The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.2, page 521, Apr. 1889, U. of Illinois Press

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APRIL · 1889 From John Wheeler Hardir~g Longmeadow Mass. April 2. ~ 889 My dear Mr Washington: We are very sorry to hear of your misfortune, & trust that it will be made up to you in due season. Mrs Harding has been planning to send you a barred of miscelianeous goods, reading etc. & is now making it up. Which is the best line to send it by? I have the impression, Savannah Steamer from Boston. Please give me by return of mail the address to put on the barrel, or any information that will expedite its reaching you in the best & cheapest way. Have you read, Questions of the Day Nc, in Putnams Series ''The Plantation Negro as a Freeman'' by Philip A. Bruce of Richmond Va. He takes a rather dark view of the future of your people in this country the main feature of which is the growing alienation of the races, and the return of the negro race to its original physical type which he thinks will involve intellectual and moral decadence, and he intimates a growing revulsion between the races and the grim determination of the whites to maintain their political supremacy and if needful thereto by a limitation of the negro franchise. Does it seem to you that there is any real prospect of such a race separation as to create serious civil disturbance? Mr. Bruce admits of a possible deliverance through better education & particularly religious education, but does not seem at all hopeful about it. Do you think Dr Haygood is a thorough Tiered of the negro as well as a wise peacemaker? I have no reason to doubt it but would like to know your view confidentially expressed. Yours very truly, John W. Harding ALS Con. ~ BTW Papers ATT. iPhilip Alexander Bruce (~856-~933) was born in Staunton Hill, Va., graduated from the University of Virginia, and received a law degree from Harvard University. In 1889 he published The Plantation Negro as a Freeman, a white supremacist statement predicting that Negroes would revert to barbarism because they had been freed from paternal slavery. Bruce became a leading historian, researching seventeenth-century Virginia records and recording the history of the New South. In The Rise of the New South (~905) he wrote into history what Henry Grady had earlier offered as myth, that the South had put away its plantation past, entered the industrial era, and solved its race problem. 52 I