ranted him. Criticism against him is savage and un-Christian, if
these doors are closed against him.

TOPIC XVIII.

WHAT PROGRESS DID THE AMERICAN WHITE MAN MAKE, IN THE NINETEENTH
CENTURY, ALONG THE LINE OF CONCEDING TO THE NEGRO HIS RELIGIOUS,
POLITICAL, AND CIVIL RIGHTS?

BY JOHN W. CROMWELL.

[Illustration: J. W. Cromwell]

JOHN WESLEY CROMWELL.

John Wesley Cromwell, the twelfth child and seventh son of
Willis H. and Elizabeth Carney Cromwell, was born at
Portsmouth, Va., September 5, 1846. In 1851 the family moved
to Philadelphia, where he entered the public schools and
subsequently the Institute for Colored Youth, graduating in
1864.

He taught at Columbia, Pa., after which he established a
private school in his native town. Under the auspices of
Northern charitable associations he taught at Spanish Neck
and Little Gunpowder in Maryland, Providence Church, Scott
Farm, Charlotte County and Wytheville, Va. On the
inauguration of the public school system he became principal
of the Dill's Bakery School in Richmond, Va., and in the
following summer taught near the scene of the Nat Turner
Insurrection in Southampton County in the same State.

Mr. Cromwell took an active part in the reconstruction of
Virginia, was delegate to the first State Republican
Convention, did jury service in the United States Court for
the term at which the case of Jefferson Davis was
calendared, and was a clerk in the reconstruction
Constitutional Convention. A shot, fired with deadly intent,
grazed his clothing while at Spanish Neck, Md., where the
church in which the school was taught was burned to the
ground, and he was twice forced to face the muzzles of
revolvers in Virginia, because of his work as an educator.

In 1871 he entered the law department of Howard University,
graduating therefrom in 1874. In 1872, after a competitive
examination, having distanced two hundred and forty
applicants, he received a $1,200 appointment in the Treasury
Department, in which he was twice promoted, by the same
method, within twenty months. In 1885, in the early days of
the Cleveland administration, he was removed as an offensive
partisan, having established and conducted since 1876 "The
People's Advocate," a weekly journal of more than local