Читать книгу The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama: Their Leaders and Their Work онлайн

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They fall to dreaming: Contending armies are seen in battle, and the one favorable to the liberty of the slave is seen to prevail. Old trees appear to wither and disappear before trees of new sort.

The war cloud bursts and the slave mingles his prayers with the roar of the booming cannon, tarrying on his knees while the American soldiery contend in mortal strife. It was understood to mean liberty. At last the deadly struggle ceased, and emancipation was declared. It was only the dawning, and therefore the light was dim.

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One of the saddest mistakes of the slave was, that he thought so much of the pleasures of freedom and so little of its weighty obligations. To him, freedom meant mansions, lands, teams, money, position, educated sons and refined daughters, with the liberty to go and to act as he pleased. If he might have burdened his mind with thoughts of his sore destitution of heart, of intellect, of purse; if he might have thought of his poverty as to skill in the arts, sciences and professions of life, as to social status, as to domestic relations, as to opportunities to succeed in a wrestle for life by the side of the victorious white man—if he might have seen that to make himself a strong manhood was his first and his most important duty—if his mind might have been full of these thoughts, it had been a thousand fold better for him. But, as his mind was on pleasures, he was disappointed when they proved only phantoms, and hence the bud of liberty was bitter.