By and by began the fierce struggle between slavery and freedom. The slaves were sent from place to place, to prevent their escape to the Union army. Albert wandered about with them—to Tennessee, to Texas, to Georgia—till the close of the war found him back in Tennessee, and near the city of Nashville. Here he picked up his letters, and, at the age of fourteen, learned to read. In 1869, he went to a school taught by one of the first student teachers from Fisk University, who encouraged him to look to something higher than the spelling-book and reader.
In 1870 he entered that institution. Then began the long, hard struggle for an education. For two years he groomed horses and did housework. For two years more he took care of a drunken young man, the son of wealthy parents in Nashville; and often might Albert have been seen with his Greek or Latin book, far into the night, sitting in some saloon or grocery, waiting for the young man, whose aged mother had made him promise that he would never leave her son in a saloon at night. Poor, awkward, and dressed out of missionary barrels, often the recipient of student aid, sometimes well-nigh disheartened, but always pressing on; once bought off by Mr. Spence for the sum of ten dollars, when his father wanted him to work in the field, he toiled slowly on, step by step, winning honor and respect, and loved by his teachers as, perhaps, few students of Fisk University were ever loved.
Always good in scholarship, always among the first of his class, in nine years he passed from the alphabet to within three mouths of a college diploma.
He was converted in 1872, and at once gave himself to the ministry. In common with most students of Fisk University, he had thought, though not very definitely, of missionary work in Africa.
On the 1st day of February, there came a call for two men for the Mendi Mission. Albert had his plans. He hoped to graduate from college, a thing few colored youths have attained. He had two orphan brothers and a little sister, to whom he purposed to give an education and Christian training. Perhaps he had also his ambitions in the ministry, where educated colored men will soon rise so high; but he laid them all aside when God called, and with a fellow-student, whose soul was mightily stirred by that call, he said, “Here am I, Lord, send me.” He said, “How I should feel, to have God call, and I not be ready!”
His last request to the students of Fisk University was that they would make this its motto:
“Her sons and her daughters are ever on the altar.”
To-day Albert Miller is on the shores of Africa. The prayers, the tears, the affections of the institution, are with him. The prayers of the Christian heart of America will be with him, and his companions, in that distant land. Did not God, who chose Abraham and David, and Paul and Luther, choose him for such a time as this, and make all the years of his slavery—his privations, and his discipline—but the means to fit him for this great work of carrying the Gospel to Africa?