Herewith is presented a digest of the legislation and of all cases involving the civil rights of citizens of the United States under the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Articles of Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
The object of this portion of the work is to state concisely, but substantially, the facts, and the principles of law which the learned courts have announced as controlling the judgment in each decision, and to bring together the various Federal and State enactments relating to this subject. The compiler of this summary has endeavored to conform to your views, and trusts it may not altogether fail to accomplish the purpose you intend, of affording the general public, without laborious research into text-books and law reports, the opportunity and means of be coming familiar with the facts to which principles of law have been applied, and upon which the vast array of civil-rights cases have been decided by the courts.
In the performance of the remainder of the undertaking which you have assigned him constituting the main part of the work, the writer is free to confess, that at every step he has encountered all the extraordinary and particularly discouraging embarrassments which environ the natural and artificial status of civil rights.
Your court of final resort appears to the writer to be Public Opinion,—a tribunal whose verdict is consequent upon the educational status of the young men of the country. The public opinion of the future will depend upon the profoundness of their sympathy with the spirit of our institutions, the depth of their aspiration for the welfare and improvement of society, and the extent of their acquaintance with the enlightened and liberal laws of the land. These are the practical consummations most devoutly to be wished, by those whose struggles now deserve the applause which after-ages always bestow upon good and virtuous actions, as, when truth, having submitted to be obscured for a while, shall triumph over the delusions of error. As, when the sun has sunk below the horizon into the hemisphere of darkness, and the stars shine forth divinely clear, the darkness itself shows to greater advantage those eternal jewels of the sky, so
