nal catastrophe clearly anticipated what the end
would be. When they gathered at their nocturnal meetings there was
unwonted light in their eyes; a spirit of hope and cheerfulness such as
they had never known before gave new life to their hymns, which had too
often been sad or weird; their feelings became irrepressible. There were
signs and tokens of various kinds which the working slaves well
understood, whatever this child of a slave-mother may have made of them.
There was something in the air which told that something uncommon was
coming--"a sound of going in the tops of the mulberry trees," as it
were, which betokened that the great day of freedom had come. Straggling
soldiers, who had broken away from the Confederate Army, had a doleful
story to tell of disaster and collapse. Then, besides, the inmates of
the great house were thinking of how best they could secure their
valuables if the invaders actually came. Then, on the first Sunday of
April 1865, the catastrophe may be said to have really come. On that day
vast quantities of stores were burned at Richmond; during the night many
a slave-owner stole away, and in the early morning numbers who had been
slaves found themselves no longer in bondage when they greeted the
regiments of the Northern Army.

Booker Washington testifies to the wild excess of joy with which the
slaves on all the plantations accepted the freedom which had come to
them in this remarkable, but no doubt providential, way. For the moment
they took no account of the future; they were altogether intoxicated
while trying to estimate the reality of that new condition in which they
found themselves--that inestimable blessing about which their
forefathers had prayed through long and weary generations. The thing
seemed to be too good to be true, and yet it was actually with them--it
was their own blissful possession!

Then, as was inevitable, human nature being what it is, there came a
somewhat strong reaction to this outburst of feeling and irrepressible
excitement. What about the future? Practically, a whole nation of
something like 4,000,000 persons had suddenly been set free, severed
from their employment and their masters, who in their way had looked
after them. Those masters had been sorely reduced by the war; many
members of the great houses had been killed or wounded. What was to
become of those millions of coloured people who had never come in
contact with the outer world, who, with a few exce