In St. Domingo the pioneers were Oge and Chevannes; they headed a revolt; they were unsuccessful, but they roused the slaves to resistance. They were captured, tried, condemned and executed. They were made to ask forgiveness of God, and of the King, for having attempted to give freedom to their own flesh and blood. They were broken alive on the wheel, and left to die of hunger and pain. The blood of these martyrs became the seed of liberty; and afterward in the midnight assault, in the massacre and pillage, the infuriated slaves shouted their names as their battle-cry, until Toussaint, the greatest of the blacks, gave freedom to them all. In the United States, among the Revolutionary fathers, such men as John Adams, and his son John Quincy--such men as Franklin and John Jay were opposed to the institution of slavery. Thomas Jefferson said, speaking of the slaves, "When the measure of their tears shall be full--when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness--doubtless a God of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality." Thomas Paine said, "No man can be happy surrounded by those whose happiness he has destroyed." And a more self-evident proposition was never uttered. These and many more Revolutionary heroes were opposed to slavery and did what they could to prevent the establishment and spread of this most wicked and terrible of all institutions. You owe gratitude to those who were for liberty as a principle and not from mere necessity. You should remember with more than gratitude that firm, consistent and faithful friend of your downtrodden race, Wm. Lloyd Garrison. He has devoted his life to your cause. Many years ago in Boston he commenced the publication of a paper devoted to liberty. Poor and despised--friendless and almost alone, he persevered in that grandest and holiest of all possible undertakings. He never stopped, or stayed, or paused until the chain was broken and the last slave could lift his toil-worn face to heaven with the light of freedom shining down upon him, and say, I am a Free Man. You should not forget that noble philanthropist, Wendell Phillips, and your most learned and eloquent defender, Charles Sumner.