Frederick Douglass, the Orator - Monroe County Library System

Central Library of Rochester and Monroe County · Historic Monographs Collection
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS. 165
Union against rebellion, and the negro responded
gallantly in all cases.
" Our legislators, our presidents, and our judges
should have a care, lest, by forcing these people
outside of law, they destroy that love of country
which is needful to the nation's defense in the
day of trouble. I am not here, in this presence,
to discuss the constitutionality or unconstitutionally
of this decision of the Supreme Court. The
decision may or may not be constitutional. That
is a question for lawyers, and not for laymen, and
there are lawyers on this platform as learned, able,
and eloquent as any who have appeared in this
case before the Supreme Court, or as any in the
land. To these I leave the exposition of the constitution
; but I claim the right to remark upon a
strange and glaring inconsistency with former
decisions, in the action of the court on this Civil
Rights Bill. It is a new departure, entirely out
of the line of the precedents and decisions of the
Supreme Court at other times and in other directions
where the rights of colored men were concerned.
It has utterly ignored and rejected the
force and application of object and intention as a
rule of interpretation. It has construed the constitution
in defiant disregard of what was the
object and intention of the adoption of the fourteenth
amendment. It has made no account
whatever of the intention and purpose of Con-