us, ignorant class of
Southerners. They needed no preparation for the bloody work
perpetrated by those lawless organizations, those more cruel than
Italian brigands. They instinctively hate the black man; because the
condition of the black, his superior capacity for labor and
receptivity of useful knowledge, place him a few pegs higher than
themselves in the social scale. So these degraded white men, the very
substratum of Southern population, were ready tools in the hands of
the organized chivalrous brigands (as they had been of the slave
oligarch), whose superior intelligence made them blush at the
lawlessness they inspired, and who, therefore, gladly transferred to
other hands the execution of those deeds of blood and death which make
men shudder even now to think of them. It was long a common saying
among the black population of the South that "I'd rudder be a niggah
den a po' w'ite man!" and they were wise in their preference.

It is safe to say, that the peasantry of no country claiming to be
civilized stands more in need of the labors of the schoolmaster and
the preacher, than do the so-called "poor white trash" of the South.
On their account, if no other, I am an advocate of a compulsory system
of education, a National Board of Education, and a very large National
appropriation for common school and industrial education.

I name this class first because it is the very lowest.

Next to this class is the great labor force of the South, the class
upon whose ample shoulders have fallen the weight of Southern labor
and inhumanity for lo! two hundred years--_the black man_. Time was,
yesterday, it appears to me, when this great class were all of _one_
condition, driven from the rising to the setting of the sun to enrich
men who were created out of the same sod, and in the construction of
whose mysterious mechanism, mental and physical, the great God
expended no more time or ingenuity. Up to the close of the Rebellion,
of that gigantic conflict which shook the pillars of republican
government to their center, the great black population were truly the
"mudsills" of Southern society, upon which rested all the industrial
burdens of that section; truly, "the hewers of wood and the drawers of
water;" a people who, in the mysterious providence of God, were torn
root and branch from their savage homes in that land which has now
become to them a dream "more insubstantial than a pageant faded," to
"dwell in a strange land, a