he citation of authorities, I would find myself challenged by a
large number of critics. Moreover I have felt it would be almost cruel
to mutilate some of the very rare old documents that shed such
peerless light upon the subject in hand.

I have brought the first volume down to the close of the eighteenth
century, detailing the great struggle through which the slavery
problem passed. I have given as fair an idea of the debate on this
question, in the convention that framed the Constitution, as possible.
It was then and there that the hydra of slavery struck its fangs into
the Constitution; and, once inoculated with the poison of the monster,
the government was only able to purify itself in the flames of a great
civil war.

The second volume opens with the present century, and closes with the
year 1880. Unable to destroy slavery by constitutional law, the best
thought and effort of this period were directed against the extension
of the evil into the territory beyond the Ohio, Mississippi, and
Missouri rivers. But having placed three-fifths of the slave
population under the Constitution, having pledged the Constitution to
the protection of slave property, it required an almost superhuman
effort to confine the evil to one section of the country. Like a
loathsome disease it spread itself over the body politic until our
nation became the eyesore of the age, and a byword among the nations
of the world. The time came when our beloved country had to submit to
heroic treatment, and the cancer of slavery was removed by the sword.

In giving an account of the _Anti-Slavery Agitation Movement_, I have
found myself able to deal briefly with methods and results only. I
have striven to honor all the multifarious measures adopted to save
the Negro and the Nation. I have not attempted to write a history of
the Anti-Slavery Movement. Many noble men and women have not even been
mentioned. It should not be forgotten that this is a history of the
Negro race; and as such I have not run into the topic discussed by the
late Henry Wilson in his "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power."

In discussing the problem of the rendition of fugitive slaves by the
Union army, I have given the facts with temperate and honest
criticism. And, in recounting the sufferings Negro troops endured as
prisoners of war in the hands of the Rebels, I have avoided any spirit
of bitterness. A great deal of the material on the war I purchased
from the MS. library of Mr.