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402

LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

1812 Gen. Jackson, at New Orleans, found it necessary to call upon the colored
people to assist in its defence against England. Abraham Lincoln found
it necessary to call upon the negro to defend the Union against rebellion. In
all cases the negro responded gallantly.

"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 in the day of trouble is needful to the Nation's defence.

"I am not here in this presence, to discuss the constitutionality or the
unconstitutionality 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 of this decision, with
former decisions, where the rules of law apply. It is a new departure, entirely
out of the line of 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 the object and
intention of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. It has made no
account whatever of the intention and purpose of Congress and the President
in putting the Civil Rights Bill upon the Statute Book of the Nation. It has
seen fit in this case, affecting a weak and much persecuted people, to be
guided by the narrowest and most restricted rules of legal interpretation. It has
viewed both the Constitution and the law with a strict regard to their letter.
but without any generous recognition and application of their broad and liberal
spirit. Upon those narrow principles the decision is logical and legal, of
course. But what I complain of, and what every lover of liberty in the United
States has a right to complain of, is this sudden and causeless reversal of all
the great rules of legal interpretation by which this Court was governed in the
construction of the Constitution and of laws respecting colored people.

"In the dark days of slavery, this Court on all occasions gave the greatest
importance to intention as a guide to interpretation. The object and intention
of the law, it was said, must prevail. Everything in favor of slavery and
against the negro was settled by this object and intention rule . We were over
and over again referred to what the framers meant, and plain language itself
was sacrificed and perverted from its natural and obvious meaning that the
so affirmed intention of these framers might be positively asserted and given
the force of law. When we said in behalf of the negro that the Constitution
of the United States was intended to establish justice and to secure the [blessings]