The color line had ceased to be sectional. In 1900 mobs in New York City and Akron, Ohio, baited black citizens with barbarity little less than that of the worst Southern lynchings. Texas courts the same year affirmed negroes' right to serve as jurymen. After 1900 one noticed in several Southern States a tendency to oust negroes from official connection even with the Republican party, each State organization affecting to be "Lily-White." The Administration seemed to favor this movement by appointing liberal Democrats at the South to federal offices, allying such, in a way, with the Republican cause. This helped make President Roosevelt popular at the South, spite of the criticism with which the press there greeted his entertainment of Booker T. Washington at the White House. When he visited the Exposition at Charleston, December, 1901-May, 1902, he was enthusiastically received. CHAPTER X. THE MEN AND THE ISSUE IN 1896 Early in 1896 it became clear that the dominant issue of the presidential campaign would be the resumption by the United States of silver-dollar free coinage. Agitation for this, hushed only for a moment by the passage of the Bland Act, had been going on ever since demonetization in 1873. The fall in prices, which the new output of gold had not yet begun to arrest; the money stringency since 1893; the insecure, bond-supplied gold reserve, and the repeal of the silver-purchase clause in the Sherman Act combined to produce a wish for increase in the nation's hard-money supply. Had the climax of fervor synchronized with an election day, a free-coinage President might have been elected. Only the Populists were a unit in favoring free coinage. Recent Republican and Democratic platforms had been phrased with Delphic genius to suit the East and West at once. The best known statesmen of both parties had "wobbled" upon the question. The Republican party contained a large element favorable to silver, while the Democratic President, at least, had boldly and steadfastly exerted himself to establish the gold standard. [Illustration: Portrait.] Senator Teller of Colorado. Realignment of forces begot queer alliances between party foes, lasting bitterness between party fellows. Even the Prohibitionists, who held the first convention, were riven into "narrow-gauge" and "broad-gauge," the latter in a rump convention incorporating a free-coinage plank into their creed. If the Republicans kept their ranks closed better than the Democrats, this was largely due to the prominence they gave to protection, attacked by the Wilson-Gorman Act. [Illustration: Portrait.] Senator Cannon.