The good commonwealth of Mississippi was in a state of upheaval. A peaceable revolution was being attempted there which would have changed the essential nature and purpose of the State government. Incited by the wordy eloquence of a provincial governor, with a few scraps of statistics gone mad, good men, honest men, men of intelligence were seriously considering the proposition to so amend the State constitution as to put upon the negro in his ignorance and poverty the whole burden of his own education—by a division of the school fund between the races in proportion to the taxes each paid to the State. This reactionary and truly astonishing proposition of Governor Wordyfellow was commonly known as the Wordyfellow Idea. It was giving great concern to the sober statesmanship of the entire nation, North and South—indeed greater concern to the thoughtful men of the South who realized its momentous import, its far-reaching effect upon Southern white people, than to the thoughtful outsiders who viewed it philosophically as having a speculative interest but no actual part in its settlement or effects. The proposition to so divide the school funds indeed found its most violent and active opposition, as it found its strongest advocates, not only among the men of the South but even in the very State of Mississippi itself. The fact soon developed that this was to be the greatest political battle that was to be fought concerning the negro. All prior conflicts had been white man against negro. This was white man against white man, with the negro as an interested onlooker. The lines were drawn roughly with the church, the schools and the independent press allied against the politicians, the political press and the less intelligent citizenship. Notable individual exceptions there were to this alignment—which all men remember—but the line of cleavage, taking it by and large, was as stated. Though the matter of an actual constitutional revision was presented as yet only to the people of Mississippi, the battle was being waged in serious purpose to a no less actual finish in every State from the Potomac to the Rio Grande. It was into this situation, fraught with dire possibilities of course, but full of promise to the negro’s friends, that the new President projected his impulsive and forceful personality. Anxious as always to be in the fight and leader in the fight, he set about to devise some plan for helping along the black man’s cause. That he might do this more intelligently he conferred often with his most trusted advisers.