d.
The degradation of the African must have been otherwise caused than
by natural inferiority."

It was such strong women that laid the foundations of the great Negro
church of today, with its five million members and ninety millions of
dollars in property. One of the early mothers of the church, Mary Still,
writes thus quaintly, in the forties:

"When we were as castouts and spurned from the large churches,
driven from our knees, pointed at by the proud, neglected by the
careless, without a place of worship, Allen, faithful to the
heavenly calling, came forward and laid the foundation of this
connection. The women, like the women at the sepulcher, were early
to aid in laying the foundation of the temple and in helping to
carry up the noble structure and in the name of their God set up
their banner; most of our aged mothers are gone from this to a
better state of things. Yet some linger still on their staves,
watching with intense interest the ark as it moves over the
tempestuous waves of opposition and ignorance....

"But the labors of these women stopped not here, for they knew well
that they were subject to affliction and death. For the purpose of
mutual aid, they banded themselves together in society capacity,
that they might be better able to administer to each others'
sufferings and to soften their own pillows. So we find the females
in the early history of the church abounding in good works and in
acts of true benevolence."

From such spiritual ancestry came two striking figures of
war-time,--Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth.

For eight or ten years previous to the breaking out of the Civil War,
Harriet Tubman was a constant attendant at anti-slavery conventions,
lectures, and other meetings; she was a black woman of medium size,
smiling countenance, with her upper front teeth gone, attired in coarse
but neat clothes, and carrying always an old-fashioned reticule at her
side. Usually as soon as she sat down she would drop off in sound sleep.

She was born a slave in Maryland, in 1820, bore the marks of the lash on
her flesh; and had been made partially deaf, and perhaps to some degree
mentally unbalanced by a blow on the head in childhood. Yet she was one
of the most important agents of the Underground Railroad and a leader of
fugitive slaves. She ran away in 1849 and went to Boston in 1854, where
she was