day after day to earn at once their living and the money for this
fee, and when they had procured it walked a score of miles in order
that they might be "registered," and, for the brief period that
remained to them of life, know that the law had sanctioned the
relation which years of love and suffering had sanctified. It was
the first act of freedom, the first step of legal recognition or
manly responsibility! It was a proud hour and a proud fact for the
race which had so long been bowed in thralldom and forbidden even
the most common though the holiest of God's ordinances. What the
law had taken little by little, as the science of Christian slavery
grew up under the brutality of our legal progress, the law returned
in bulk. It was the first seal which was put on the slave's
manhood--the first step upward from the brutishness of another's
possession to the glory of independence. The race felt its importance
as did no one else at that time. By hundreds and thousands they
crowded the places appointed, to accept the honor offered to their
posterity, and thereby unwittingly conferred undying honor upon
themselves. Few indeed were the unworthy ones who evaded the sacred
responsibility thus laid upon them, and left their offspring to
remain under the badge of shame. When carefully looked at it was
but a scant cure, and threw the responsibility of illegitimacy
where it did not belong, but it was a mighty step nevertheless.
The distance from zero to unity is always infinity.

The county clerk in and for the county of Horsford sat behind
the low wooden railing which he had been compelled to put across
his office to protect him from the too near approach of those who
crowded to this fountain of rehabilitating honor that had recently
been opened therein. Unused to anything beyond the plantation on
which they had been reared, the temple of justice was as strange