LITMIR.BIZ

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      Me from delights to sever,

      Me to torture, me to task?

      Fleecy locks and dark complexion

      Cannot forfeit nature's claim;

      Skins may differ, but affection

      Dwells in white and black the same.

      Time passed on, and Tom and I, and Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland, still continued to occupy the same house. The Lord blessed the entire household, and none of us had ever cause to regret the steps we had taken and carried out with such speed. We enlisted heart and soul in the grand anti-slavery movement, and blew the bellows with all our might to help on the good cause of liberty and perfect freedom. The border ruffians in Kansas had been beaten back into the South, which was the first open fight between the two high contending parties. That put the angry South in no good humor. Like an ungovernable, high-strung virago, her temper was up, and she threatened secession, and dreamed of extending a new slave empire around the Gulf of Mexico. The abolitionists of the North were unyielding, and the two sections were drifting into war.

      In the midst of so much combustion and heated temper, it would have been remarkable, indeed, if there had been no "flame" that burst out here or there. In all impending struggles and revolutions there is always someone who voices the pent-up feelings of one party or the other, and sometimes of both. On the impulse of the moment, as it were by an act of inspiration, somebody steps out of the ranks, and becomes the leader on his side. The man who led the way on the part of the anti-slavery party, was the famous John Brown, who figured so largely in Kansas, and in 1859 seized upon the United States Arsenal at Harper's Ferry, in Virginia, while he was leading on a handful of white and colored men for the purpose of effecting a general rising of the slaves throughout the South. But the Virginians came pouring down upon him and his little band. Some were killed and wounded; others were missing, and John Brown himself and a few of his followers were hung. Still, John Brown was in the right. He was simply an outgrowth of the times. He regarded the slaves as prisoners, whom it was the duty of any man to set at liberty. They or their forefathers, at least, had been taken captive in Africa, and it – that is, American slavery – was the crying scandal of the entire Christian world. John Brown was one of the abolitionists of the North, and they were responsible for his actions. But the South was alarmed all over its dark domain. From Mason and Dixon's Line to the Rio Grande the news of John Brown's raid flew like wildfire, and the violent temper of the South grew to a white heat. And all the world – both at home and abroad – remarked,

      "If one single spark like this can raise such a conflagration, what shall we have when the anti-slavery party shall set their foot into the whole 'business' on a grand scale? If one man at Harper's Ferry can effect such a disturbance, what will ensue when the great overshadowing North will arise in her might, and call for a settlement of the whole question in favor of the oppressed African?"

      The war, indeed, was now nearer than before. The South would listen to no compromise nor reason of any kind. The haughty Southern lords would brook no interference. The Northern intruders who touched her "peculiar institution" touched "the apple of her eye." And now for war!

      The war came at last, and South Carolina was the state that struck the first blow. Then one state seceded after another, and they set up the "Southern Confederacy," with slavery as its corner-stone. Then the wildest and most tremendous excitement spread over all the great North, and the interest reached even the ends of the earth. For the time being, so great was the national delirium that the great masses of the population seemed to have completely forgotten the glorious cause of abolitionism, the grand doings of the underground railroad, and even the eternal decree of the Most High God that one man should not own property in another. But all the same the deep and thoughtful minds of all thorough-going Christians all over the world could see that this war should not close till every slave was set free. It was Pharaoh and the captive Israelites over again, "Let my people go, that they may serve me."

      That which threw the great North into such a state of excitement and alarm was not the slave question at all. The people were concerned over the breaking up of this great united republic, because the establishment of the Southern Confederacy cut the nation in two, and took away from us the middle and lower Mississippi. If the hair is the glory of a woman, as Paul says, the Mississippi river is the glory of the United States. Uncle Sam, therefore, even yet did all he could to induce the seceded states to come home again, and assured them in every possible way that not a finger should be laid upon their slaves, but that they should keep them all! But the haughty South had made up her mind to set up house-keeping for herself, and she thought she could do so even if the worst came to the worst. She had been getting ready for secession for fifty years, and now the crisis had come.

      There did not appear to be the slightest idea on either side that more than four years would elapse before the dreadful business would be settled. A call was made by President Lincoln for seventy-five thousand men to serve for three months, but a far greater number offered themselves. There were thousands, if not millions, of people who believed that the small affair would be all over in a very little while, and nothing was talked of but marching to Richmond, and winding things up. Then the rebellious leaders would return to their duties, slavery would go on as before, and the Mississippi river would once more flow through our glorious republic – one and undivided, from the headwaters of the same to the Gulf of Mexico.

      It never seemed to enter the minds of the great masses of the people then that the South was as terribly in earnest as she certainly was, nor how well-trained she was and ready for the fray. The skill of her leaders, the intrepidity of her sons, and fighting upon her own soil, were lost sight of to a very great extent in the wild delirium that seized on the great Northern heart over the breaking up of the Union. It did not seem to strike the national mind at the time that this was a war sent by God for the extirpation of slavery, and as an answer to the prayers of the oppressed millions in the South for freedom, and for the treatment of human beings. It did not then occur to the minds of the North that a day would come after nearly two years' indecisive fighting, when military necessity would compel the Federal government to free the slave by Act of Congress, and call upon him "to come to the help of the Lord against the mighty," and Shakespeare

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