"You denied us Christian communion because you could not endure slave-holding. You refused us permission to sojourn, or even pass through the North with our property. You refused us any share of the lands acquired mainly by our diplomacy and blood and treasure. You robbed us of our property and refused to restore it." The speaker went minutely into the outrages perpetrated by the Abolition party. The list of oppressions had reach a crisis. Meanwhile the cotton and the cane went on in Dixie land, to the weird ditties and the quaint folk-lore of the happy-go-lucky race. So the outbreak of the war found the American slave in the height of his prosperity, unmindful of so-called wrongs, and utterly unfit for the boasted freedom that was thrust upon him. The cruel decree was carried out, and millions of helpless beings were turned adrift without rudder or compass, to bemoan the loss of the good old times when they were provided with the comforts of life they were nevermore to know. With the moral question of slavery this paper has nothing to do. Facts, and facts alone, dictate the record. But who has been, and who is now, the friend of the erstwhile slave? The Northerner or the Southerner? Says one: "We have freed you, but we don't want you." Says the other: "We did not free you, but we will take you and make you comfortable. We love your people--you, who have rocked us on your faithful breasts--who have interlarded our very speech with your dialect, and who were our playmates in the joyous days of youth. We have laid your hoary heads in honored graves, and will treasure your memory till the final hour when death shall make all men equal." Secession Read April 11, 1909 We seem not to have been a happy family during our first one hundred years as a Union of States. We quarrelled frequently among ourselves, and like the dissatisfied children of the household there was oft-threatened disruption. If you do not treat me fairly I will leave home, said the stubborn Northern child, no less than the warm-hearted Southern offspring. And they stood alike in the attitude of going out the door the moment the provocation became unbearable. The right of secession and the thought of secession was frequently in the mind all along the infant years of the Republic. But the word "Secession" did not become a familiar term until the early sixties. Then the greeting was "Hello! old Secesh!" or "Are you secesh?" One might have thought that this awful thing the South had done was heard of for the first time, and had birth alone in the brains of the fiery aristocrats who tore themselves away from their plebean cousins; whereas history shows, as I have said, that every State believed it had a right to secede from the general government by the wording of our constitution, so when the pressure grew too close the terms, "Southern Rights," and "Secession," became the slogan of battle and sounded the tocsin of war.