The Republican Party is strong enough to dare to do right and cannot afford to shirk a duty. The colored men North and South were loyal to the Government in the days of its greatest peril. There was not a rebel or a traitor to be found among them. They ask the privilege of citizenship now that slavery has been forever banished from our country.

As quoted in History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1903), by Benjamin F. Gue, Volume III