A topic of constant discussion is the effect of the war so far as the negro is concerned. I have seen the negro in slavery before and during the war and now a freedman for forty years since the war closed and I feel that I am capable of expressing an opinion upon the subject. As a slave he was generally well treated, and was generally contented and happy. He was usually free from care or responsibility, all his wants being provided for by his master. He had a task to perform and the performance of it was exacted of him, sometimes this task was exceedingly light, it was scarcely ever severe. It was natural he should wish to be able to essay or not to essay this task as his humor suggested to him and the wish for this I believe was the principal incentive for freedom to most of the slaves. Very many I believe gave the matter of freedom no consideration and cared nothing about it. When the close of the war brought freedom to the vast body of those who were slaves their reasoning suggested to them as it did to very many of the less informed whites that the war had been fought purely to free the negro. The corollary to this in the mind of the negro was that they were the equal of the whites, and immediately upon the close of the war the teaching inculcated among themselves with greatest assiduity was the matter of equality. During the lapse of forty years however the question of equality has in a measure worked itself out as it always does dependent upon personal and material factors. When persons occupy grades of servants, laborers, mechanics, storekeepers, merchants and professional men the question of color in that all are black will not put them on an equality one with the other and the question of equality is not helped by trying to extend the equalizing so as to put the colored man whatever his condition in life on a level with the white man whatever his condition. This was a struggle so patent in the case of the freedmen immediately after the close of the war that was bound in the course of years to disappear from the hopelessness of it. The result is that from my observation the negro has measurably been bettered after the many years that have elapsed since the war, so that now his deportment and manners are better, he is more honest and he has not deteriorated as a worker and he is getting nearer to the deportment he possessed before his character was disrupted by the harmful teachings of those idealists in the New England States who professed before and during the war to be his only true friends.