to enact other laws making
their freedom a blessing. The old spirit of domination never died in
the slave-master, but was only maddened by emancipation. For thirty
years no measures were adopted tending to protect or educate the
freedmen. At length, and quite recently, the colonial authorities
passed a whipping act, then a law of eviction for people of color,
then a law imposing heavy impost duties, bearing most grievously upon
them, and finally a law providing for the importation of coolies, thus
taxing the freedmen for the very purpose of taking the bread out of
the mouths of their own children! I believe it turns out, after all,
that these outraged people even then did not rise up against the local
government; but the white ruffians of the island, goaded on by their
own unchecked rapacity, and availing themselves of the infernal
pretext of a black insurrection, perpetrated deeds of rapine and
vengeance that find no parallel anywhere, save in the acts of their
natural allies, the late slave-breeding rebels, against our flag. Sir,
is there no warning here against the policy of leaving our freedmen to
the tender mercies of their old masters? Are the white rebels of this
District any better than the Jamaica villains to whom I have referred?
The late report of General Schurz gives evidence of some important
facts which will doubtless apply here. The mass of the white people in
the South, he says, are totally destitute of any national feeling. The
same bigoted sectionalism that swayed them prior to the war is almost
universal. Nor have they any feeling of the enormity of treason as a
crime. To them it is not odious, as very naturally it would not be,
under the policy which foregoes the punishment of traitors, and gives
so many of them the chief places of power in the South. And their
hatred of the negro to-day is as intense and scathing and as universal
as before the war. I believe it to be even more so. The proposition to
educate him and elevate his condition is every-where met with contempt
and scorn. They acknowledge that slavery, as it once existed, is
overthrown; but the continued inferiority and subordination of the
colored race, under some form of vassalage or serfdom, is regarded by
them as certain. Sir, they have no thought of any thing else; and if
the ballot shall be withheld from the freedmen after the withdrawal of
military power, the most revolting forms of oppression and outrage
will be practiced, resulting,