Alfred H. Stone Collection
Volume: 28

8. J. R. Ralls, The Negro Problem. An Essay on the Industrial, Political and Moral Aspects of the Negro race in the Southern States. As Presented under the Late Amendments to the Federal Constitution (Atlanta, GA: Jas. P. Harrison & Co., 1877). (116 p.)

Indictment of abolitionists for stirring up conflict between races in the South by encouraging unrealistic expectations among African Americans, which are later codified in the war amendments to the Constitution. “While the great mass of this race will very probably remain in a state of ignorance for successive generations, numbers will be educated, which will stimulate their pride and awaken new aspirations, and, finding a superior, and the ruling race above them, whose sphere cannot be attained, on account of caste, will cause them to agitate foolish and impracticable questions, which will beget a restive, jealous, and dissatisfied spirit among the masses, that must make society, in the future, more disorderly and insecure than at present.”