This report was written by William Windom and Henry W. Blair, the two Republicans in the U.S. Senate who were serving on a committee looking at allegations that businesses in northern and western states were trying to lure Black labor away from the South. Since the end of Reconstruction roughly four years earlier, thousands of African Americans had left the South for better conditions in other regions of the United States, a movement known at the time as the “exodus.” Southern planters, unable to keep the labor they needed to harvest crops, accused northern Republicans of misleading Black labor in order to weaken the Democratic Party in the South.