ional house had tumbled about former masters and
slaves. The slave race possessed no more and knew no more as freedmen than
they had possessed or known as slaves. Yes, they possessed themselves and
the hard hands which God had given them for their support. But being
landless and moneyless they were dependent for employment on the old
master class. This put them at an immense economic disadvantage as a labor
class on the threshold of their new life of freedom, and in the power of
the old master class. The outlook for the new freedmen under these
circumstances was not propitious. All the same these people, poor and
ignorant and at the mercy of a ruthless employer class, were happy as
children in the delight of their newfound freedom. The sound of their
childlike joy was heard in the land amid the grim desolations of war and
the sullen faces of their old masters. Care free and fear free, in spite
of unfriendly conditions and a threatening outlook, they gave themselves
up to such joy as God has rarely given in the history of the world to four
millions of people. Now no race can pass through such a spiritual
experience without being the better for it. For great happiness like great
suffering operates oftentimes as a moral purifier. Before the overwhelming
fact that they could no longer be bought and sold--that they could no
longer be separated from their loved ones, these simple black folk fell in
transports of gratitude before God, their mighty deliverer, their
everlasting Father. Love was in their mouths and love was in their hearts.
Cheerful they were by nature and hopeful, and gifted withal with an
extraordinary amount of the milk of human kindness. Service was natural
and easy for them, and the cherishing of friends and foes in their need;
but resentfulness and revenge moved them hardly at all during their long
years of bondage. Comparatively few crimes against persons or property had
been recorded against them before emancipation. The few slave
insurrections or attempted slave insurrections were exceptions to the
general tenor of their peaceable disposition and conduct, to the uniform
and singular absence of ill-will, of a spirit of revenge in them as a
race.

This gentle trait was strikingly illustrated during the war of the
rebellion. They had opportunity enough and provocation enough, God knows,
to attack the property and the lives of the defenseless families of their
hard task-masters during those four dreadful year