If you go back and read his stuff, he was always right up to the line, hinting at it, but leaving it unsaid. But a few times, he would come right out and say it...and then defend it.
I read Frederick Douglass' "Narrative" last month. I'd pay good money to hear him weigh in on the idea that the presidency is "reserved for white European descendants". Did you know that he (Douglass) once kicked the @$$ of the "slave breaker" whose tender care he had been entrusted to? The only reason he didn't end up dead for it is because it would have ruined the reputation of the "breaker" if made public, so it went unreported. LOL.
For many years after the establishment of the original Constitution, and until two years after the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress never authorized the naturalization of any but "free white persons."
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Passing by questions once earnestly controverted, but finally put at rest by the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, it is beyond doubt that, before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 or the adoption of the Constitutional [p675] Amendment, all white persons, at least, born within the sovereignty of the United States, whether children of citizens or of foreigners, excepting only children of ambassadors or public ministers of a foreign government, were native-born citizens of the United States.
We can't go back and change the past. Again, it is what it is. And the Minor court had a very salient point to keep in mind:
Our province is to decide what the law is, not to declare what it should be. ... If the law is wrong, it ought to be changed; but the power for that is not with us.