A. I confine my replies to my own section, because I am
not familiar with the others. I have answered that question
in the written answers. The feeling is harmonious and good,
as I have expressed it there. The negro naturally looks to
the planter for advice and for assistance, and the planter
looks to his laborers for the development of his property.
Consequently their interests are identical and their
feelings good.

Q. You have alluded once or twice to the pressure of
outside, and I suppose Northern, opinion; I assume that you
mean political opinion in the past and the desirability that
it should cease. What is the fact as to a progressive
disintegration of the solid Republican or solid negro vote
of the South? What are the chances of its dividing, and of
the white vote dividing? We hear now of a "solid South,"
colored on the one side and white on the other. What
prospect is there of a division in that regard; to what
extent does it exist, or is it going on?
--A. The negroes of the South are already divided in their
votes. There are a great many who vote with the proprietors
of the properties. There are instances where they vote with
what they call their Republican friends. A few years ago in
the South any man who was an escaped convict from one of
your penitentiaries here who would come down to that country
and tell the negroes that he was one of General Grant's
soldiers, and fought to free him, would vote the last one
out; but any of those negroes would come to me at that very
time with his money and get me to save it for him, and take
care of it for him. He would put all his confidence in me so
far as his money was concerned, but when it would come to
politics he would vote with this man, who probably did not
own the coat he had on his back. Those kind of inferences
were what did do us in the South very material damage. Let
me illustrate that by a riot in my own county. In Chicot
County, in 1872, there was a proposition to impose upon the
county a railroad tax of $250,000 for the purpose of
building a railroad.

Q. What proportion of the taxable property of the county
would that have been?
--A. Our whole assessed valuation was about $1,500,000 at
that time. This was brought out by a promise that if the
appro