ing to make
slavery national and perpetual, but fed the entire rebel army, and
never laid the weight of a finger upon the head of any of the women or
children entrusted to their care! To this virtue of fidelity to their
worst enemies they added still another, loyalty to the Union flag and
escaping Union soldiers. All night long they would direct the lonely,
famishing, fainting, and almost delirious Union soldier in a safe way,
and then when the night and morning met they would point their pilgrim
friends to the North Star, hide them and feed them during the day, and
then return to the plantation to care for the loved ones of the men
who starved Union soldiers and hunted them down with bloodhounds! This
is the brightest gem that history can place upon the brow of the
Negro; and in conferring it there is no one found to object.

Since the war the crime among Colored people is to be accounted for
upon two grounds, viz.: ignorance, and a combination of circumstances
over which they had no control. It was one thing for the Negro to
understand the cruel laws of slavery, but when he found himself a
freeman he was not able to know what was an infraction of the law.
They did not know what in law constituted a _tort_, or a civil action
from a sled. The violent passions pampered in slavery, the destruction
of the home, the promiscuous mingling of the sexes, a conscience
enfeebled by disuse, made them easy transgressors. The Negro is not a
criminal generically; he is an accidental criminal. The judiciary and
juries of the South are responsible for the alarming prison statistics
which stand against the Negro. It takes generations for men to
overcome their prejudices. With a white judge and a white jury a Negro
is guilty the moment he makes his appearance in court. It is seldom
that a Negro can get judgment against a white person under the most
favorable circumstances. The Negroes who appear in courts are of the
poorer and more ignorant class. They have no funds with which to
employ counsel, and have but few intelligent lawyers to come to their
rescue. In cases of theft, especially of poultry, pigs, sheep, fruit,
etc., it is next to impossible to convince a white judge or jury that
the defendant is not guilty. They reason that because the half-fed,
overworked slave appropriated articles of food, as a freeman the Negro
was not changed. They ascribed a general habit, growing out of trying
circumstances, to the Negro as a slave that he