1858 3,113,962
1859 3,851,481
1860 4,669,770
1861 3,656,006
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Total 18,230,738

Years Bales
1878 4,811,265
1879 5,073,531
1880 5,757,397
1881 6,589,329
1882 5,435,845
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The five years’ work of freedom 27,667,367
The five years’ work of slavery 18,230,738
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Balance in favor of freedom 9,436,629

Now this item of production is a positive disproof of Dr. Tucker’s statement, “that the average level in material prosperity is but little higher than it was before the war.”  Here is the fact that the Freedman has produced one-third more in five years than he did in the same time when a slave!

Another view of this matter is still more striking.  The excess of yield in cotton in seven years [i.e., from 1875 to 1882] over the seven years [i.e., from 1854 to 1861] is 17,091,000 bales, being $1.  If Dr. Tucker will glance at the great increase of the cotton, tobacco, and sugar crops South, as shown in Agricultural Reports from 1865 to 1882, and reflect that NEGROES have been the producers of these crops, he will understand their indignation at his outrageous charges of “laziness and vagabondage:”  and perhaps he will listen to their demand that he shall take back the unjust and injurious imputations which, without knowledge and discrimination, he makes against a whole race of people.

     This impulse to thrift on the part of the Freedmen was no
     tardy and reluctant disposition.  It was the immediate
     offspring of freedom.

It is not possible even to approximate the landed acquisitions of the colored people, but that they have been large purchasers of small holdings will readily be admitted by all candid persons who are acquainted with the intense pastoral nature of the people, their constant thrift, and their deepseated determination to own their own homes.  If we assume, with Dr. Crummell, that in the past seventeen years, the hardest, most disadvantageous years they will ever again be compelled to go through, they have come into possession of 5,600,000 acres, the gain in the next seventeen years must be vastly greater.  At any rate, we are free to place the holdings in the next fifty years at not less than 35,000,000 acres, and the probability is that it will be vastly more.