united. ”

“ For, from the opening to the closing of the Revolutionary War, on many fields of strife and triumph, Negroes had fought the battles of the American Nation with a valor no less distinguished than that of their white brothers with whom they passed through that desperate struggle shoulder to shoulder. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I commit this work to the public, white and black, to the friends and foes of the Negro, in the hope that the obsolete antagonisms which grew out of the relation of master and slave may speedily sink as storms beneath the horizon; and that the day will hasten when there shall be no North, no South, no Black, no White,—but all be American citizens, with equal duties and equal rights. ”

“ Soldiers during both the Civil and the Spanish-American wars, demonstrated the fact that they are patriotic to the core and that on the battlefield they are not afraid of the belching cannon. They have done their duty in this regard. And when we look into the history [Pg 162] of the Colored people since the Civil War we are satisfied that the progress which has been made, is a most satisfactory one. It is acknowledged by some of the leading White men of the nation, that the progress of the Negro Race since the Rebellion has been unparalleled in history. ”

“ The North, for the present far removed and well buttressed against any serious practical consequences, and even against temporary discomfort from the policies and conditions it has advocated, acting on a theory, filled with a spirit of traditionary guardianship of the Negro, and reasoning from limited examples of progression and virtue, has ever insisted on one principle and one policy, founded on a conception of the absolute equality of the two races. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have taught me—in spite of wrongs and injustices to which members of my race are frequently subjected—to look with confidence to the future and to believe that the Negro has the power within himself to become an indispensable part of the life of the South, not feared and merely tolerated, but trusted and respected by the members of the white race by whom he is surrounded. ”

“ The circumstances that led to the founding of the Negro Republic in the wilds of Africa perished in the fires of civil war. The Negro is free everywhere; but the republic of Liberia stands, and should stand until its light shall have penetrated the gloom of Africa, and until the heathen shall gather to the brightness of its shining. May it stand through the ages as a Christian Republic, as a faithful light-house along the dark and trackless sea of African paganism! ”

“ 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——! ”

“ I swear to maintain and defend the social and political superiority of the White Race on this continent; always and in all places to observe a marked distinction between the White and African races; to vote for none but white men for any office of honor, profit, or trust ”

“ He means the negro—we mean that white men were created equal—that we are equal to Northern white people, and have a right, which we do not deny to them, of living under a government of our own choice. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Nothing would give the Negroes greater joy than to see the right kind of a white man from the South made President of the nation.
"And the right kind of men exist in the South! There were perhaps as many white men from the South in the Union army as there were Negroes.
"Only one thing is now needed to gladden the hearts of the Negroes of the United States and cause them to turn enthusiastically to the making of the South the grandest section of the Union," said Ensal. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ In the Catholic colonies, however, of New France and New Spain, if the half-breed were a good Catholic he was regarded as a Frenchman or a Spaniard, as the case might be. This fact alone gives the clew to many of our Colonial wars where the Indians, other than the Iroquois, were persuaded to join the French against the Americans by half-breeds who considered themselves Frenchmen. The Church of Rome has everywhere used its influence to break down racial distinctions. ”

“ But, despite of it all, the Negro remains like iron or granite, cool, strong, imperturbable and cheerful. ”

“ To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of 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, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. ”

“ My Génifrède, though I hate the whites, I love the blacks. I love your father. The whites will rise upon us at home, as they are always scheming against us in France, if we are not strong and as watchful as we are strong. If I and others leave L’Ouverture alone to govern, and betake ourselves to the woods and the mountains, the whites will again be masters, and you and I, my Génifrède, shall be slaves. ”

“ And down South, with the old-line Whigs, with the Kentuckians, the Virginians and the Tennesseeans, he tells you that there is a physical difference between the races, making the one superior, the other inferior, and he is in favor of maintaining the superiority of the white race over the negro. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ Anyone at all familiar with the hopes and aspirations of the colored race, as expressed, for instance, in their prolific newspaper literature, must have perceived the wonderful inspiration which they have drawn from the career of a few distinguished Europeans of partial Negro ancestry, who have felt no call, by way of social prejudice, to deny or conceal their origin, or to refuse their sympathy to those who need it so much. ”

“ 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. ”