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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 341

Louisiana upon forty or fifty millions; and upon unascertained sums elsewhere
in the Southern States.

"Why should a people who have made such progress in the course of a
few years be humiliated and scandalized by exodus agents, begging money
to remove them from their homes, especially at a time when every indication
favors the position that the wrongs and hardships which they suffer are soon
to be redressed?

"Besides the objection thus stated, it is manifest that the public and noisy
advocacy of a general stampede of the colored people from the South to the
North is necessarily an abandonment of the great and paramount principle of
protection to person and property in every State in the Union. It is an evasion
of a solemn obligation and duty. The business of this nation is to protect its
citizens where they are, not to transport them where they will not need protection.
The best that can be said of this exodus in this respect is, that it is an
attempt to climb up some other way; it is an expedient, a half-way measure,
and tends to weaken in the public mind a sense of the absolute right, power,
and duty of the government, inasmuch as it concedes by implication at least,
that on the soil of the South the law of the land cannot command obedience,
the ballot-box cannot be kept pure, peaceable elections cannot be held, the
Constitution cannot be enforced, and the lives and liberties of loyal and
peaceable citizens cannot be protected. It is a surrender, a premature disheartening
surrender, since it would secure freedom and free institutions by
migration rather than by protection; by flight rather than by right; by going
into a strange land rather than by staying in one's own. It leaves the whole
question of equal rights on the soil of the South open and still to be settled,
with the moral influence of exodus against us; since it is a confession of the
utter impracticability of equal rights and equal protection in any State where
those rights may be struck down by violence.

"It does not appear that the friends of freedom should spend either time
or talent in furtherance of this exodus, as a desirable measure, either for the
North or the South. If the people of this country cannot be protected in every
State of the Union, the government of the United States is shorn of its rightful
dignity and power, the late rebellion has triumphed, the sovereignty of
the nation is an empty name, and the power and authority in individual States
is greater than the power and authority of the United States....

"The colored people of the South, just beginning to accumulate a little
property, and to lay the foundation of family, should not be in haste to sell
that little and be off to the banks of the Mississippi. The habit of roaming
from place to place in pursuit of better conditions of existence is never a