Page:Journal of Negro History, vol. 7.djvu/474



Lieber was a German by birth, found his service in South Carolina very uncongenial, and stood by the union. To compare slavery to apprenticeship is an affront. The day's work set down by Murat (whose history of the United States is a very obscure work) is contrary to evidence North or South. Regular nurseries were built only on a few large plantations. The arguments in favor of slavery on pages nine and ten are stated without qualification or contradiction. I deeply regret that a Journal of Negro History should admit an article so full of statements both untrue and dangerous to the Negro race.

The experience of a Georgia peon "seems to me very doubtful. I am personally acquainted with the story of Dade's stockade, and have passed within a few miles of it, and I do not believe in the least that there is now, or has been in the past thirty years, any plantation in the South where families are brought up in servitude. The only Ponce-de-Leon spring that I know is in Florida, which is not on the road between Georgia and Mississippi. The man seems to think that Chattanooga is on the west side of the river. It is a dangerous thing to accept any such statement without thorough investigation and calling upon the relater to state exactly where these things happened, and what was his course of travel.

I should not venture to write so decidedly but that you have done so much for the cause of the Negro race, and I don't like to see you give ammunition to the enemies of your race.

Sincerely yours,

My dear Doctor Woodson:

The following list of Negro delegates to the Republican National Conventions from 1868 to 1920, inclusive, from South Carolina, may be of sufficient interest for publication. As the proceedings of the conventions do not differentiate as to the racial identity of the delegates it is necessary that this data should be collected before it is too late, especially as it pertains to the Reconstruction period.