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All but four miles of the forty (40) mile route has already been graded, by a black Civil Engineer, employed by the company. The track for the road is to be laid down from Wilmington, N. C, to Wnghtsville, on the seaboard; and the whole scheme is the work, in capital and execution, of Freedmen!
I have referred above to the large landed estate of the black man; and I may add, here, that it is the result of his own sweatful toil. He has earned his own property. Unlike the Indian, he has had no one to prop him up. He was turned loose suddenly, without any capital, to undertake the duty of self-support. The nation acted as though it owed him no duty and no debt. It gave him his freedom to save its own life; and then left him to struggle for life, if not to die! Justice demanded that, after centuries of slavery, he should have been made the ward of the nation—at least until he learned the ways and provinces of freedom. He was turned out to die!
But neither failure nor death was to be the destiny of the Negro. It never has been in any of the lands of his emancipation. Everywhere, when freedom has come to him, he has discovered all the proclivities to enterprise and personal sustentation. It has been conspicuously so in this nation. The Freedmen of this country, on coming out of bondage, began at once all the laborious activities which their needs demanded, and which were required for the securing a foothold in this land.
Of course this industrial enterprise was not universal. It never is universal in any people. Large numbers could not understand the situation; could not see the grand vistas of opportunity and success which freedom opened before them. My own estimate of their progress since emancipation is this, viz.: (1) That about one third have fallen to a lower level than they were previous to emancipation, viz., the aged, the decrepid, the imbruted, and the
