It is his belief, that one of the most stupendous of the wrongs which the Negro has suffered, was in turning the whole army of slaves loose in a hostile country, without money, without friends, without experience in home getting or even self-support. Their two hundred and fifty years of unrequited labor counted for naught. They were free but penniless in the land which they had made rich.
But though they were robbed of the reward of their labor, though they have been denied their common rights, though they have been discriminated against in every walk of life and in favor of every breed of foreign anarchist and socialist, though they have been made to feel the measured hate of the poor white man’s venom, yet through it all they have been true; true to the country they _owe_ (?) so little, true to the flag that denies them protection, true to the government that practically disowns them, true to their honor, fidelity and loyalty, the birthrights of superior blood.
Correct Date of Birth.--Reasons Ex-Slaves Cannot give their Ages.--Childhood Days in Slavery.--Emigration to Missouri in 1844.--Return to Virginia in 1847.--Life in the New Country.--Hunting, Fishing and Playing.--Treed by Wild Hogs.--Narrow Escape from Abolitionists at Cincinnati, Ohio, and Service as a Slave for Seventeen Years Thereafter as a Result 11
Happy Days Spent Till Thirteen Years Old.--The Old Millpond and the Trusted Old Slave Miller.--Slave Children Treated Tenderly and Kindly.--Overseer’s Brutality Checked by Old Mistress.--Whipped on Account of a Lie Told by a Poor White Man.--Status of Poor White Trash.--Fewer Liberties Than Slaves.--No Association or Intermarriage with the Ruling Class.--Hauled to the Polls and Forced to Vote as the Master Class Directed.--Poor Whites as Well as the Slaves Freed by the War.--Both Classes Equally Illiterate.--The Old Master Class and the Colored People Can Live in Peace, were it not for the Poor White Trash 24
Runaway Negroes.--Cause and Effect.--Some Dangerous to Capture.--Mean Masters and Good Ones.--The Good and the Mean Slave.--The Unruly and Fighting Class, Who Would not Submit.--Inferior and Superior Blood and How Divided.--The Typical Poor Whites Have Inferior Blood in Their Veins.--Superior Blood in Slave Veins.--How Superior Blooded Slaves Took in Their Situation and Spent Life in Their Master’s Service and are the Better Class of Colored Citizens To-day.--Blood Will Tell, Regardless of the Color of the Individual in Whose Veins it Flows 32