regarded by their white neighbors. These universally
expressed the opinion that all colored men who would practice
equal industry and sobriety could have fared equally well; and in
fact their own condition was ample proof of the treatment of the
colored people by the whites of the South, and of their
opportunities to thrive, if they were so determined. Some of
these men owned so much as a thousand acres of real estate in the
best portions of the South; many of them had tenants of their
own, white men, occupying their premises and paying them rent;
and your committee naturally arrived at the conclusion that if
one black man could attain to this degree of prosperity and
respectable citizenship, others could, having the same capacity
for business and practicing the same sobriety and industry.

Your committee also directed their attention to the complaints
frequently made with regard to the laws passed in various States
of the South relating to landlord and tenant, and to the system
adopted by many planters for furnishing their tenants and
laborers with supplies. We found, upon investigation of these
laws, and of the witnesses in relation to their operation, that
as a general rule they were urgently called for by the
circumstances in which the South found itself after the war. The
universal adoption of homestead and personal property exemption
laws deprived poor men of credit, and the landlord class, for its
own protection, procured the passage of these laws giving them a
lien upon the crop made by the tenant until his rents and his
supplies furnished for the subsistence of the tenant and his
family had been paid and discharged; and while upon the surface
these laws appeared to be hard and in favor of the landlord, they
were, as was actually testified by many intelligent witnesses,
quite as much or more in favor of the tenant, as it enabled him
to obtain credit, to subsist himself and his family, and to make
a crop without any means whatsoever but his own labor. It was
alleged also that in many instances landlords, or if not
landlords then merchants, would establish country stores for
furnishing supplies to laborers and tenants, and the laborer,
having no money to go elsewhere or take the natural advantages of
competition, was forced to buy at th