  Crummell's early thought in the 1840s began to respond to these gathering philosophical pressures on the notion of black civil rights. He reasoned that if arguments in favor of rights were partial to blacks or otherwise based on the local conditions of black Americans, then those civil rights would be subject to future retraction on similarly partial or consequentialist grounds. And in any case, public sympathy can be volatile and unreliable, setting up backlashes. Such shaky ground for legal rights for blacks would be disastrous. In particular, though black service to the country created “favorable considerations” for the wider acceptance of their demands for justice, it remained an insufficient and “untenable” justification (Crummell, “New York Convention Address,” 202). “We object to others placing our rights upon complexion,” he explained, so “[w]e ourselves [should] not lay our claims to consideration on this or any similar ground.” Only a general, rational solution can provide a “just and impartial guarantee” of such civil rights as those protecting voting (201). Notice that Crummell is not making the merely political point that rights ought not be based on the partiality that the public (and its duly elected representatives in legislatures) might extend to blacks. He's making the stronger logical case that it's the nature of rights to be non-partial.