In the spring of 1879 thousands of colored people, unable longer to endure the intolerable hardships, injustice, and suffering inflicted upon them by a class of Democrats in the South, had, in utter despair, fled panic-stricken from their homes and sought protection among strangers in a strange land. Homeless, penniless, and in rags, these poor people were thronging the wharves of Saint Louis, crowding the steamers on the Mississippi River, and in pitiable destitution throwing themselves upon the charity of Kansas. Thousands more were congregating along the banks of the Mississippi River, hailing the passing steamers, and imploring them for a passage to the land of freedom, where their rights of citizens were respected and honest toil rewarded by honest compensation. The newspapers were filled with accounts of their destitution, and the very air was burdened with the cry of distress from a class of American citizens flying from persecutions which they could not longer endure. Their piteous tales of outrage, suffering and wrong touched the hearts of the more fortunate members of their race in the North and West, and aid societies, designed to afford temporary relief, and composed largely, almost wholly, of colored people, were organized in Washington, Saint Louis, Topeka, and in various other places. That they were organized to induce migration for political purposes, or to aid or to encourage these people to leave their homes for any purpose, or that they ever contributed one dollar to that end, is utterly untrue, and there is absolutely nothing in the testimony to sustain such a charge. Their purposes and objects were purely charitable. They found a race of wretched miserable people flying from oppression and wrong, and they sought to relieve their distress. The refugees were hungry, and they fed them: in rags, and they clothed them; homeless, and they sheltered them; destitute, and they found employment for them--only this and nothing more. The real origin of the exodus movement and the organizations at the South which have promoted it are very clearly stated by the witnesses who have been most active in regard to it. Henry Adams, of Shreveport, Louisiana, an uneducated colored laborer, but a man of very unusual natural abilities, and, so far as the committee could learn, entirely reliable and truthful, states that he entered the United States Army in 1866 and remained in it until 1869; that when he left the Army he returned to his former home at Shreveport, and, finding the condition of his race intolerable, he and a number of other men who had also been in the Army set themselves to work to better the condition of their people. In 1870-- He says--