a strange position in which they were. A race despised, degraded,
penniless, ignorant, houseless, homeless, fatherless, childless,
nameless. Husband or wife there was not one in four millions.
Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them
all might lift his hand in a daughter's defence. Uncle and aunt
and cousin, home, family--none of these words had any place in
the freedman's vocabulary. Right he had, in the abstract; in the
concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was still
color-blinded by the past.

The fruit of slavery--its first ripe harvest, gathered with swords
and bloody bayonets, was before the nation which looked ignorantly
on the fruits of the deliverance it had wrought. The North did not
comprehend its work; the South could not comprehend its fate. The
unbound slave looked to the future in dull, wondering hope.

The first step in advance was taken neither by the nation nor by the
freedmen. It was prompted by the voice of conscience, long hushed
and hidden in the master's breast. It was the protest of Christianity
and morality against that which it had witnessed with complacency
for many a generation. All at once it was perceived to be a great
enormity that four millions of Christian people, in a Christian
land, should dwell together without marriage rite or family tie.
While they were slaves, the fact that they might be bought and sold
had hidden this evil from the eye of morality, which had looked
unabashed upon the unlicensed freedom of the quarters and the
enormities of the barracoon. Now all at once it was shocked beyond
expression at the domestic relations of the freedmen.

So they made haste in the first legislative assemblies that met in