September 22, 2011
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 9/22/2011
Black Americana imprint, "Protest Against the Robbery of the Colored Race by the Proposed Amendment of the Constitution. By George B. Cheever, D.D., Pastor of the Church of the Puritans, in New York City." Printed by Robert Johnston, 1866, 44p. octavo, with excellent content, it reads in very small part: "...From the present Congress, the first Legislative Assembly of the United States after the defeat of the rebellion and the assassination of President Lincoln, much was justly expected for God and the country. The opportunity was vast and grand...And in behalf of the colored race, in the fresh, grateful remembrance of the services of two hundred thousand soldiers, many admirable speeches were made, and much was promised, from the enactment of impartial suffrage in the District of Columbia, to the same just measure in the rebel States. And great admiration and applause was bestowed in view of such patriotic assurances, and wise and good beginnings. The disappointment of a failure is severe in proportion. For the conclusion of all this deliberative glory is a proposal to amend the Constitution of the United States, not in behalf of justice, but against it; not for the protection of the colored race, but for their oppression; not to release them from the endurance of wrong, but to deliver them, for the content of the rebels to be morally crucified, for such is the result, in our country, of constitutionally depriving them of the right to vote on account of the color of their skin...You deny your own birthright, not for a mess of pottage - there would be comparative virtue in that; but for the sake of denying to the negro a participation in human rights. You consent to base the most sacred of your own rights on the whiteness of your skin, in order that you may take away the most sacred rights of the colored race on account of the blackness of theirs. What your fathers fought for unto the death as an inalienable right of freedom, because they were men, you accept as a boon of tyranny, because your skins are white. And this doctrine now taught in Congress makes rebels, slanderers, and hypocrites of your dead fathers, for the sake of rewarding living rebels with power as loyal men, and putting down loyal citizens by disfranchisement under them. As Burke once said, Your Senators and Representatives unplumb the dead, for bullets to assassinate the living. They desecrate our fathers' sepulchers, and the altar of human nature itself, and immolate the colored race by tricks; the dice being loaded, the amendment a fraud. May God preserve the people, and restrain the State Legislatures from consummating the proposed iniquity..." Much more. VG.
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