The free
Negro leader early arose and his chief characteristic was
intense earnestness and deep feeling on the slavery question.
Freedom became to him a real thing and not a dream. His
religion became darker and more intense, and into his ethics
crept a note of revenge, into his songs a day of reckoning
close at hand. The "Coming of the Lord" swept this side of
Death, and came to be a thing to be hoped for in this day.
Through fugitive slaves and irrepressible discussion this de-
sire for freedom seized the black millions still in bondage,
and became their one ideal of life. The black bards caught
new notes, and sometimes even dared to sing,--
"O Freedom, O Freedom, O Freedom over me!
Before I'll be a slave
I'll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord
And be free."
For fifty years Negro religion thus transformed itself and
identified itself with the dream of Abolition, until that which
was a radical fad in the white North and an anarchistic plot in
the white South had become a religion to the black world.
Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to the
freedman a literal Coming of the Lord.
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