in the South were land-owners and slave-owners, while of the 226,216 who lived outside of the slave States, a fair proportion were well-to-do. According to the report of a Commission appointed by Mr. Lincoln in 1863 to “examine and report upon the condition of the newly emancipated Freedmen of the United States,” the Commission ascertained that the free colored people of Louisiana in the year 1860 paid taxes on an assessment of thirteen millions.[30] To this sum must be added the amount that was accumulated during the Reconstruction period, by other means than those of honest thrift. The residue marks the advance of the Negro race in material progress.

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Unhappily for those who claim that the Negro race has shown extraordinary thrift since its emancipation thirty-eight years ago, the records, when examined, fail to bear out the contention.

On the 29th of June, 1903, Mr. Charles A. Gardiner, of the New York bar, delivered a notable address at Albany, before the Convocation[Pg 68] of the University of the State of New York, on a “Constitutional and Educational Solution of the Negro Problem,” in which he presented some remarkable statements relating to the condition of the Negroes. He showed that, in 1890, the real and personal property of the fifteen old slave States was $13,380,517,311, of which the blacks owned only 3.3 per cent., an average of $64.20 per capita. The six Atlantic and Gulf States had $3,215,127,929, of which the blacks owned only 3.5 per cent., an average of $28.60 each. The writer has tried to obtain the later statistics, but has not been successful in securing complete statistics, owing to the fact that the United States Census Bureau has not yet completed its calculations touching this subject, and because many of the States do not keep separately the records of the property owned by the whites and Negroes. He has, however, secured from the records of the States of Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia, where the records are kept separately, the statistics showing the actual and relative amount of property owned by the Negroes for the year 1902:

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ASSESSED VALUE OF ALL PROPERTY OWNED BY NEGROES.

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