What man can compute the dollars stolen from the black slave in the shape of wages, for a period of a hundred years!  What claim has the slave-holder against the government for confiscation of property by the side of the claim of the slaves for a hundred years of wages and enervated and dwarfed manhood!  A billion dollars would have bought every slave in the South in 1860, but fifty billions would not have adequately recompensed the slave for enforced labor and debased manhood.  The debt grows in magnitude the closer it is inspected.  And yet there are those who will laugh this claim to scorn; who will be unable to see any grounds upon which to base the justice of it; who will say that the black man was fully compensated for all the ills he had borne, the robbery to which he had been subjected, and the debasement—­not to say enervation—­of his manhood, by the great act by which he was made a free man and a citizen.

But there is, or should be, such a claim; it rests upon the strongest possible grounds of equity; while the conference of freedom and citizenship was simply the rendering back in the first instance that which no man has any right to appropriate, law or no law; and, in the second, bestowing a boon which had been honestly earned in every conflict waged by the Union from Yorktown to Appomatox Court House—­a boon, I am forced to exclaim, which has, in many respects, proved to be more of a curse than a blessing, more a dead weight to carry than a help to conserve his freedom; and to aid in the fixing of his proper status as a co-equal citizen.  I deny the right of any man to enslave his fellow; I deny the right of any government, sovereign as the Union or dependent as are the States in many respects, to pass any regulation which robs one man or class to enrich another.  Individuals may invest their capital in human flesh, and governments may legalize the infamous compact; yet it carries upon its face the rankest injustice to the man and outrage upon the laws of God, the common Parent of all mankind.  There are those in this country—­men too of large influence, however small their wit, who, aping miserably the masterly irony of Junius, speak of the black man as the “ward of the nation”—­a sort of pauper, dependent upon the charity of a generous and humane people for sustenance, and even tolerance to dwell among them, to enjoy the blessing of a civilization which I pronounce to be reared upon quicksand, a civilization more fruitful of poverty, misery and crime than of competence, happiness and virtue.  Those who regard the black man in the light of a “ward of the nation,” are too narrow-minded, ignorant or ungenerous to deserve my contempt.  The people of this country have been made fabulously affluent by legalized robbery of the black man; the coffers of the National Government have overflowed into the channels of subsidy and peculation, enriching sharpers and thieves, with the earnings of slave labor; while