thern Commercial Congress in
a session at Norfolk, Judge Francis D. Winston, of North
Carolina, expressed this same view of the situation in a
resolution which declares that: "The complete industrial,
intellectual and social development of the southern States
can be secured only when the negro becomes a part of the
citizenship of our sister States, and that we will encourage
all movements tending to an equitable distribution of our
negro population among the other States of the Union.

It is not likely that there will be any serious objection to
a declaration of this kind in favor of the more equitable
distribution of the negroes throughout the country as the
question involved can then be better handled. No encouragement
to the negroes to leave the South will be held out, but there
will be no effort made to keep the negroes from going beyond
explaining the situation to them.[156]

A comment of the _Nashville Banner_ was:

From a logical point of view that looks beyond immediate
emergencies, the southern whites should encourage negro
emigration to the North, not for the cynical motives that
impelled the late Hon. Jeff Davis while Governor of Arkansas
to pardon negro convicts on condition that they go to
Massachusetts to live, but to relieve the South of the entire
burden and all the brunt of the race problem, and make room
for and to create greater inducements for white immigration
that the South very much needs. Some thousands of negroes
going north every year and a corresponding number of whites
coming south would affect a distribution of the races that
would be in many ways beneficial and that at the very least
would take away from the race problem all sectional aspects,
which is and has always been the chief cause of sectional ill
feeling. And it would in the end give the South a homogeneous
citizenship.

The _Vicksburg Herald_[157] was of the opinion that:

Adjustments and compensation will, we have faith, come. The
northern drift as it continues, and carries thousands with it,
will lower negro congestion in certain sections of the South.
Such a change, restrained and graduated against violent
progression, promises ultimate benefit. In the South, the
effect of losing thousands of negroes from lands in southern
Mississippi is already ... producing a wholesome