The A. M. A. was organized when the great missionary societies, home and foreign, aided churches in the South that received slaveholders as members. It was formed not as an anti-slavery society, nor merely as a formal protest against slavery, but as affording a channel through which anti-slavery Christians might carry forward missions without complicity with slavery. Hence it established missions in foreign lands and among the Indians, and also home missions in the West. But in the progress of the anti-slavery movement the large missionary societies withdrew their aid from slaveholding churches, and soon thereafter came the opening for the great work to be done for the freedmen. The Association was believed to be providentially prepared to undertake this work, and hence it gave up its home missions in the West and among the Indians and entered with alacrity into this new field. The territory it occupied was the whole South, its schools being located in every Southern State. But gradually it withdrew from Delaware, Maryland, and unwisely, as I then thought, and now think, from Florida. At the West it organized a few churches in Kansas, which, however, it at length turned over to the American Home Missionary Society, only resuming limited efforts there when the great exodus of colored people thither took place. In Missouri it never attempted much in church planting. It found that the Home Missionary Society that had done so grand a work from the Atlantic to the Pacific, rearing its monuments of light and piety along the whole line of its march, had entered Missouri so effectually that there was no more call for the Association in those parts, and hence that state was soon and cheerfully surrendered to the occupancy of that Society. In Texas the Association has established one of its chartered institutions at Austin, the Tillotson Collegiate and Normal Institute; it was the earliest Congregational Society to plant churches in the State; its churches there, though few, are more in number than that of any other Congregational Society, and two calls are pressing upon us now for the organization of new churches. Thus its field may be said to be the “Solid South” leaving out Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Florida and the new State of West Virginia. In this territory it has planted its large and permanent educational institutions; its 89 churches, united in eight conferences, covering nearly the whole South.