The history of the American Negro differs very widely from that of any people whose life-story has been told; and when it shall come to be known and studied will open an entirely new view of experience. In it we shall be able to see what has never before been discovered in history; to wit: the absolute beginning of a people. Brought to these shores by the ship-load as freight, and sold as merchandise; entirely broken away from the tribes, races, or nations of their native land; recognized only, as African slaves, and forbidden all movement looking toward organic life; deprived of even the right of family or of marriage, and corrupted in the most shameless manner by their powerful and licentious oppressors--it is from this heterogeneous protoplasm that the American Negro has been developed. The foundation from which he sprang had been laid by piecemeal as the slave ships made their annual deposits of cargoes brought from different points on the West Coast, and basely corrupted as is only too well known; yet out of it has grown, within less than three hundred years, an organic people. Grandfathers, and great-grandfathers are among them; and personal acquaintance is exceedingly wide. In the face of slavery and against its teaching and its power, overcoming the seduction of the master class, and the coarse and brutal corruptions of the baser overseer class, the African slave persistently strove to clothe himself with the habiliments of civilization, and so prepared himself for social organization that as soon as the hindrances were removed, this vast people almost immediately set themselves in families; and for over thirty years they have been busily engaged hunting up the lost roots of their family trees. We know the pit whence the Afro-American race was dug, the rock whence he was hewn; he was born here on this soil, from a people who in the classic language of the Hebrew prophet, could be described as, No People.