"Oh, intemperate, peppery Thomas Scott, and ye other constitutional patriots! is there no sense of truth in you, then? no discernment of what is really what?" —Carlyle.
"Nor can you change the nature or lessen the degree of the wrong by your own contemptuous feeling for the object. He may be altogether unworthy of your favor, but you owe him justice, and you must pay the debt to the uttermost. A legal right is, in and of itself, a very respectable thing, however much you may hate and despise the man, or body of men, that set it up."—J. Black.
A philosophical review of the political events which preceded the adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States would involve the history of Civil Liberty from the dawn of its earliest star in Bethlehem of Judæa, when it led the wise men to the place where its first great teacher, wrapped in swaddling-clothes, was lying in a manger. If the Gospel of Saint Luke be accepted as a true version of the facts, by the jurisprudents whose watch is over our flock, suddenly an angel appeared, saying, "I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be"—not to Jew or Gentile, bond or free, but—"to all people;" and suddenly there appeared with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host proclaiming glory to God in the highest and on earth peace, good-will toward—not white, or black,—but toward men. Almost nineteen centuries after this historical occurrence, the cool-headed, representative statesmen of America, who had been conspicuous for their early, continued, and effectual labors for the universal freedom of man, whose fame will endure as long as the love of liberty animates the hearts of the American people, and whose feet had never been defiled by the slime of race-prejudice, laid the foundations of the civil rights of the descendants of the African race: they determined to follow the precedent set by the great law-giver of the enslaved Israelites. After grave deliberations, aided by the national counsellors of all the parties to this compact, who were properly regarded as the oracles of the country, and with the constitutional consent of the white American people, they carefully put three rolls, containing the law, inside the Constitution, that ark of God's
