harges than the white man who
would blacken his name.

During all the years of slavery, no such charge was ever made, not even
during the dark days of the rebellion, when the white man, following the
fortunes of war went to do battle for the maintenance of slavery. While
the master was away fighting to forge the fetters upon the slave, he left
his wife and children with no protectors save the Negroes themselves. And
yet during those years of trust and peril, no Negro proved recreant to his
trust and no white man returned to a home that had been dispoiled.

Likewise during the period of alleged "insurrection," and alarming "race
riots," it never occurred to the white man, that his wife and children
were in danger of assault. Nor in the Reconstruction era, when the hue and
cry was against "Negro Domination," was there ever a thought that the
domination would ever contaminate a fireside or strike to death the virtue
of womanhood. It must appear strange indeed, to every thoughtful and
candid man, that more than a quarter of a century elapsed before the Negro
began to show signs of such infamous degeneration.

In his remarkable apology for lynching, Bishop Haygood, of Georgia, says:
"No race, not the most savage, tolerates the rape of woman, but it may be
said without reflection upon any other people that the Southern people are
now and always have been most sensitive concerning the honor of their
women--their mothers, wives, sisters and daughters." It is not the purpose
of this defense to say one word against the white women of the South. Such
need not be said, but it is their misfortune that the chivalrous white men
of that section, in order to escape the deserved execration of the
civilized world, should shield themselves by their cowardly and infamously
false excuse, and call into question that very honor about which their
distinguished priestly apologist claims they are most sensitive. To
justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not
possess. True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one who reads the
record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the
South, will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very
chivalrous regard for the honor due the women of his own race or respect
for the womanhood which circumstances placed in his power. That chivalry
which is "most sensitive concerning the honor of women" can hope for but
little respect from the civilized wor