_AEsop's Fables_.

CHAPTER I

_Black_

There is no question to-day in American politics more unsettled than
the negro question; nor has there been a time since the adoption of
the Federal Constitution when this question has not, in one shape or
another, been a disturbing element, a deep-rooted cancer, upon the
body of our society, frequently occupying public attention to the
exclusion of all other questions. It appears to possess, as no other
question, the elements of perennial vitality.

The introduction of African slaves into the colony of Virginia in
August, 1619, was the beginning of an agitation, a problem, the
solution of which no man, even at this late date, can predict,
although many wise men have prophesied.

History--the record of human error, cruelty and misdirected
zeal--furnishes no more striking anomaly than the British Puritan
fleeing from princely rule and tyranny and dragging at his heels the
African savage, bound in servile chains; praying to a just God for
freedom, and at the same time riveting upon his fellow-man the gyves
of most unjust and cruel slavery. A parallel for such hypocrisy, such
sacrilegious invocation, is not matched in the various history of
peoples.

It did not matter to the early settlers of the American colonies that,
in the memorable struggle for the right to be represented if taxed, a
black man--Crispus Attucks, a full-blooded Negro--died upon the soil
of Massachusetts, in the Boston massacre of 1770, in common with other
loyal, earnest men, as the first armed protest against an odious
tyranny; it did not matter that in the armies of the colonies, in
rebellion against Great Britain, there were (according to the report
of Adjutant General Scammell), on the 24th day of August, 1778, 755
regularly enlisted negro troops; it did not matter that in the second
war with Great Britain, General Andrew Jackson, on the 21st day of
September, 1814, appealed to the "free colored people of Louisiana" as
"sons of freedom," who were "called upon to defend _our_ most
inestimable blessing," the right to be free and sovereign, and to
"rally around the standard of the eagle, to defend all which is dear
in existence;" it did not matter that in each of these memorable
struggles the black man was called upon, and responded nobly, to the
call for volunteers to drive out the minions of the British tyrant.
When the smoke of battle had dissolved into thin air; when the
precious right to be f