COMMON SENSE FOR COLORED MEN.
[The following letter with the above caption is from the New York Evangelist, and was written by the Rev. Moses A. Hopkins, a colored preacher of Franklinton, N.C. It contains so much truth, and good, hard, common sense, that the Missionary is constrained to send it along. This is done with a slight but emphatic caveat in regard to one paragraph, to which exception is taken as misleading. To say “the pinching poverty which drove a few idle and ignorant Freedmen to Indiana, Kansas, and Africa” does not come up to the proportions, as the writer would imply that it does, of a satisfactory explanation of this great movement which has taken more than 40,000 colored people from their old to new homes, at great expense, both of suffering and money.
From Florence, Ala., many of the most intelligent and well-to-do of these people exodized. Among those who went to Africa were many intelligent and thrifty men, sufficiently so to send out an agent and arrange for the movement, with means to place themselves in their new home, and they were unanimous in assigning reasons which justified them in the experiment.—Ed. Miss.]
Many designing men, “filled to the brim” with sledge-hammer rhetoric and campaign eloquence, for more than a decade have “used sorcery and bewitched the colored people” with their “cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive,” till many of the Freedmen thought that the time had fully come when the last should be first and the first last, and were waiting and watching for their turn in the White House and Congress.
But having hoped against hope, till hope deferred and poverty had saddened their hearts, most of them have turned their minds to the soil, which now promises “seed to the sower and bread to the eater.” On every hand “the valleys are covered over with corn,” and God, the poor man’s Friend, has just granted the tillers of the ground “a plentiful rain,” which causes “the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice.”
The present prospect of a bountiful harvest has greatly inspired our people to labor and to appreciate honest toil, and to remember that the great mass of the Freedmen will make better plowmen than Presidents, and better sowers than Senators. The pinching poverty which drove a few idle and ignorant Freedmen to Indiana, Kansas and Africa, has taught those who had the good sense to stay at home, that God will not bless idleness and ignorance among any people. Most of the Freedmen have decided to buy land and labor on it; to build houses and dwell in them, “and to plant gardens and eat the fruit of them”; to seek the peace of the country and the cities where God has caused them to be carried away captives; and to remember that in the peace and prosperity of this country shall they have peace.