Emancipation and Emigration: A Plan to Transfer the Freedmen of the South to the Government Lands of the West by The Principia Club

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE FREEDMEN OF THE SOUTH. Cambridgeport, Mass., Aug. 13, 1878. Fellow Citizens:—If any apology for improving your condition were needed it may be found in the fact that a large portion of the last forty years of my life was spent, and many thousand dollars invested, in the terrible conflict with the slave power. It is not necessary for me to remind you that the result of that conflict was your emancipation from American slavery by the Republican party, with such leaders and co-laborers as Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, Rev. Joshua Leavitt, D. D., and Rev. Wm. Goodell, all of whom have now passed away, but whose life-long labors, with many who are still living, culminated in the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln in 1863. But it is, as it seems to me, necessary to remind you that the Republican party of to-day is a very different thing from then—that your liberties and citizenship have now become the stock in trade of corrupt politicians—that your political rights have been bartered away for the promises of your old masters, which they never meant to perform when they made them, and for which they now substitute demands for your return to slavery, with the pecuniary interest of one to two thousand dollars in each able-bodied man left out; consequently when they shoot a man they do not lose that amount of investment in his body. Among the demands of the "dominant race" is the repeal of the constitutional amendments which made you citizens and gave you the ballot. Of course they did not ask the Republican party to do it directly. They only asked them to put the political power of the nation into the hands of the Democratic party, and the second and third rate politicians now at the head of affairs at Washington were stupid enough to do it, for the poor privilege of occupying the White House for a short time. But when another Congress assembles with a Democratic majority in both houses (if such a calamity should overtake us), that will be done as sure as water runs down hill. Now what we propose to do is to open a door to the "better land" of this country, into which every freedman, who has had enough of slavery, both legal before the war, and practical since, and who has enterprise enough to desire to better his condition and that of his family, if he has one, may enter. It is the most practical, sensible, and scientific "labor reform" yet proposed; with neither the blatherskite of Kearney, nor his blasphemy, profanity, nor blarney, to mar and jeopardize the movement. It has been known in Washington for some time, that "The Principia Club Papers, No. 9," soon to be issued, will contain a plan of emigration for the freedmen and their families of the Southern States, and their settlement upon the government lands of the Northern and Western States and Territories, where they can cultivate their own farms and sit under their own vine and fig-tree. The club will appoint a board of trustees in whom the public can have the utmost confidence, whose duty it shall be to assist the freedmen in the selection, purchase, and payment of their farms, and the removal of their families and outfits. More full explanations and descriptions will be given in the pamphlet, which will contain also specific directions to individuals or colonies how to proceed in the matter. While arrangements are being made with the government, the club will be glad to receive any suggestions from any one interested in the movement, and especially the leading colored men in the country