ed such
advantages of contact and education as to make them desirable and useful
as leaders in the Reconstruction of the South and the remaking of the
race. In their tirades against the Carpet-bag politicians who handled the
Reconstruction situation so much to the dissatisfaction of the southern
whites, historians often forget to mention also that a large number of the
Negro leaders who participated in that drama were also natives or
residents of Northern States.

Three motives impelled these blacks to go South. Some had found northern
communities so hostile as to impede their progress, many wanted to rejoin
relatives from whom they had been separated by their flight from the land
of slavery, and others were moved by the spirit of adventure to enter a
new field ripe with all sorts of opportunities. This movement, together
with that of migration to large urban communities, largely accounts for
the depopulation and the consequent decline of certain colored communities
in the North after 1865.

Some of the Negroes who returned to the South became men of national
prominence. William J. Simmons, who prior to the Civil War was carried
from South Carolina to Pennsylvania, returned to do religious and
educational work in Kentucky. Bishop James W. Hood, of the African
Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, went from Connecticut to North Carolina
to engage in similar work. Honorable R.T. Greener, the first Negro
graduate of Harvard, went from Philadelphia to teach in the District of
Columbia and later to be a professor in the University of South Carolina.
F.L. Cardoza, educated at the University of Edinburgh, returned to South
Carolina and became State Treasurer. R.B. Elliot, born in Boston and
educated in England, settled in South Carolina from which he was sent to
Congress.

John M. Langston was taken to Ohio and educated but came back to Virginia
his native State from which he was elected to Congress. J.T. White left
Indiana to enter politics in Arkansas, becoming State Senator and later
commissioner of public works and internal improvements. Judge Mifflin
Wister Gibbs, a native of Philadelphia, purposely settled in Arkansas
where he served as city judge and Register of United States Land Office.
T. Morris Chester, of Pittsburgh, finally made his way to Louisiana where
he served with distinction as a lawyer and held the position of
Brigadier-General in charge of the Louisiana State Guards under the
Kellogg government. Joseph Cart