applied to the Negro in his new condition of freedom”. Even before the resentment of the national legislature had taken form, the Ku-Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelias, the Society of the Pale Faces, and other bands of organized representatives of culture had begun to do their bloody work of terrorizing Negroes into economic and social subjection. And all this before any steps had been taken to extend the suffrage to Negroes.

themselves

[38]

sense

When the northerners investigated these conditions they met with such fierce and unreasoning hostility on the part of the south that they found it necessary to arm the Negro with the ballot in his own defense. And yet, professional southerners like Tom Dixon, Tom Watson, Ben Tillman Vardaman and Blease pretend to their ignorant or forgetful countrymen that the present attitude of the south was caused in the first instance by a reaction against “Negro domination”, social and political [39] which the north had forced upon it.

[39]

The subsequent developments can not be explained by those amiable enthusiasts who see in the “freedom” of Negroes an act of genuine humanitarianism on the part of the north. For, after northern business-men had secured the government—and their thousands of miles of railroad-grants—they promptly dropped the mask of humanitarian hypocrisy, and left the Negroes to shift for themselves. During the disputed count of the votes in the Hayes-Tilden electoral contest in 1877 a deal was arranged by which the northerners agreed to withdraw the army which protected the Negroes, newly-granted franchise in the south, on condition that the southerners should concede the election to Hayes. The new industrial order wanted above all things to retain control of the government which it had captured during the war, and upon the altar of this necessity it sacrificed the Negro in the south, just as Lincoln had done in the early days of the war. From that time the suppression of the Negro vote, the growth of “Jim Crow” legislation, lynching and segregation have continued with the continuing consent of Republican congressman, presidents and supreme courts. And through it all, Negro “leaders” like Mr. Washington have found it very much worth their while to administer anodynes both to the Negro and the Nation, to reconcile the one to a bastard democracy and the other to a mutilated manhood.

It would be well to trace here the nature of [40] the economic changes 

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