"I done have no home nohow, if they shoots my ole man an' the
boys, an' gives me no money for de washin."

A bright woman of twenty-five years is asked her condition, when she
answers; "I had n't much real trouble yet, like some of my neighbors
who lost every thing. We had a lot an' a little house, an' some stock
on the place. We sold all out 'kase we did n't dare to stay when
votin' time came again. Some neighbors better off than we had been all
broken up by a pack of "_night-riders_"--all in white,--who scared
everybody to death, run the men off to the swamps before elections,
run the stock off, an' set fire to their places. A poor woman might
as well be killed and done with it."

In the early Spring of 1879, the now famous Exodus of the Negroes from
the South set in toward the Northern States.

"Many already have fled to the forest and lurk on its outskirts,
Waiting with anxious hearts the dubious fate of the morrow. Arms
have been taken from us, and warlike weapons of all kinds;
Nothing is left but the blacksmith's sledge and the scythe of the
mower."

The story of the emigration of a people has been often repeated since
the world began. The Israelites of old, with their wanderings of forty
years, furnish the theme of an inspired poem as old as history itself.
The dreadful tale of the Kalmuck Tartars, in 1770, fleeing from their
enemies, the Russians, over the desolate steppes of Asia in
mid-winter; starting out six hundred thousand strong, men, women, and
children, with their flocks and herds, and reaching the confines of
China with only two hundred thousand left, formed an era in oriental
annals, and made a combination from which new races of men have
sprung. But still more appropriate to this occasion is the history of
the Huguenots of France, driven by religious persecution to England
and Ireland, where, under their influence, industries sprang up as the
flowers of the field, and what was England's gain was irreparable loss
to France.[135] The expulsion of the Acadians, a harmless and
inoffensive people, from Nova Scotia, is another instance of the
revenge that natural laws inflict upon tyranny and injustice. Next to
the persecuted Pilgrims crossing a dreary ocean in mid-winter to the
sterile coasts of a land of savages for freedom's sake, history hardly
furnishes a more touching picture than that of forty thousand
homeless, friendless, starving Negroes going to a land already