Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/365

in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and there is only one story. "I have negroes here," said one eminent gentleman, "who were my slaves in the old time. They hang around my house. They will fight for me, work for me and bring me their money to keep. They take my advice in all things, and are trustworthy and devoted. They will not vote for me. My coachman there will vote against me and in favor of the meanest Republican in the county." The negro thus far sees nothing in politics but his own freedom. He votes for Grant all the time. His political education embraces a sentiment and a fact. The sentiment is Lincoln, the fact is Grant. I was talking to a woolly headed vagabond the other day, who had learned that I was a Northern man, and wanted to go home with me as an attendant. He was a worthless, ragged, shining darky, as black as night, and earned his living, he told me, by dancing the juba for gentlemen on the sidewalk when the police were not looking. During the war he was a slave lad. "Did you know you were free," I said, "before the war was over?" He told me that the news came very quickly; that they all kept "mighty shady," never pretending to know until "Massa Sherman came with the soldiers." But they knew it all the time, and there was never a night that his "old mammie didn't pray to Massa Lincoln." This is the thought that has burned deep into the negro mind. You cannot erase it. You cannot take it from him. He has heard the slaves' horn. He has worn the yoke and carried the scar into furrow and swamp. He has seen father and mother perhaps, taken to the block and sold into slavery. That memory ever lives as it would live with you and I, if such a career darkened our lives. So Moses may steal and Whipper may "administer justice," to him they mean freedom. Coming out of the night they find no hand to grasp but the hand of the adventurer. Is it any wonder then, that they follow him as blind men or those who see darkly?

Better Signs

I cannot resist the conclusion, and it grows upon me every day, in the South, that for much of the wrong, that has been done in these States the old Southerners are to blame. I say this in sorrow and with no harshness of feeling to them, and not without making allowance for a feeling which, after all, is one of human nature, a feeling of hatred of the men who defeated their hopes of empire and of contempt for the negro, who is today a senator, but who yester-