The Reconstruction constitutions of the South, in 1868 and 1869, following the Fourteenth Amendment, gave the Negroes the ballot. It is needless to say that this was not the will of the white majority. And it must always be said of these Reconstruction governments that, whatever faults they may have had, they made the first, and up to the present time the _last_ serious and straight-going efforts to establish real democratic-republican organization in the South. In this era the Congress of the United States was in the hands of the friends of freedom, and in 1866 the Negro was given the ballot in all the territories of the United States. On June 8, 1867, the Congress gave the ballot to the Negroes of the District of Columbia, over the President’s veto and against the will of the white inhabitants. In a popular vote on the proposition the city of Washington returned 6521 votes against enfranchising the blacks and 35 votes for it; while Georgetown returned the interesting figures of 812 votes against the proposition, and for it one vote. This record of fifty years ago is sufficient to indicate what would be the conditions in Washington, D. C., if it were left to its own devices. Such are the facts of obstinate resistance to the Negro’s actual freedom, which brought the friends of freedom in Congress rather slowly around to the necessity of adopting the Fourteenth, and when that failed, the Fifteenth Amendment. I repeat that if, after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the legislatures and courts and other creatures of the popular suffrage had shown a genius for doing justice to the Negro, it is likely that his friends in Congress would have forgotten him entirely, that the two subsequent Amendments would not have been proposed and that he would have been left outside of the Constitutional pale of citizenship indefinitely. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments put the enemies of freedom successively on trial and each time they failed. Yea, even against the decree of the Fifteenth Amendment have they defeated democracy by indirection and duplicity. If the aim of the Fifteenth Amendment should be finally defeated, it would be the ultimate failure of democracy,—but there are late indications that in the end it will not fail. And of all the many-angled struggles which the colored people are supporting in this country for their advancement and ultimate security, the central aim of every fighting line should be full-fledged citizenship.