Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 56

20. Sherman M. Booth, Justice Essential to National Prosperity. Address Delivered before the National Equal Suffrage Association, by Sherman M. Booth, Esq., (of Milwaukee, Wis.) at the Union League Hall, Washington, D. C., June 6, 1866 (Washington, DC: Chronicle Steam Print, 1866). (12 p.)

Speech advocating the extension of suffrage to African American men. “I have offered no proof of the right of the colored man to suffrage. There needs none. He is a man, and that is all there is to be said about it. Ours is a Republican Government, whose charter of power is the consent of the governed, whose vital principle is the equality of all men before the law, and opposed to all despotisms, aristocracies and class distinctions, and this statement of admitted truths closes the argument. When slavery perished, all the frame work of slave legislation and the judicial decisions built upon it, and all the liabilities and disabilities of slavery were swept out of existence by the dissolving breath of Freedom, and the emancipated slave stood up a free man—a free man, with all the rights of a freeman” (emphasis in original).