FOREWORD THE title of this work is sufficiently explicit, I take it, to leave no room for doubt as to its general character, though there is a disposition in some quarters to use other terms than negro to designate that class of our people derived from African origin. For ordinary purposes, the inhabitants of this country may be fairly divided into white and colored classes. Nevertheless, such racial grouping is neither an exact nor a true ethnological designation of the American people, for the reason that it does not agree with known facts. For example, many persons of negroid ancestry, but white in color, are classed with the white race in communities ignorant of their negro origin. On the other hand, many Italians, Portuguese, Mexicans, and Indians, are dark complexioned, but without the least strain of negro blood. Therefore, as there is such a thing as a distinctively negro people, and as it is in indisputable evidence that the American freed people were primarily derived from a genuine negro stock, there is ample warrant for using the terms negro and negroid in designating the person, as well as the forms of thought and action, characteristic of the descendants of such ancestors. The normal color of the negro is black, but that color is neither his exclusive property nor his only hue. As a matter of fact, variant shades of color are found in his racial existence. Hence, neither the phrase, "negro people," nor its kindred appellatives, as employed in these pages, are to be understood as invariably implying a black segment of mankind, but rather as a uniform designation of a pronounced set of characteristics, specifically exemplified in the physical, mental, and moral qualities of a type of humanity. Color, then, apart from defined negroid characteristics, in nowise enters into the questions under consideration, though the characteristics themselves are manifest in white, black, yellow, brown, and other variable tints of racial color. My contentions on this point are that any man, of whatever hue, who exhibits the characteristic traits which I shall hereafter describe is a negro; otherwise, he is not. For example, I have some relatives who are fair in color, but negroes in every sense of the word, and other relatives, who, though dark in complexion, are in other respects comparatively free from negro idiosyncrasies. I have also personal knowledge of many individuals, representing all shades of color, who are manfully engaged in a struggle to free themselves from all visible trace of racial traits. Having submitted these observations, I hope to have made it clear that this contribution to American sociology deals in a fundamental sense with specific traits of character, and with color only in so far as it is incidental to ethnological characteristics. I began this undertaking with a profound belief in the truth, "What man has thought, man can think; what man has felt, man can feel; what man has done, man can do;" nor have my labors lessened my faith in that direction. Therefore, in the trust that all negroid men and women, now hedged about with discouragements and hampered by privations, but, nevertheless, hungering and thirsting after the realities of true manhood and womanhood, may be encouraged to strive for the consummation of their ideals, I take them at once into my confidence, and give them a bit of my personal history. To such my narrative may bring cheer and success, when they come to know how one of their kith and kin, who was reared like themselves in the school of adversity, and in addition physically disabled at the dawn of manhood, throughout a lifelong struggle with adverse circumstances, in which he owed nothing to adventitious influences, not only acquired by discriminate reading and serious meditation on the great issues of life a fair degree of knowledge of men and things, but also found that every endowment of manhood or womanhood is within the reach of every human being who puts integrity before material gain and self-respect before mendacious folly. None of my ancestors was owned in slavery, so far as my knowledge goes. On my mother's side I come from German and English stock. My maternal grandfather, the son of a white indentured female servant by a colored man, was born at Bedford, Pennsylvania, about the year 1758. My maternal grandmother was a white German woman, born in 1770, and brought up at Hagerstown, Maryland. This branch of my ancestry emigrated to Ohio in 1792, and settled near the town of Marietta, where my mother was born, in 1812. On the paternal side, both of my grandparents, who were of mixed blood, were Virginians by birth. My father, who was born in the year 1808, near Moorfield, in Hardy County, removed to Ohio before attaining his majority. I was born on a farm, in a log cabin, on the fourth day of May, 1843, in Jackson Township, Pickaway County, Ohio. My earliest memories recall my father and mother with their circle of children gathered round the family fireside Sabbath afternoons engaged in reading the Scriptures, and recitations. of the Decalogue and the Shorter Catechism. These wholesome teachings, including the morning orisons and evening prayers, with the never omitted supplication for "those who were in bonds," produced indelible impressions on my youthful mind, and exerted an abiding influence over my life. This reference to the daily prayers for an enslaved class indicates that I was bred in an atmosphere of aversion to human bondage. Action, however, not speech merely, opened my understanding, and gave me positive convictions concerning life and liberty. For, as far back as I can remember, my parents' home was the rendezvous of escaping slaves, from |