The minority, however, was composed of very earnest men of the same type as those who originally created and combined the anti-slavery sentiment of the country, and who now espoused the right of the negro to equality before the law.

Equality, they believed, could neither be conferred nor maintained unless the negro were invested with the badge of American manhood--the right to vote--a right which they were determined to guarantee as firmly to the colored man as it was already guaranteed to the white man.
The great mass of the Republicans stopped short of the demand for the conferment of suffrage on the negro.

That privilege was indeed, still denied him in a majority of the loyal States, and it seemed illogical and unwarrantable to expect a more advanced philanthropy, a higher sense of justice, from the South than had been yet attained by the North.

But without raising the question of suffrage, there were rights with which the negro must be endowed before he could essentially better his material condition or advance in knowledge.

It was, first of all, required that he should have the full protection of the law of marriage, of which he had always been deprived, and that with the privilege he should be subjected to the honest observance of the obligations which marriage imposes--to the end that good morals should be inculcated, and that every child should have a responsible father.
It was, in the second place, in the highest degree necessary that he should have the benefit of such laws as would assure to him the wages of his labor and confer upon him the right to acquire and hold real estate and other property, with the same security and protection enjoyed by the whites.