ifteenth Amendment gave
him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible sign of
freedom, he now regarded as the chief means of gaining and perfecting
the liberty with which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had
not votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes enfranchised
the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a power that had done all this?
A million black men started with renewed zeal to vote themselves
into the kingdom. The decade fled away,--a decade containing, to the
freedman's mind, nothing but suppressed votes, stuffed ballot-boxes, and
election outrages that nullified his vaunted right of suffrage. And yet
that decade from 1875 to 1885 held another powerful movement, the rise
of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night
after a clouded day. It was the ideal of "book-learning;" the curiosity,
born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the
cabalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Mission
and night schools began in the smoke of battle, ran the gauntlet of
reconstruction, and at last developed into permanent foundations. Here
at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan;
longer than the highway of emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but
straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily, doggedly;
only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty
minds, the dull understandings of the dark pupils of these schools know
how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn. It was weary
work. The cold statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and
there, noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some one
had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever dark, the mists
were often cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however,
the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but
flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection
and self-examination; it changed the child of emancipation to the youth
with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. In
those sombre forests of his striving his own soul rose before him, and
he saw himself,--darkly as through a veil; and yet he saw in himself
some faint revelation of his power, of his mission. He began to have a
dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be hi