rogress that the Negro
had made during his thirty years of freedom. He deplored the fact that
"politics" had crept into the amendment designed to effect his purpose
and urged its acceptance as a matter of encouragement and justice to a
numerically significant group of the American people. Cheatham
proposed, also, a measure which sought to have printed the historical
record of the Negro troops in the wars in which they had participated.

The welfare of the race was often reflected in the remarks of George
W. Murray, a Congressman from South Carolina. When, in the Fifty-third
Congress, there arose, in connection with the proposal that federal
aid be extended to the Atlanta Exposition,[96] the question of the
progress of the Negro race, Murray favored such an exposition because,
he declared, it would offer opportunity to have registered the facts
and statistics of the Negro's achievement since emancipation. As
evidence of the inventive genius of his race, he submitted to Congress
at this time a list of patents which had been granted by the
government for the inventions of Negroes. Murray spoke briefly of what
the Negroes were doing and thinking and, in conclusion, gave to the
effort for federal aid his unqualified endorsement.

Measures proposed by George H. White, a representative from North
Carolina to the Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Congresses, tended mainly
to promote the social welfare of his race.[97] One of these was a
resolution for the consideration of a bill to provide a home for aged
and infirm Negroes. His other measures of this sort were bills to pay
the wages of the Negro Civil War-time employees withheld by the War
Department, to incorporate a "National Colored American Association,"
and to provide for the exhibit of the educational and industrial
progress of the Negro at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Few measures of
this type could become law.

VARIOUS INTERESTS

Many problems miscellaneous in character interested the Negro
Congressmen. Indeed, early in the Forty-second Congress, Josiah T.
Walls[98] supported a measure which proposed to appropriate $3,000,000
to aid the centennial celebration and international exhibition of
1876. Sometime later, moreover, he urged the recognition of the
belligerent rights of Cuba. In the Forty-fourth Congress, John A.
Hyman, of North Carolina, offered a measure to provide relief for the
Cherokee Indians, who had returned to the "Nation West"[99] while the
measures of