St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1879-05-09
True Charity to the Negro.

There is widespread effort to rouse
the same feeling at the North for the
negro emigrant which was felt gen
Grafton ago for the fugitive slave. This
is mistake. The cases are not paral-
lei. There was full reason for the SEN
timent which clustered about the negro
escaping from bondage. His aid was a
sacred duty which, in the minds of
many, overrode, and rightly, the claims
of an unjust law. The negro emigrant
of to-day is a freeman like the rest of
US. He does not like to live in one
place and he prefers to live in another.
He has a right to his choice. If his
migration brings the weak and helpless,
dependent on him, to want, this want
ought to be relieved. Nothing more
ought to be done. To aid the emigra-
ton by paying the transportation of
negroes from the banks of the lower
Mississippi to Kansas, when those al
ready in Kansas cannot support them
selves, would be unwise, not to say
wicked. As for stimulating the move
ment, by spreading the idea among the
negroes that some mysterious and be-
nevolent power at the North stands
ready to save them from the conse-
quences of their own blunder in going,
that is not to be thought of. In short,
the funds being raised should be relig-
iously applied to settling those who have
arrived, not to unsettle those who have
not started. 1t is high time that the
negro had all the rights of freeman,
and the first of these rights is COM
plete responsibility for his own acts.
Let him go and come as he pleases and
if he plumbers in either let him suffer
for his blunders. He will get wisdom
in no other way.
The desire to relieve his distress is
praisewOrthy. 1t should have full play,
but sedulOus care should be taken by
those who distribute the aims now gath
ering all over the North that they do
not make matters worse. The attempt
of the negro to better himself is exactly
the attempt of every other emigrant.
1t is an economic movement which
ought to be left to the control of eco
nomic laws. Every possible care should
be taken to prevent an unreasOning
speculation Selling on the negro mind.
There probably could be no better use
of the money of the charitable just now
than the wide circulation among south
ern negroes of exact information about
Kansas. The cold climate, the price of
land, the difficulty of unskilled labor
securing employment, the want which
has Overtaken the negro emigrants thus
far; all these facts it would be the
part of wisdom to spread widely at the
South, so as to give the negro full bene-
fit of the knowledge he would otherwise
receive by a bitter experience. This
would reduce the migration to those
who have money enough to pay their
way fIom the South and energy enough
to earn their living at the North.
This is more necessary because to an
evil extent this has not been done. The
evidence is clear that lying pictures of
the advantages of Kansas and ly-'
ing prophecies of future and impos-
sible cruelty from the whites began
this migration in Louisiana and Missis-
sippi. A strong tendency has also been
visible to use the exodus as political
capital. Nothing could be worse. The
negro has suffered by this treatment in
the past, it will be strange cruelty if he
is forced to suffer again. The time is
past for making a ward of him. Treat
him like man. Hold him accOunta-
bic for his errors like other men. Let
him pay his own way and earn his own
living like other men. Any other course
simply revives the very idea of his
weakness on which slavery WAS built i'll
another and most dangerous FORM
Spr. Republican.