"Well, Sir," was the prompt reply, "I have the timber and want the money, but no man can purchase a single stave or hoop pole, or a particle of grain from me for that purpose."
The cooper, of course, became unusually angry on receiving such a stern reproof and contemptuously addressed this man of color, calling him a "Nigger."
"That is very true," mildly replied the Negro. "I can't help that, but I can help selling my timber to make whisky barrels, and I mean to do it."—The Weekly Herald and Philanthropist, May 13, 1846.
A Benevolent Negro. Before the Northwest Territory became disturbed by the influx of free Negroes and fugitives running away from persecution in the South, there had been enough trouble with white vagrants to lead to drastic laws for the protection of certain communities. Michigan, which did not until 1827 pass a measure dealing especially with undesirable Negroes, had prior to this time a law providing for selling idle and dissolute persons at auction. At one of the sales in 1821 a Negro bought a white man and ordered him to follow his master, and the order was obeyed. But the benevolent black took his servant to the steamboat, paid his passage and restored him his freedom, making himself satisfied with sending the white vagrant out of the territory.—Niles Register, XXI, p. 214.
BOOK REVIEWS
Harvard Studies. I. Varia Africana. I. Oric Bates, Editor, F. H. Sterns, Asst. Editor. Introduction by Theodore Roosevelt. The African Department of the Peabody Museum of Harvard University, Cambridge, 1917. Quarto. Pp. 292.
In the introduction to the Harvard African studies ex-President Roosevelt describes the enterprise which this volume represents as "the first serious attempt by Americans to contribute to the real study of the African." He might have added, with almost equal truth, that it is the first serious attempt by Americans to study the Negro.