His words sounded across the country. In many instances they filled people, already worn out and war-weary, with dismay. The ballot was such a vast advance beyond the former objects proclaimed by the friends of the colored race that it struck men as preposterous and wholly inadmissible. Antislavery men were far from united as to the wisdom of Douglass’ stand. At first William Lloyd Garrison was not ready to join in the idea, but he was soon found on the right side. As Douglass said of him, “A man’s head will not long remain wrong, when his heart is right.” But if at first Garrison thought it was too much to ask, Wendell Phillips saw not only the justice, but the wisdom and necessity, of the measure. “I shall never leave the Negro until, so far as God gives me the power, I achieve [absolute equality before the law--absolute civil equality],” he thundered from his pulpit. Enfranchisement of the freedmen was resisted on two main grounds: first, the tendency of the measure to bring the freedmen into conflict with the old master-class and the white people of the South generally; second, their unfitness, by reason of their ignorance, servility and degradation, to exercise over the destinies of the nation so great a power as the ballot. “We’ve set them free! By Heaven, that’s enough! Let them go to work and prove themselves!” So spake the North, anxious to get back to “business as usual.” But deep down in the land there was a mighty stirring. Words had been said that could not be recalled--_henceforth, and forever free_. There were no stories of killings, massacre or rape by the freed blacks. Whitelaw Reid, touring the South, reported: “The Negroes everywhere are quiet, respectful and peaceful; they are the only group at work.” And the Alexandria _Gazette_ said “the Negroes generally behave themselves respectfully toward the whites.” At first there was much roaming about. Husbands set out to find wives; and wives, idle, sat on the flat ground, believing they would come. Mothers who had never set foot off the plantation, struck out across the country to find their children; and children--like dirty, scared, brown animals--swarmed aimlessly. There was sickness and death. Freedman’s Aid Societies floundered around in a vacuum, well-intentioned, doling out relief here and there; but what the black man needed was a place where he could stand--a tiny, little part of the great earth and a tool in his right hand. William Freeland, master of Freelands, sat on his high-pillared porch staring at the unkempt, tangled yard. Weeds and briers choking everything--shrubbery, close-fisted, intricately branched, suffocating the rambler. In the fields beyond, nothing was growing save long grass, thistles and fierce suckers; and over the pond a scum had gathered, frothing and buoyed with its own gases.