Excerpt from Abraham Lincoln's Contemporaries: Harriet Beecher Stowe; Excerpts From Newspapers and Other Sources A negro town Looking out the doors and Windows of the cabins, lounging in the door ways, leaning over the 1ow frame fences gather ing into quickly for1ning, quiekly dissolving groups in the dusty streets they swarm they are here from milk-white th1ough all deepening shades to glossy blackness; octoroons, quad roons, mulattoes some With large liquid black eyes,1ef1ned features, delicate forms! Working, gossiping, higgling over prices around a vege table cart, dlscu351nglast night's church festival, to day' s fuheral, or next week's railway excur sion, sleeping, planning how to get work and how to escape. It. F rom some unseen old fig ure in flamboyant turban, bending over the washtubin the rear of a cabin comes a crooned song of indescribable pathos; behind a half closed front shutter, a Moorish hued amoroso in gay linen thrums his banjo m a measure of ecstatic gayety, preludin g the more passionate melodies of the coming night. Here a fight; there the sound of the fiddle and the rhythmic pattin g of hands. Tatters and silks flaunt them selves side by side. Dirt and cleanliness lie down together: - Indolence goes hand in hand With thrift. Superstition dogs the slow foot steps of reason. Passion and self - control eye each other all day long across the narrow way. If there is anywhere resolute virtue, all round it is a weltered muck of low and sen sual desire. One sees all the surviving types of old negro life here crowded together with and contrasted With all the new phases of col ored life sees the transitional stage of a race, part of Whom were born slaves_' and are now freemen, 'pa1t of (whom have been born freemen 'but remain so much like slaves. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.