Page:The Story of the Jubilee Singers (7th).djvu/23

 and labouring—over four millions of bondmen were suddenly made free. They were homeless, penniless, ignorant, improvident—unprepared in every way for the dangers as well as the duties of freedom. Self-reliance they had never had the opportunity to learn, and, suddenly left to shift for themselves, they were at the mercy of the knaves who were everywhere so ready to cheat them out of their honest earnings. They had been kept all their lives in a school of immorality, and even church membership was no evidence that one was not a thief, a liar, or a libertine. Their former masters were so impoverished by their emancipation, along with the other costs of the war, that they had little ability—and were so exasperated by it that they had usually still less disposition—to help them.

The task of giving these freed slaves a Christian education was laid mainly, therefore, upon the Christian people of the North. It was a missionary work of such magnitude and character as no people was ever called to take up before. Schools were started—even before the close of the first six months of the war—in little cabins, in army tents, in unfloored log chapels, in abandoned slave marts, under the open sky. Hundreds of Northern ladies, many of them from homes of luxury and culture, came to teach these degraded people the A B C's of the spelling-book and of Christian citizenship.

The work was full of discomforts, difficulties, and danger. By the varying fortunes of war the schools were often broken up, and the teachers forced to seek safety for their lives in flight. Overworked, unable