The Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution had been passed, securing the race in their personal and civil rights as freemen before the common law of the United States; but as yet colored men could not vote, and the Republican party, as a just and defensive measure, considered that it would be well to arm those who had formerly been slaves with all the rights of citizens, even as others. This brought up the question of a new amendment to the Constitution. It was to be a new dress in which the new citizens were to be clothed before the work was complete. There was opposition enough to this in some quarters; of course, it never was once intended to ask such men as Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee for their consent. Even if many of the colored men were uneducated, they were as good, if not better, than a wicked and intelligent rebel. The rebels (as they were still commonly called), would rather pull the national government down to the ground than restore it, but the entire ransomed race desired to build it up. Politically, and also from a sense of gratitude for their freedom, they belonged to the Republican party, and therefore they were perfectly right in siding with the Republicans on every and all occasions. Besides, the right for colored men to vote was bound to come forward sometime or other, and it might just as well come now as hereafter. Ignorance on their part was much better than the studied opposition on the part of the rebels. And I doubt very much whether the most illiterate colored man did not know more about the American Constitution than those ignorant hordes of Europeans who are almost weekly dumped down on our shores, who neither know nor care anything about our Constitution, and who never even heard of the name of George Washington. If this was not so serious a matter, I could almost laugh at the thought of the ignorance of those foreigners. Besides, if colored men were in many cases unfit for the franchise, it was no bad thing to give it them at once anyhow, because it would stimulate the nation at large to push their complete education along, and the race themselves would now have a far more powerful motive to acquire knowledge than they had ever had before. Therefore, there was a very great deal of interest taken by the nation at large in the passage of the new amendment to the Constitution that was destined to place black men upon the self-same footing with white men. The white Republicans also considered that they were indebted to colored soldiers for the restoration of the Union to the tune of at least 200,000 brave, heroic men, and that they owed them the right to vote.