Black and White

ph of the

Table of

le to make possible the verification of their blasphemy. They carry their lamentations into the pulpit, grave convocations, newspapers, and even into halls of legislation, State and Federal. They are the false prophets who blind the eye of reason and blunt the sympathies of honest, well-meaning men. They are the Jonases on board the ship of progress. They belong to that class of men who would pick flaws in the finest work of art. They find fault with the great mass of ignorance around them, contending that the poor victims have only themselves to blame for their destitute and painful condition, and, therefore, are not entitled to the sympathy or charity of their more fortunate brethren-unmindful that the gr

ss, by permitting them to usurp or monopolize, through the accepted channel of barter and trade, the soil, from which the masses, the laboring masses, must obtain a subsistence, and without the privilege of cultivating which they must faint and die.[7] It also added four millions of souls to what have been termed, in the refinement of sarca

an unjust pension list? We hardly miss the small compensation which we grant to the men (or their heirs) who, in the hour of National peril, gave their lives freely to perpetuate the Union of our States. Where, then, is secreted the parasite which is eating away the energies of the people, making paupers and criminals in the midst of plenty and the grandest of civilizations? Is it not to be found in the powerful monopolies we have created? Monopoly in land, in railroads, telegraphs, fostered manufactures, etc.,-the gigantic forces in our civilization which are, in their very nature, agent

on their former masters-lifted by one stroke of the pen, as it were, from the most degraded condition to the very pinnacle of sovereign manhood-the equals in unrestricted

d and the crouching and fearful freed man on the other-the lion and the lamb. To do less would be more than cruel, it would be murderous;-the agency which created the condition was bound by all law and precedent to see that those conditions were maintained in their entirety. It could not evade the issue except at the expense of dignity, consistency and humanity. There was but one honorable course to pursue. Any other would be a horrible abandonment of principle. If it were powerful to create, to make free men and citizens, it must,

ion, take the State of Virginia. The people of that State contracted large debts to aid and abet the cause of the so-called Confederate Government, a thing which crystallized around the question: "Have the Sovereign States absolute, undivided authority to regulate their own internal concerns, slave and other, or is this authority vested in the Federal or National Government?" When the people of Virginia contracted those large debts, drawing upon her future resources, and placing burdens upon men yet unborn, to propagate theories at variance with sound doctrines of government, and to perpetuate an institution too vile to be mentioned with respect, in 1860, and immediately subsequent thereto, when the State of Virginia contracted the debts in question for the perpetuation of slavery, she had a population of 1,047,299; 65.6 per cent of which was white (free), and 34.4 per cent was colored (slave). Virginia, therefore, in contracting debts in 1860, did not calculate that twenty-two years thereafter the obligations would be repudiated, and the credit of the State depreciated, by the assistance of the very class of persons to bind whom to a cruel and barbarous servitude those debts were contracted. It is one of the most striking instances of retributive justice that I ever knew. Nothing was more natural, when the question came up for final settlement a few years ago, than that the black voters of Virginia should take sides with those who opposed the full settlement of the indebtedness

entail upon him. The character of the people called upon to settle the debt of Virginia, contracted in 1860, before or immediately after, differed radically from the character of the people who were called upon to tax themselves to cancel that debt. Not only had the character of the people undergone a radical change; the whole social and industrial mechanism of the state had undergone a wonderful, almost an unrecognizable, metamorphosis. The haughty aristocrat, with his magnificent plantation, his army of slaves, and his "cattle on a thousand hills," who

voided. The issue could not be evaded; like Banquo's ghost, it would not down. There were not wanting men, even when the war had ended and the question of chattel slavery had been forever relegated to the limbo of "things that were," who were willing still to toy with half-way measures, to cater to the caprices of that treacherous yet brave power-the South. They had not yet learned that Southern sentiment was fundamentally revolutionary, dynamic in the extreme, and could not be toyed with

nd successfully nullified the l

ersonnel of their ruling class; and this, too, not only with unyielding stubbornness, but with success. One cannot but admire the arrogant boldness with which they charged the nation which had overpowered them-even in the teeth of her legislators-with perfidy, malice, and a spirit of unworthy and contemptible revenge. How they laughed to scorn the Reconstruction Acts of which the wise men boasted! How boldly they declared the

TNO

country by social development, and that, notwithstanding its race character gave it peculiar tenacity, would in time have been abolished in the same way in other parts of the country. We have not really abolished slavery; we have retained it in its most insidious and widespread form-in the form which applies to whites as to

esent aspects. So long as the existing mass of our crude and unassimilated colored population holds its present place in the body politic, we must expect that civilization and political rights will oscillate between alternate perils-the peril that comes from the white man when he places civiliza

States and parts of States, are and henceforth shall be free; and that the Executive Government of the United States, including the mili

truct the following table showing the number of colored troops e

oops Furni

w England S

Middle St

States and Te

rder Stat

uthern St

-

tal Stat

arge

ounted

cers

-

total

n; besides this, there were 92,576 colored troops (included