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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
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[ignorance]. If he knew nothing of letters, he knew something of events and of the
history of parties to them. He knew that the Republican party was the party
hated by the old master class, and that the Democratic party was the party
beloved of the old master class.

CHAPTER VI.
THE SUPREME COURT DECISION.

Action of the Supreme Court – Its effect on the colored people – Address at Lincoln Hall.

In further illustration of the reactionary tendencies of public opinion against
the black man and of the increasing decline, since the war for the Union, in
the power of resistance to the onward march of the rebel states to their former
control and ascendency in the councils of the nation, the decision of the
United States Supreme Court, declaring the Civil Rights law of 1875, unconstitutional,
is striking and convincing. The strength and activities of the
malign clements of the country against equal rights and equality before the
law, seemed to increase in proportion to the increasing distance between that
time and the time of the war. When the black man's arm was needed to defend
the country; when the North and the South were in arms against each other,
and the country was in danger of dismemberment, his rights were well considered.
That the reverse is now true is a proof of the fading and defacing
effect of time and the transient character of Republican gratitude. From the
hour that the loyal North began to fraternize with the disloyal and slave holding
South; from the hour that they began to "'shake hands over the bloody
chasm:" from that hour the cause of justice to the black man began to decline
and lose its hold upon the public mind, and it has lost ground ever since.

The future historian will turn to the year 1883 to find the most flagrant
example of this national deterioration. Here he will find the Supreme Court
of the nation reversing the action of the Government, defeating the manifest
purpose of the Constitution, nullifying the Fourteenth Amendment, and placing
itself on the side of prejudice, proscription and persecution.

Whatever this Supreme Court may have been in the past, or may, by the
Constitution, have been intended to be, it has, since the days of the Dred
Scott decision, been wholly under the influence of the Slave power, and its
decisions have been dictated by that power rather than by what seemed to be
sound and established rules of legal interpretation.

Although we had, in other days, seen this court bend and twist the law
to the will and interest of the Slave power, it was supposed that by the late