it to you as an American--one of yourselves, who wants to get at the
right, and get at the truth, and who will get on his knees and thank God
for anyone who will tell him how to solve the problem and meet the
dangers that are therein.

Those dangers are not only for us, they are for you. The key to it, in
our opinion, is that to which I alluded but just now; that for the
present, at least, the white race is the torch-bearer of civilization,
not only for itself, but for the world. There is only one thing that I
can say assuredly, and that is that never again will that element of the
white race, the white people of the South, any more than you of the
North, consent to be dominated by any weaker race whatsoever. And on
this depends your salvation, no less than ours. Some of you may remember
that once, during that great siege of Petersburg, which resulted, in the
beginning of April, 1865, in the capture of the city and the overthrow
of the Confederacy, there was an attempt made to mine the hitherto
impregnable lines of General Lee. Finally, one cold morning, the mine
was sprung, and a space perhaps double the length of one of your squares
was blown up, carrying everything adjacent into the air and making a
breach in the lines. Beside a little stream under the hill in the Union
lines was massed a large force, a section of which, in front, was
composed of negroes. They were hurried forward to rush the breach that
had been created. They were wild with the ardor of battle. As it
happened, a part of the gray line which had held the adjacent trenches,
knowing the peril, had thrown themselves, in the dim dawn of the
morning, across the newly made breach, and when they found the colored
troops rushing in they nerved themselves anew to the contest. I may say
to you calmly, after thirty odd years of experience with the negro race,
that it was well for the town of Petersburg that morning that that
attempt to carry the lines failed. That thin gray line there in the gray