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336 LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS

promise. Hundreds of these people came to Washington, and at one time
there were from two to three hundred lodged here, unable to get further for
the want of money. I lost no time in appealing to my friends for the means of
assisting them. Conspicuous among these friends was Mrs. Elizabeth
Thompson of New York city-the lady who, several years ago, made the
nation a present of Carpenter's great historical picture of the "Signing of the
Emancipation Proclamation," and who has expended large sums of her
money in investigating the causes of yellow-fever, and in endeavors to discover
means for preventing its ravages in New Orleans and elsewhere. I
found Mrs. Thompson consistently alive to the claims of humanity in this, as
in other instances, for she sent me, without delay, a draft for two hundred and
fifty dollars, and in doing so expressed the wish that I would promptly inform
her of any other opportunity of doing good. How little justice was done me
by those who accused me of indifference to the welfare of the colored people
of the South on account of my opposition to the so-called exodus will be seen
by the following extracts from a paper on that subject laid before the Social
Science Congress at Saratoga, when that question was before the country:

"Important as manual labor is everywhere, it is nowhere more important
and absolutely indispensable to the existence of society than in the more
southern of the United States. Machinery may continue to do, as it has done,
much of the work of the North, but the work of the South requires bone,
sinew, and muscle of the strongest and most enduring kind for its performance.
Labor in that section must know no pause. Her soil is pregnant and
prolific with life and energy. All the forces of nature within her borders are
wonderfully vigorous, persistent, and active. Aided by an almost perpetual
summer abundantly supplied with heat and moisture, her soil readily and
rapidly covers itself with noxious weeds, dense forests. and impenetrable
jungles. Only a few years of non-tillage would be needed to give the sunny
and fruitful South to the bats and owls of a desolate wilderness. From this
condition, shocking for a southern man to contemplate, it is now seen that
nothing less powerful than the naked iron arm of the negro, can save her.
For him as a Southern laborer, there is no competitor or substitute. The
thought of filling his place by any other variety of the human family, will be
found delusive and utterly impracticable. Neither Chinaman, German,
Norwegian, nor Swede can drive him from the sugar and cotton fields of
Louisiana and Mississippi. They would certainly perish in the black bottoms
of these states if they could be induced, which they cannot, to try the
experiment.