Slavery was predominant. Like Apollyon in Pilgrim's Progress, it
"straddled over the whole breadth of the way." Church and state, press
and pulpit, business interests, literature, and fashion were prostrate at
its feet. Our convention, with few exceptions, was composed of men
without influence or position, poor and little known, strong only in
their convictions and faith in the justice of their cause. To onlookers
our endeavor to undo the evil work of two centuries and convert a nation
to the "great renunciation" involved in emancipation must have seemed
absurd in the last degree. Our voices in such an atmosphere found no
echo. We could look for no response but laughs of derision or the
missiles of a mob.

But we felt that we had the strength of truth on our side; we were right,
and all the world about us was wrong. We had faith, hope, and
enthusiasm, and did our work, nothing doubting, amidst a generation who
first despised and then feared and hated us. For myself I have never
ceased to be grateful to the Divine Providence for the privilege of
taking a part in that work.

And now for more than twenty years we have had a free country. No slave
treads its soil. The anticipated dangerous consequences of complete
emancipation have not been felt. The emancipated class, as a whole, have
done wisely, and well under circumstances of peculiar difficulty. The
masters have learned that cotton can be raised better by free than by
slave labor, and nobody now wishes a return to slave-holding. Sectional
prejudices are subsiding, the bitterness of the civil war is slowly
passing away. We are beginning to feel that we are one people, with no
really clashing interests, and none more truly rejoice in the growing
prosperity of the South than the old abolitionists, who hated slavery as
a curse to the master as well as to the slave.