They were, for the most part, humble people—their souls crushed and bruised, as Plato says, with servile employments. Their lives had been obstructed by slavery; slavery had nurtured in them some vices, had dwarfed and crippled in them many virtues. They were, in the mass, uncouth, grotesque, ungainly, repulsive to the eye; they were degraded, imbruted, low, ignorant, weak and poor; and, therefore, the heart of every gentleman should have leaped, like Burke’s sword from its scabbard, to avenge even a look that threatened them with insult. Yet, on the other hand, there were many among them too comely and noble to need the defence the hearts of chevaliers fling around those to whom Man and Nature have been unkind. “In the negro countenance,” says Charles Lamb, “you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces, or rather masks, that have looked out kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller beautifully calls—those ‘images of God cut in ebony.’” The gentle Londoner could have said it all, and more, of the negro faces one met in Boston, and he might have added a far prouder word for the character that matched the faces. For all that is manliest in manhood, all that is womanliest in womanhood, rose here and there, with tropic energy, uncrushed by the load of past slavery and present social wrong, among those people. Piety, rude and simple, it may be, yet fervent and mighty as ever clasped with tears the Savior’s feet, or rose through eternity to faint in the raptures of prayer before the throne of Jehovah; love, none more loyal and tender, for the father, the mother, the husband, the wife, the child, the home, the country; compassion, quick and strong for mutual succor; flush-handed hospitality; courtesy born not of art but nature; patience; cheerfulness; self-respect; laborious industry; ambition to rise and to excel, despite of fettering disabilities and thick-strewn obstacles; heroic bravery and endurance, such as blanch the cheeks and shake the hearts of those who read or hear the pains and perils negroes have dared for their own freedom, and nobler still, the freedom of their fellows—these, and many other virtues, bourgeoned and blossomed in the hearts and lives of the black fugitives. For these people, whatever pro-slavery snobs and sciolists might say of them, or however they might prate of their inferiority, were, nevertheless, of worthy blood. Take as one sure proof of the negro’s native elegance and gentility of soul, his love and talent for music. The old genius of Africa which taught the lips of Memnon those weird auroral tones which enchanted the valley of the Nile, still haunts the broken souls of the race on this continent. America has no distinctive music but her negro melodies. Listening to those merry rigadoon tunes, wonderful for their jovial sweetness and facile celerity of movement, or