George S. Burleigh 1847 editorial in favor of Black suffrage

“WHITE” CITIZENS

            When the black cloud is once overtopped by our aspiring steps, we wonder how it could ever have been so dark. When the day is risen, night seems half-fabulous, and its terrors but an idle dream. Shall we not, when we have risen a little from the base prejudice that environs us, start with astonishment at the spectacle we now present, in denying our colored brother his civil rights because of his color? When we have passed from shadow of this night of shame and barbarism, will we not look incredulous upon the history that relates, that in 1847, Connecticut, the ’Black’ and ‘Blue’ Lawed land of virtue and sobriety, excluded men from civil franchises for an hereditary tan on their skin?

            It is strange, and we would not believe it, if it were not so palpably brought to our senses, that reasonable beings, not to say Christians and Republicans, with so little temptation to be mean and cruel, should yet have acquiesced so long, or actively supported such palpable meanness and cruelty.

            Those privileges which you value, you may not justly withhold from another, for any cause which will not exclude yourselves. Conventional rights are not to be subject to arbitrary whim. There is a natural law governing even these. Such petty distinctions as the form and complexion of the clay which holds in a free soul, are beneath the dignity of a rational government.

            The exclusion of one class for no moral or mental want from the dominion itself, of government, would be unjust and arbitrary, but to deny them its privileges and rights, while it requires of them obedience and fealty, is a still deeper depth of tyranny and wrong.

            Worse and worse is the offense, when the government so unjust, professes equality of natural rights, and a foundation in natural law. What natural law makes hereditary sunburn more cause of disfranchisement that the transient? What law of nature denies rights to a man whose forefathers came once from Africa, and grants them to such as find their ancestry in every other habitable part of the globe? The act is not only revolting to nature, and the sense of Christian brotherhood, but it is grossly behind the age, a relic of ages unwise and oppressive. All New England, we believe, has freed itself from this stain, except our enlightened Connecticut. Here it lingers still, a taint of the old slavery, a blight from that devil’s breath breathed here of yore. It is hard to eradicate an injustice bequeathed to us from our fathers, sanctified by the earliest memories of our childhood, and rooted in the obstinate habit of our maturity. Would that our ‘steady habits’ had become better before they grew so staid. Our fear of innovation leaves many a gross iniquity to hallow itself with the mould and rust of antiquity, which a little live action and faith would better have removed. That one little word ‘white,’ which is yet a black stain on our Constitution, would leave the instrument whiter if it were blotted out. Humanity demands it. Justice and love and truth, require it; the philosophy of true policy, and the genius of Republican government, add their lesser voice to those great demands, and bid us to be just to the Black man now, and to all Humanity. If the freedom we profess is not as great a falsehood here as in the bloody South, if the piety we avow is not as brazenly hypocritical as that which drawls and whines in the ranks of our bandits in Mexico, we shall not longer suffer so mean and cruel a thing as we have herein allowed, to disgrace our State.

            We will be a staid people, if you choose, but let us not be a stupid people, and delay the pettiest justice, till the finger of a free world’s contempt starts the blood to a flush of shame, when now it should glow with a generous impulse. We will be religious, but for that very cause may we not be so weeded to the old, that the live spirit of growing Good cannot drive the sap of our old trunk into new limbs and foliage, and shed off the withered leaves of the past. We will be very Whiggish, Democratic, Republican,—or what ever you will of shifting names for one general theory of free government,—but for that freedom’s sake, which we should cherish more than any name, let us not be so free with our neighbor’s rights,—let us not belie the creed of every party in the blind faith that we shall so serve one. Humanity must be served sooner or later, the sooner the better for all parties. It is but little she asks now, nothing to some souls, in its literal words, but to thousands it is much, and to all it should be important for the principle involved, if not for its outward value. Humanity asks the enfranchisement of the black man, and our state must answer her demand as she can. Let her answer be worthy of her profession, and her olden fame.