Note 13 — PART I SOUTHWARD HO!

According to Mr. W.H. Thomas, a negro writer violently hostile to his race, negroes in the year 1901 owned about $700,000,000, and paid state and municipal taxes of over $3,000,000. This, he reckons, would mean property to the amount of about $90 per head, or a saving of about $2·60 (ten and sixpence) per head per year since emancipation. Mr. Thomas also states that before the war there was in the South a free negro population of a quarter of a million, owning between thirty-five and forty million dollars’ worth of property. “The American Negro,” pp. 39 and 74. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page also points out that some negroes accumulated wealth during the Reconstruction period “by other means than those of honest thrift.” But it is probable that in most cases the money thus gained was not so employed as to constitute a permanent addition to the wealth of the race.