“None of my ancestors were owned in slavery, so far as my knowledge goes. On my mother’s side I come from German and English stock. My maternal grandfather, the son of a white indentured female servant by a colored man, was born at Bedford, Pennsylvania, about the year 1758. My maternal grandmother was a white German woman, born in 1770, and brought up at Hagerstown, Maryland. This branch of my ancestry emigrated to Ohio in 1792; and settled near the town of Marietta, where my mother was born in 1812. On the paternal side my grandparents, who were of mixed blood, were Virginians by birth. My father, who was born in 1808, near Moorfield, in Hardy County, removed to Ohio before attaining his majority. I was born on a farm, in a log cabin, on the fourth day of May, 1843, in Jackson Township, Pickaway County, Ohio.”[266] After reciting the recollections of his youth, his father’s active interest concerning, and his own sympathy for, the “Underground railroad”, and his efforts to educate himself, Thomas asserts that at the outbreak of hostilities he tendered his services in 1861 to the Government, but was refused admission to the army on account of color. In a civil capacity, however, he entered the 42d. Ohio Infantry Regiment, and— “was in the Big Sandy campaign with General Garfield, and during the summer of 1863, with the Union forces at Cumberland Gap, Tennessee.” In the fall of that year he joined the 95th. regiment, with which he remained, until the capture of Vicksburg, when, returning to Ohio, he enlisted in the 5th United States colored troops, and was appointed sergeant, and after service in the Department of the James, was in the assault on Fort Fisher, North Carolina, and lost an arm in the capture of the city of Wilmington. Going South to teach, he took up his residence first in Georgia, later in Newberry, South Carolina, in 1873, and was appointed a trial justice. In 1876 he was elected a member of the legislature, and after the fall of the radical governments of the South, “gave up the practice of law and withdrew from active participation in politics” to devote his attention to the educational advancement of the freedmen, in pursuit of which, he “visited every Southern State and community.”[267] Certainly such a one would seem admirably equipped for the task of discussing most interestingly and instructively the Negro question, as a perusal of his book clearly indicates. Why then, is the book not more popular in the North, where is to be found the great reading public of the United States?