The most damnable outrage ever!” the Memphis Scimitar called it. President Theodore I Roosevelt, it was learned, had entertained a I black man at dinner at the White House, and I the reaction was about what might have been expected in America in 1901. One southern newspaper described the affair as “a crime equal to treason”; an editor warned that “no Southern woman with proper respect would now accept an invitation to the White House.” And “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the irascible, oneeyed, unsuccessful farmer who was now a senator from South Carolina, spoke for the militant racists: “Entertaining that nigger,” he said, would “necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in tiie South before they will learn their place again.”

The object of this furor was a forty-five-year-old, mildmannered gentleman who had been a slave until about the age of nine. The son of a Negro cook and an unknown father—possibly a white man from a neighboring plantation—he was born in “the most miserable, desolate, and discouraging surroundings” on James Burroughs’ plantation in Franklin County, Virginia. With his mother and two other children he lived in a fourteen-by-sixteen cabin which had an open fireplace, a door, several uncovered openings in the walls, and a potato-hole in the middle of the dirt floor, where vegetables were stored. He couldn’t recall ever sitting down to a meal with his family; slave children simply picked up scraps of bread or meat whenever they could, and often he breakfasted on boiled corn that the pigs had left on the ground around the trough. His first shoes were made of wood, and he remembered with horror the flax shirts he had to wear—before you broke them in, it was like having “a dozen or more chestnut burrs, or a hundred small pin-points” next to your skin. Equally memorable was his first glimpse of a school; he had walked as far as the schoolhouse door, carrying books for one of his young mistresses, and, looking inside and seeing several dozen boys and girls studying, imagined it to be “about the same as getting into paradise.”

His first realization that he was a slave came early one morning when he awoke to find his mother kneeling over her children, praying that Mr. Lincoln and his armies would be successful so that she and the little ones might be free. For years the Negro grapevine had passed along the presentiments of freedom—the words of Garrison and Lovejoy, Brown and Lincoln—and late at night in the slave quarters there would be whispered discussions about events far to the northward. Slavery was what the war was about, they knew, and Union victory would mean the end of slavery. During the spring of 1865 freedom was in the air, and as the great day drew closer there was more singing in the slave huts than ever—bolder songs, with more of a ring to them. One momentous morning all the slaves