The Jasper Weekly Courier

The Negroes and the Republican Convention.

When Abe Lincoln, President of the United States, issued a proclamation emancipating the slaves, it seems to have given the Republican party a bill of sale to the negro vote. Until a very recent period the Republicans have had a fee simple title to them, and but few of the negro voters seem to have dared assert their political independence. However unreasonable it may appear to suspect that the negroes will go on voting blindly as directed by the Republican party for all time to come through a mere sentimental fact that gratitude requires they should make themselves political vassals, it seems to be the prevailing idea among Republicans.

The spirit of unrest among the negroes on political questions shows how affairs are drifting. They have grown tired of being mere voting cattle, and the only thing to satisfy them seems to be some acknowledgement that they are a part of the Republican party. Every Republican leader knows that it would not do to give the negroes a fair share of the offices, and it will never be done. They attempted, however, to allay the disquiet by electing a few negroes from the South as delegates to the Chicago Convention, but this has added fuel to the flames. The negro is not satisfied with such empty honors. He has so often been told that he is just as good as a white man, that he begins to want to see the Republicans act upon that political principle. Alas, he will never see it!

That there is room for complaint on the treatment they have received from the Republican party, is very true, but they have no one to blame but themselves. They fare much better in the South than they do in the North. The census of 1880 shows that in the ten Northern States named, there are male negroes over the age of twenty-one, as follows:

Connecticut 3,629
Illinois 13,091
Indiana 10,789
Kansas 17,705
Massachusetts 6,051
Michigan 6,109
New Jersey 10,670
Ohio 21,709
Pennsylvania 23,014
New York 20,050

Total 127,125

In at least seven of these States the negroes hold the fate of the Republican party in their hands. In only Kansas, Massachusetts and Michigan is the Republican majority such as to enable that party to let the negroes go. Without the colored vote they have scarcely a fighting chance in several of these States, and yet not one of the ten sent a negro delegate to the Chicago Convention. In not one of the ten is there a negro in a desirable elective office. The greed for place will not permit the blacks to have even a nubbin out of the public crib. There is, however, one thing the colored voters may count on -they are remembered in the platforms.--Columbus (Ga.) Enquirer.