Quote

Besides paid white laborers, there was everywhere a class of white servants bound without wages for a term of years, and a more miserable class of Negro slaves.

For the Negro, Andrew Johnson did less than nothing when once he realized that the chief beneficiary of labor and economic reform in the South would be freedmen. His inability to picture Negroes as men made him oppose efforts to give them land; oppose national efforts to educate them; and above all things, oppose their rights to vote.

Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'

Most of the slaves, who were thus unconditionally freed, returned without any solicitation to their former masters, to serve them, at stated wages; as free men. The work, which they now did, was found to better done than before.

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.

The Negro was a political football between his former slave master and Northern political adventurers. The economic basis of this contest was the power to tax, to float bonds, to award franchise: in short, to gain control over the financial resources of the newly organized States.

Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.

Slavery is not the only question which comes up in this controversy. There is a far more important one to you, and that is, what shall be done with the free negro?

Negroes must be free in order to be equal, and they must be equal in order to be free... Men cannot win freedom unless they win equality. They cannot win equality unless they win freedom.