Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 19

2. W. M. Dickson, Review of the Letter of General Cox, of Ohio (Boston: Geo. C. Rand & Avery, 1865). (4 p.)

Assessment of race relations in Reconstruction with particular emphasis on black suffrage. “The negro will feel, having entire equality before the law, the ambition to become a good citizen; and the ambitious white man will respect the power of the negro votes, and endeavor, by kind treatment, to gain them. . . . Under this policy, I can see a great and happy and prosperous future for the South. But if we take the contrary course; if we are to treat the unhappy negro as a pariah, whose touch or presence is contamination, who is to be cast out of our sight, put away to himself; if we are to continue to extend over him our protecting arm, in the sense of treating and using him as a child; if he is to have no power, but to be a poor, helpless being, subject to the insult and outrage of the strong; if he is to be delivered, bound hand and foot, to his former master, who still wants him to be a slave, and who will proceed, under a reconstructed government, to oppress him, and virtually return him to the hardships of slavery, without even the protection of that condition,--then it requires no prophet to foretell that we will have a bloody struggle of races in the South” (emphasis in original).