t before Aggregate Total Amount
Mules, Hogs, and Enumerated Value of of Tax Assessed
Sheep, Mechanical except Whole on Polls
and Cattle. Tools. Annual Crops, Property. and Property.
Provisions, etc.
----------- ---------- ---------------- ---------- ---------------
$1,704,230 $143,258 $369,751 $5,182,398 $106,660.39

Increase in number of acres since return of 1878 39,309
Increase in wealth since return of 1878 $57,523

In Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, and in
Maryland, Colored men have possessed themselves of excellent farms
and moderate fortunes. In Baltimore a company of Colored men own a
ship dock, and transact a large business. Some of the largest orange
plantations in Florida are owned by Colored men. On most of the
plantations, and in many of the large towns and cities Colored
mechanics are quite numerous. The Montgomeries who own the plantation,
once the property of Jefferson Davis, extending for miles along the
Mississippi, are probably the best business men in the South. In
Louisiana, P. P. Deslonde, A. Dubuclet, Hon. T. T. Allain, and State
Senator Young are men who, although taking a lively interest in
politics, have accumulated property and saved it.

There is nothing vicious in the character of the Southern Negro. He is
gentle, affectionate, and faithful. If it has appeared, through false
figures, that he is a criminal, there is room for satisfactory
explanation. In 1870, out of a population, of persons of color, in all
the States and Territories, of 4,880,009, there were only 9,400 who
were receiving aid on the 1st of June, 1870; and only 8,056 in all the
prisons of America. Nine tenths of these were South, and could neither
read nor write.

During the Rebellion, when every white male from fifteen to seventy
was out fighting to sustain the Confederacy--when the Southern
Government was robbing the cradle and the grave for soldiers--the
wives and children of the Confederates were committed to the care and
keeping of their slaves. And what is the verdict of history? That
these women were outraged and their children brained? No! But that
during all those years of painful anxiety, of hope and fear, of fiery
trial and severe privation, those faithful Negroes toiled, not only to
support the wives and children of the men who were fight