section of the country, carried out to some extent among themselves that portion of the Declaration of Independence touching the equal creation and inalienable rights of man. The ten millions forming the other section consisted in nearly equal portions of two races—one Anglo-Saxon, the other African; one master, the other slave; one the descendants of voluntary emigrants who came hither seeking happiness and a broader freedom; the other deriving their blood from forced emigrants who came to the shores of America and were sold as chattels.

This condition developed the problem which has harassed the country for more than a hundred years. It raised the question which could be answered only in one way, and that was that such an experiment in government with two such conflicting elements could not succeed. Abraham Lincoln answered it, when he said: “Our country cannot exist half slave and half free.” The thoughtful men of the nation saw the cloud on the horizon, when it was no bigger than a man’s hand. They endeavored to ward off the storm of which it was the precursor, but they were not equal to the task. It grew and grew and became darker and darker, until it finally burst into a tempest, destructive of life and treasure beyond the imagination of man. But this storm was worth all the sacrifice which our country was called upon to suffer, for it carried before it slavery and all its horrors. That glorious storm of shot and shell was sent by the Almighty as a punishment for our country’s greatest crime. It made it possible for us to assemble here tonight as a free people.

Those who associate the movement for the freedom of the Negro only with the northern section of our country forget that in Tennessee the first anti-slavery paper was published, and that in the early years of the nineteenth century it was far safer to deliver a speech against slavery in East Tennessee than in any part of the North. In Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, George Mason and George Wythe, all Virginians, the cause of freedom found uncompromising advocates. It was through the influence of these men that the first Congress of the colonies in 1774 adopted unanimously a covenant against slavery. Thomas Jefferson wrote that portion of the ordinance before the Continental Congress in 1784 which declared for the freedom of the Negro in all territory to be ceded to the new Union by the original states. Unfortunately this section of the resolution was lost, because a delegate from the state of New Jersey, who was in favor of it, was not in his place in Congress when the vote was taken.

Those of us who have studied the passing and conflicting 

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