If he had what they did not possess, the rights of a man, the civil and political position of a man in the State, the equality of a brother in the church, it could not make him feel better than they, it filled him instead with a righteous sense of wrong, a passionate sympathy, a supreme desire and determination to make his own rights the measure of theirs.
"I lose sight of your present situation," he said in his address before Free People of Color, "and look at it only in futurity.

I imagine myself surrounded by educated men of color, the Websters, and Clays, and Hamiltons, and Dwights, and Edwardses of the day.

I listen to their voice as judges and representatives, and rulers of the people--the whole people." This glowing vision was not the handiwork of a rhetorician writing with an eye to its effect upon his hearers.

The ardent hope of the reformer was rather the father of the golden dream.
This practical recognition of the negro as a man and a brother was the exact opposite of the treatment which was his terrible lot in the country.

Never in all history was there a race more shamefully oppressed by a dominant race than were the blacks by the whites of America.