character which made him
a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength
degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of
the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The
Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered
conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining
patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great
Day when He should lead His dark children home,--this became his
comforting dream. His preacher repeated the prophecy, and his bards
sang,--

"Children, we all shall be free
When the Lord shall appear!"

This deep religious fatalism, painted so beautifully in "Uncle Tom,"
came soon to breed, as all fatalistic faiths will, the sensualist side
by side with the martyr. Under the lax moral life of the plantation,
where marriage was a farce, laziness a virtue, and property a theft, a
religion of resignation and submission degenerated easily, in less
strenuous minds, into a philosophy of indulgence and crime. Many of
the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed
in this period of the slave's ethical growth. Here it was that the
Home was ruined under the very shadow of the Church, white and black;
here habits of shiftlessness took root, and sullen hopelessness
replaced hopeful strife.

With the beginning of the abolition movement and the gradual growth of
a class of free Negroes came a change. We often neglect the influence
of the freedman before the war, because of the paucity of his numbers
and the small weight he had in the history of the nation. But we must
not forget that his chief influence was internal,--was exerted on the
black world; and that there he was the ethical and social leader.
Huddled as he was in a few centres like Philadelphia, New York, and New
Orleans, the masses of the freedmen sank into poverty and listlessness;
but not all of them. The free Negro leader early arose and his chief
characteristic was intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery
question. Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics crept a
note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning close at hand. The
"Coming of the Lord" swept this side of Death, and came to be a thing
to be hoped for in this day. Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible
discussion this desire for freedom seized the bla