Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 10

17. Anti-Abolition Tracts.—No. 2. Free Negroism; or, Results of Emancipation in the North, and the West India Islands, with Statistics of the Decay of Commerce—Idleness of the Negro—His Return to Savageism [sic], and the Effect of Emancipation upon the Farming, Mechanical and Laboring Classes, 2nd ed. (New York: Van Evrie, Horton & Co., 1863). (32 p.)

Tract arguing 1) that the effects of emancipation in Northern states has been “the increase of crime, pauperism, and vice among the freed negroes,” 2) that in the British West Indies emancipation has “ruined production, destroyed commerce, and where the negro is fast relapsing into his original African savagism,” and 3) that “the effect of Free Negroism upon the commerce, wealth, and business of the world, and especially upon the white laboring and producing classes, in producing a scarcity of tropical productions, and a consequent increase in price, thus allowing Negro Idleness to tax WHITE LABOR” (italics in original). Mr. Stone has marked the following passage. “Even Horace Greely, in a moment of apparent forgetfulness, declared in the Tribune, September 22d, 1855, that ‘nine tenths of the free blacks have no idea of setting themselves to work except as the hirelings or servitors of white men; no idea of building a church, or other serious enterprise, except through beggary of the whites. As a class, the blacks are indolent, improvident, servile, and licentious’” (italics in original).