Old Portraits and Modern Sketches: Part 1 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf WhittierWhittier, John Greenleaf
History
Old Portraits and Modern Sketches: Part 1 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Biography
For the party in this country which has assumed the name of Democracy, as
a party, we have had, we confess, for some years past, very little
respect. It has advocated many salutary measures, tending to equalize the
advantages of trade and remove the evils of special legislation. But if
it has occasionally lopped some of the branches of the evil tree of
oppression, so far from striking at its root, it has suffered itself to
be made the instrument of nourishing and protecting it. It has allowed
itself to be called, by its Southern flatterers, "the natural ally of
slavery." It has spurned the petitions of the people in behalf of
freedom under its feet, in Congress and State legislatures. Nominally
the advocate of universal suffrage, it has wrested from the colored
citizens of Pennsylvania that right of citizenship which they had enjoyed
under a Constitution framed by Franklin and Rush. Perhaps the most
shameful exhibition of its spirit was made in the late Rhode Island
struggle, when the free suffrage convention, solemnly calling heaven and
earth to witness its readiness to encounter all the horrors of civil war,
in defence of the holy principle of equal and universal suffrage,
deliberately excluded colored Rhode Islanders from the privilege of
voting. In the Constitutional Conventions of Michigan and Iowa, the same
party declared all men equal, and then provided an exception to this rule
in the case of the colored inhabitants. Its course on the question of
excluding slavery from Texas is a matter of history, known and read of
all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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