492 
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN REVIEW 
to-day, without any further admixture of white blood, were itself uni¬ 
formly mixed, it would result in a light brown or almost yellow race. 
The earlier American settlers brought in African blacks as slaves, 
beginning over three hundred years ago. In 1863 during the Civil 
War the slaves were emancipated by a proclamation of President 
Abraham Lincoln. There were at the time between three and four 
million slaves, almost exclusively in the southern part of the United 
States, where three-fourths of the American Negroes still live. There 
are now at least twelve millions of this variously mixed group in the 
United States. The Civil War not only gave them freedom from 
chattel slavery, but amendments were added to the Federal Consti¬ 
tution making them full citizens of the United States, with the right 
to own property, to vote, to hold office, and to exercise all other rights 
of American citizenship. 
This was and still is the law of the land, but in fact and in practice 
the members of this group have never yet been accorded their full 
rights in any part of the nation and hardly any in many parts. It was 
natural that the south which had known them for 250 years as slaves, 
should try in spite of law to keep them down economically, politically, 
and socially. And the equally natural struggle of the emancipated 
colored people to rise in the face of this opposition constitutes the 
American race problem. For fifty years they have had only a partial 
freedom, being generally freer in the north, which fought on the 
side of emancipation, than in the south, which fought against emanci¬ 
pation. 
We cannot understand the more recent phases of this human 
struggle unless we consider these antecedents. It should be remem¬ 
bered that for a number of years after the close of the Civil War the 
general government was necessarily in the hands of the section and 
party which had been victorious—that is, the northern states and 
their dominant political parties. This prevented the southern states 
from denying to the newly emancipated Negroes all of their free¬ 
dom, but it should be frankly admitted that the new citizens were 
kept down as low as the general government would tolerate. As time 
went on, of course, the animosity between northern whites and south¬ 
ern whites grew less, and the colored people were left more and more 
without the support of powerful northern sentiment in defense of 
their civil and political rights. This explains a strange contrast, 
which must puzzle any one not familiar with this history; that although 
soon after the Civil War the colored people had representatives in 
the Congress, the highest law-making body of the nation, in its Sen¬ 
ate and in its House of Representatives, and in all the legislatures of 
the southern states, attaining the positions of lieutenant-governor and 
judge, at a time when the race was much less prepared for such par¬ 
ticipation than it is now—yet to-day, when the colored group is ten 
