and to the southwest, not far from where Sam Hose was
crucified, you may stand on a spot which is to-day the centre of the
Negro problem,--the centre of those nine million men who are America's
dark heritage from slavery and the slave-trade.

Not only is Georgia thus the geographical focus of our Negro
population, but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the
Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State. No other
State in the Union can count a million Negroes among its citizens,--a
population as large as the slave population of the whole Union in 1800;
no other State fought so long and strenuously to gather this host of
Africans. Oglethorpe thought slavery against law and gospel; but the
circumstances which gave Georgia its first inhabitants were not
calculated to furnish citizens over-nice in their ideas about rum and
slaves. Despite the prohibitions of the trustees, these Georgians,
like some of their descendants, proceeded to take the law into their
own hands; and so pliant were the judges, and so flagrant the
smuggling, and so earnest were the prayers of Whitefield, that by the
middle of the eighteenth century all restrictions were swept away, and
the slave-trade went merrily on for fifty years and more.

Down in Darien, where the Delegal riots took place some summers ago,
there used to come a strong protest against slavery from the Scotch
Highlanders; and the Moravians of Ebenezer did not like the system.
But not till the Haytian Terror of Toussaint was the trade in men even
checked; while the national statute of 1808 did not suffice to stop it.
How the Africans poured in!--fifty thousand between 1790 and 1810, and
then, from Virginia and from smugglers, two thousand a year for many
years more. So the thirty thousand Negroes of Georgia in 1790 doubled
in a decade,--were over a hundred thousand in 1810, had reached two
hundred thousand in 1820, and half a million at the time of the war.
Thus like a snake the black population writhed upward.

But we must hasten on our journey. This that we pass as we near
Atlanta is the ancient land of the Cherokees,--that brave Indian nation
which strove so long for its fatherland, until Fate and the United
States Government drove them beyond the Mississippi. If you wish to
ride with me you must come into the "Jim Crow Car." There will be no
objection,--already four other white men, and a little white girl with
her nurse, are in there. Usually the rac