Union men do not question this reasoning, but if it is urged as an objection to the plan of Congress, we reply: There are now within the limits of the United States about five millions of colored people. They are not aliens or strangers. They are here not by the choice of themselves or of their ancestors. They are here by the misfortune of their fathers and the crime of ours. Their labor, privations, and sufferings, unpaid and unrequited, have cleared and redeemed one-third of the inhabited territory of the Union. Their toil has added to the resources and wealth of the nation untold millions. Whether we prefer it or not, they are our countrymen, and will remain so forever. They are more than countrymen--they are citizens. Free colored people were citizens of the colonies. The Constitution of the United States, formed by our fathers, created no disabilities on account of color. By the acts of our fathers and of ourselves, they bear equally the burdens and are required to discharge the highest duties of citizens. They are compelled to pay taxes and to bear arms. They fought side by side with their white countrymen in the great struggle for independence, and in the recent war for the Union. In the revolutionary contest, colored men bore an honorable part, from the Boston massacre, in 1770, to the surrender of Cornwallis, in 1781. Bancroft says: "Their names may be read on the pension rolls of the country side by side with those of other soldiers of the revolution." In the war of 1812 General Jackson issued an order complimenting the colored men of his army engaged in the defense of New Orleans. I need not speak of their number or of their services in the war of the rebellion. The Nation enrolled and accepted them among her defendants to the number of about two hundred thousand, and in the new regular army act, passed at the close of the rebellion, by the votes of Democrats and Union men alike, in the Senate and in the House, and by the assent of the president, regiments of colored men, cavalry and infantry, form part of the standing army of the Republic. In the navy, colored American sailors have fought side by side with white men from the days of Paul Jones to the victory of the Kearsarge over the rebel pirate Alabama. Colored men will, in the future as in the past, in all times of National peril, be our fellow-soldiers. Tax-payers, countrymen, fellow-citizens, and fellow-soldiers, the colored men of America have been and will be. It is now too late for the adversaries of nationality and human rights to undertake to deprive these tax-payers, freemen, citizens, and soldiers of the right to vote.