The average negro obeys, literally obeys, the divine instruction to take no thought for the morrow.  If he has a good dinner in the oven he is apt to forget for the time being that there is such a meal as supper, and he certainly does not give even a passing thought to the fact that if he has no breakfast in the morning he will be “powerfu’ hungry.”  This indifference as to the future robbed slavery of much of its hardship, and although every one condemns the idea in the abstract, there are many humane men and women who do not think the colored man suffered half as much as has so often and so emphatically been stated.

Abolition was advocated with much earnestness for many years prior to Lincoln’s famous emancipation proclamation.  The agitation first took tangible shape during the administration of General Jackson, a man who received more hero worship than has fallen to the lot of any of his successors.  To a zealous, if perhaps bigoted, Quaker belongs the credit of having started the work, by founding a newspaper, which he called the “Genius of Universal Emancipation.”  William Lloyd Garrison, subsequently with “The Liberator,” was connected with this journal, and in the first issue he announced as his programme, war to the death against slavery in every form.  “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard,” was the announcement with which he opened the campaign, which he subsequently carried on with more conspicuous vigor than success.

Garrison handled the question of the relation between the white and colored people of the country without gloves, and his very outspoken language occasionally got him into trouble.  The people who supported him were known as Abolitionists, a name which even at that early date conjured up hard feeling, and divided household against household, and family against family.  Among these Garrison was regarded as a hero, and to some extent as a martyr, while the bitterness of his invective earned for him the title of fanatic and crank from the thousands who disagreed with him, and who thought he was advocating legislation in advance of public sentiment.

The debates of the days of which we are speaking were full of interest.  Many of the arguments advanced teemed with force.  The Abolitionists denounced the Republic for inconsistency, in declaring that all men were equal, and then keeping 3,000,000 colored people in enforced subjection.  In reply the Bible was freely quoted in defense of slavery, and the fight was taken up by ministers of religion with much zeal.  It was not, by any means, a sectional question at that time.  While the slaves were owned by Southern planters and landed proprietors, they were purchased and kept on borrowed capital, and many of the men in the North, who were supposed to sympathize with the Abolitionists, were as much interested in the perpetuation of slavery as those who actually owned the slaves themselves.