_Mr. President_: Your committee on business have the honor to
submit this their final report. Discussing the general and
widespread alarm among the colored people of Louisiana, including
so potent a fear that in many parishes, and in others perhaps
largely to follow, there is an exodus of agricultural labor which
indicates the prostration and destruction of the productive, and
therefore essentially vital, interests of the State. _The
Committee find that the primary cause of this lies in the absence
of a republican form of government to the people of Louisiana.
Crime and lawlessness existing to an extent that laughs at all
restraint, and the misgovernment naturally induced from a State
administration itself the product of violence, have created an
absorbing and constantly increasing distrust and alarm among our
people throughout the State. All rights of freemen denied and all
claims to a just recompense for labor rendered or honorable
dealings between planter and laborer disallowed, justice a
mockery, and the laws a cheat, the very officers of the courts
being themselves the mobocrats and violators of the law, the only
remedy left the colored citizens in many of parishes of our State
today is to emigrate. The fiat to go forth is irresistible. The
constantly recurring, nay, ever-present, fear which haunts the
minds of these our people in the turbulent parishes of the State
is that slavery in the horrible form of peonage is approaching;
that the avowed disposition of men in power to reduce the laborer
and his interest to the minimum of advantages as freemen and to
absolutely none as citizens has produced so absolute a feat that
in many cases it has become a panic. It is flight from present
sufferings and from wrongs to come._

Here are the reasons for the exodus as stated by the colored
people themselves. In view of the facts which we have stated, and
of the terrible history which we cannot here repeat, does any one
believe their statement of grievances is overdrawn? Is there any
other race of freemen on the face of the earth who would have
endured and patiently suffered as they have? Is there any other
government among civilized nations which would have permitted
such acts to be perpetrated against its citizens?

We will not dwell upon the c