Page:From servitude to service; (IA fromservitudetos00ogde).pdf/19

As the writer of the first chapter of this book on Southern Institutions, it devolves upon me, perhaps, more than upon those who are to follow, to lay the basis and background, of which each of the institutions treated is but a special emergence. They are the outcome of that patriotic and humanitarian movement, which blotted out the foul stain of slavery from our national escutcheon, wrote the last three Amendments to the Federal Constitution, and made that document a charter of liberty, indeed.

When the smoke of war had blown away, when the cessation of strife proclaimed the end of the great American conflict, when "the war drum throbbed no longer, and the battle flags were furled," there emerged from the wreck and ruin of war four millions of human chattels, who were transformed, as if by magic, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from slavery to freedom, from bondage to liberty, from death unto life. These people were absolutely ignorant and destitute. They had not tasted of the tree of knowledge which is the tree of good and evil. This