This deliverer, this brother, believed in law, the invisibility and incomprehensibility of which appealed to the superstition of the emancipated slaves. This northern brother had struggled desperately with the tyrant, poured out his treasure and shed his blood without stint in the conflict; and having conquered, stood with weapons in either hand, to command the peace in the name of this invisible and incomprehensible law; while the religious, industrial, and educational influences which he summoned from his northern home, coming up while yet the atmosphere was tremulous with the sounds of expiring conflict, brought food for hungry bodies, intellects and souls; healing for lacerated spirits; and the vesture of a better civilization for the nakedness of the black, and the mail-chafed form of the white.
Women who pressed to the battle-front with a cup of water for the lips of the dying, and a pillow for the wounded head that lay upon the bloody sward, from hearts baptized to self-sacrifice, and pens lit with the zeal of the Nazarene, sent white-winged, burning messages all over the news-reading North; and while from thousands of homes there, brave men came with flaunting flags, and beating drums, and booming cannons, singing as they marched:
“We are coming, Father Abr’am,
Three hundred thousand more,”
and
“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree.”
(and voluntarily broke that pledge,) from out those same homes stole a procession of women, not clandestinely, not timidly, but brave of soul and strong of heart and inflexible of purpose, though without ostentation. The bible and spelling-book were their only weapons, and their song was of “the mercies of the Lord forever,” and their “trust under the feathers of His wings!” “Neither the terror by night,” “the arrow by day,” “the pestilence in darkness,” nor “destruction at noon,” nor the “thousand falling on their right hand,” and on their left, could make them afraid; “because they had made the Lord their strength, even the Most High their refuge.” They went forth to “tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon.” Scorn, insult, slander, poverty, loneliness, sickness and death, they trampled under their feet; for “through the work of the Lord were they made glad,” and they “triumphed in the work of His hands.”
Away on in the Elysian fields of heaven, when the cycles of eternity shall have encircled the universe, and rolled back upon their track in such repeated and intricate mazes as only the Infinite mind can trace, they shall receive from the lips of the ransomed of all nations, “the blessing of those once ready to perish”; and the blessed assurance that the torch they lit in the freedman’s hut, lit a beacon that illumined the world.
If the South is saved to civilization, its chief human savior was “the nigger school-teacher.”
To these evidences of kindly interest on the part of the Northern people, and the influence of, and confidence implied in the immediate presence of feminine representatives of the best and most peaceable element of the North, certainly not less is due than to the natural timidity of the race, or their great faith in ultimate Divine deliverance, which needed intelligent direction.