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Elizabeth Oakes Smith Collection, Accession 8326, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library
Deposit [ 1963 Dec 17 ] 1966 Aug 12
Funded in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities
[Says she is recovering from illness; longs for snow while suffering through North Carolina weather; tells him that [Appleton] is clearing woods and trying to repair the yacht in which he was almost wrecked; hopes to escape the fevers next autumn by going away; says she has been elected "Worthy Chief Templar" by the local lodge and she is also superintendent of the Sunday School; describes poverty of the local people; the flag at the lodge is at half-mast because of Vice President Henry Wilson 's death; talks about the mischief done by Northern scalawags to the colored people; feels that the colored are seeing through it all; stresses that the colored are in need of schools and instruction of every kind; she and her group are enrolling coloreds in their own lodges; believes that the Negroes are unwilling to work and do so only when driven by necessity.]
[Adds to her earlier letter regarding colored people in her vicinity; claims the coloreds are not persecuted by the whites and that they prefer to live close to their old masters; gives examples to prove that the coloreds prefer slavery to liberation; believes and gives examples that because of their tropical blood, coloreds are averse to toil and work only by necessity; tells him that the white lodges are unwilling to accept the coloreds, who prefer to be among themselves; the Grand Templars have helped to install coloreds into lodges of their own and are not opposed to colored lodges as long as separation is maintained; says that temperance lodges have sprung up all over North Carolina , South Carolina , Georgia , Kentucky , and Virginia and have tens of thousands of members who do "grand Work" for the colored men like going to them as speakers, etc.; explains that she thought that this clarification of her previous letter was necessary.]