uddenly changed. The slave
became a free man by the dispensation of Providence and against the will
of his master.

A free man, yet penniless and homeless. A man of toil, but one whose own
and whose ancestral toil had created a material and social grandeur
which now mocked at his poverty and arrogantly denied him a share in its
blessings. A free man, but ignorant, the greatest curse imposed by his
former status which had contributed to the enlightenment of others. A
freeman, but helpless in the face of an impending persecution. He, whose
labor had contributed to the comfort and social happiness of
others,--who, while they were testing on scores of battle fields their
power to rob him of his freedom, was caring for and protecting their
wives and daughters and furnishing the sinews of the unholy war--was now
at the mercy of those who had gone forth to battle with the cry that,
"slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal
condition."

The Thirteenth Amendment became the law of the land through the travail
of war. But the war had sapped the Nation's strength, had cost nearly a
million lives and created a debt of three billions. Weary of strife and
vexation, the nation was fain to leave the settlement of the problems,
to which the new status of the Negro had given rise, to those among whom
he was to live, i.e., to his former masters.

This was indeed a critical period in the history of the Negro race in
the United States and the lessons of this period are exceedingly
important in the light of the present attack upon the political rights
of the black man.

In recent discussions of the merits and wisdom of Negro suffrage, this
period is as a rule strangely overlooked. The assertion so commonly
made, that the conferring of the right to vote upon the Negro was a
colossal blunder, evinces the extent to which this period has been
ignored by those who make it, or else their remarkable ignorance of the
history of Negro suffrage. Political prejudices and the blind zeal and
opportunism of those who have discovered some "sure cure," for the
Negro's ills have aided much in the work of discrediting Negro suffrage.
Some have ignored the facts to such an extent as to assert that Negro
suffrage was the result of vindictiveness on the part of the
Northerners, who wished both to humiliate the South and to perpetuate
the power of the Republican Party. The trouble with this assertion is
that it imputes too much t