who was hired out for a quarter of a cent a day. Describing
this process of hiring, he says:

They call these people county convicts, and if you have got a
farm you can hire them out of the jail. They have got that
system, and the colored men object to it. I know some of these
men who have State convicts that they hire and they work them
under shotguns. A farmer hires so many of the State, and they are
under the supervision of a sergeant with a gun and nigger-hounds
to run them with if they get away. They hire them and put them in
the same gang with the striped suit on, and, if they want, the
guard can bring them down with his shotgun! Then they have these
nigger-hounds, and if one of them gets off and they can't find
him they take the hounds, and from a shoe or anything of the kind
belonging to the convict they trail him down.

Q. Are these the same sort of blood-hounds they used to have to
run the Negroes with?--A. Yes, sir.

These things need no comment. To the Negro they are painfully
suggestive of slavery. Is it a wonder that he has resolved to go
where peonage and blood-hounds are unknown?

Several witnesses were called from Saint Louis and Kansas, who
had conversed with thousands of the refugees, and who swore that
they all told the same story of injustice, oppression and wrong.
Upon the arrival of the first boat-loads at Saint Louis, in the
early spring of 1879, the people of that city were deeply moved
by the evident destitution and distress which they presented, and
thousands of them were interviewed as to the causes which
impelled them to leave their homes at that inclement season of
the year. In the presence of these people, and with a full
knowledge of their condition and of the flight, a memorial to
Congress was prepared, and signed by a large number of the most
prominent and most respectable citizens of Saint Louis, embracing
such names as Mayor Overholtz (a Democrat), Hon. John F. Dillon,
judge of the United States circuit court, ex-United States
Senator J.B. Henderson and nearly a hundred other leading
citizens, in which the condition and grievances of the refugees
are stated as follows:

The undersigned, your memorialists, respectfully represent that
within the last two weeks there have come by steamboats up the