fearless Lovejoys, our own majestic Frederick Douglass with his tongue of flame, and others equally energetic and equally in earnest. God had given to these men the fires of genius. It took the cause of human liberty to arouse them from their slumbers. Great events make great men.

From 1850 to 1860 the country was all aflame with the slavery agitation. The institution itself was complete master in the halls of national legislation. It prostituted statesmen, and by the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court of the United States “clothed it with the ample garments of judicial respectability.” Three quarters of a century after the fathers of the country had met in Convention “for the purpose of forming a more perfect union,” the great evil slavery brought that union to the very verge of dissolution. The prophesy of Jefferson that slavery would be the rock on which the country would eventually split was fulfilled and the states were in the throes of a Civil War.

There are evils so vast and radical that nothing short of a bloody revolution can be found sufficient to extirpate them. So the eradication of the monstrous system that held four millions of human beings in bondage—a vast property estimated in value at from twelve to fifteen hundred million dollars—was accomplished only by a terrible, devastating war—the court of last resort. From it there was no appeal.

In the beginning of the struggle few believed that the liberation of the slaves would be the outcome. And if it had not been for the obstinate perversity of the South the two sections of the country might have reached an agreement perpetuating slavery in the states in which it then existed and simply forbidding its extension into new territory. The North was perfectly willing that there should be a rehabilitation of the country with southern laws and southern institutions reacknowledged in their old form. But God was in this contest as well as man. He willed it otherwise. The war became so desperate that President Lincoln was forced to issue the Emancipation Proclamation as an imperative measure of self-defense. He did what he had always desired to do, but what he had been kept from doing by northern public opinion—an opinion which the exigencies of the situation had now revolutionized.

This act was soon followed by the arming of colored men for duty as soldiers. No men ever sought more eagerly to fight for any cause than did the black men for the freedom which the Emancipation Proclamation promised. When the opportunity was given them to enlist, they joyfully accepted it, and as the loyal white men 

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