Note return — OUR WAR AND OUR WANT.

But what is to become of the freed blacks? Again and again does this preposterous bugbear rise up to prove, by the terror which it excites, the vast ignorance of the subject which prevails in this country, and the small amount of deliberate reasoning generally bestowed on matters of the most vital importance. Reader, if you would answer it, go to facts. You have probably all your life accepted as true the statement that the black when free promptly becomes an idle, worthless vagabond. You have believed that a majority of the free blacks in the North are good for nothing. Now I tell you calmly and deliberately, and challenging inquiry, that this is not true. Admitting that about one-fifth of them are so, you have but a weak argument. As for the forlorn, unacclimated exiles in Canada, where there is no demand for the labor which they are peculiarly fit to render, they are not a case in point. The black servants, cooks, barbers, white-washers, carpet-beaters and grooms of Baltimore and Philadelphia, which form the four-fifths majority of free blacks in those cities, are not idle vagabonds. Above all, reader, I beg of you to read the dispassionate and calmly written Cotton Kingdom of Frederick Law Olmstead, recently published by Mason Brothers, of New York. You will there find the fact set forth by closest observation that the negroes in part are indeed lazy vagabonds, but that the majority, when allowed to work for themselves, and when free, do work, and that right steadily. In the Virginia tobacco factories slaves can earn on an average as much money for themselves, in the 'over hours' allowed them, as the manufacturer pays their owner for their services during the day. There are cases in which slaves, hired for one hundred dollars a year, have made for themselves three hundred.1