Sorry about the HTML errors. THe quotation marks are rendered as funny characters as this...(”). Please don’t flame. It’s been a while since I really gave a good posting, and I’m a bit rusty.
My computer keeps switching back and forth from Chinese and English and thus it was a bit difficult to compile up. I know that there are errors and that maybe this will anger some people. I’m just basically pretty distraught at what is going on in the USA. I see a president who actually thinks that the federal Government is a Democracy... Who thinks that a 14% unemployment rate is a sign of progress, and who wants to start yet another endless war in Asia.
Nothing ever changes...
More especially, it cannot be believed that the large slaveholding States regarded them as included in the word citizens, or would have consented to a Constitution which might compel them to receive them in that character from another State. For if they were so received, and entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens, it would exempt them from the operation of the special laws and from the police regulations which they considered to be necessary for their own safety.This was what the rights of free citizens were conceived to include before the Civil War.It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognised as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport [i.e. with no requirement to show government picture ID], and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went[i.e. carry with no need for license of any form]. And all of this would be done in the face of the subject race of the same color, both free and slaves, and inevitably producing discontent and insubordination among them, and endangering the peace and safety of the State.
It is impossible, it would seem, to believe that the great men of the slaveholding States, who took so large a share in framing the Constitution of the United States and exercised so much influence in procuring its adoption, could have been so forgetful or regardless of their own safety and the safety of those who trusted and confided in them.