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| FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER. 767 of ita mournful grief. Oh, what a terrible lesson does this «v«nt read to us 1 A few years since slavery tortured, burned, hong and outraged us, and the nation passed by and said, they had nothing to do with slavery where it was, slavery would have something to do with them where they were. Ob, how fearfully the judgments of Ichabod bare pressed upou the nation's .life 1 Well, it may be in the providence of God this blow was needed to intensify the nation's hatred of slavery, to show the utter fallacy of baaing national reconstruction uponihe votes of returned rebels, and rejecting"loyal black men; making (after all the blood poured oat like water, and wealth scattered like chaff) a return to the old idea that a while rebel is better or of more aoconnt-in the body politic than a loyal black man. * * Moses, the meekest man on earth, led the children of Israel over the Red Sea, but was not permitted to see them settled in Canaan. Mr. Lincoln has led up through another Red Sea to the table land of triumphant victory, and God hag seen fit to summon for the new era another man. It is ours then to bow to the Chaatener and let our honored and loved chieftain go. Surely the everlasting arms that have hushed him BO strangely to sleep are able to guide the nation through its untrod future; but in vain should be this fearful baptism of blood it from the dark bosom of slavery springs such terrible crimes. Let the whole nation resolve that the whole virus shall be eliminated from its body ; that in the future slavery ehall only be remembered aa a thing of the past that shall never have tha faintest hope of a resurrection." Up to this point, we have spoken of Mrs. Harper as a laborer, battling for freedom under slavery and the war. She is equally earnest in laboring for Equality before the law—education, and a higher manhood, especially in the South, among the Freetlmen. For the best part of several years, since the \var, she has traveled very extensively through the Southern States, going on the plantations and amongst the lowly, as well as to the cities and towns, addressing schools, Churches, meetings in Court Houses, Legislative Halls, &c., and, sometimes, under the most trying and hazardous circumstances; influenced in her labor of love, wholly by the noble impulses of her own heart, working her way along unsustained by any Society. In this mission, she has conic in contact with all classes—the original slaveholders and the Freedmen, before and since the Fifteenth Amendment bill was enacted. Excepting two of the Southern States (Texas and Arkansas), she has traveled largely over all the others, and in no instance has she permitted herself, through fear, to disappoint an audience, when engagements had been made for her to epeak, although frequently admonished that it would be dangerous to venture in so doing. We first quote from a letter dated Darlington, S. C., May 13, 18C7: " You will see by this that I am in the sunny South. * * * I here read ar.J see human nature under new lights and phases. I meet with a people eager to hear, ready to listen, as if they felt that the slumber of the ages had been broken, and that they were to sleep no more. * * * I am glad that the colored man gete his freedom and suffrage together; that he is not forced to go through the same condition of things here, that has inclined him so much to gpatby, isolation, and indifference, in the North. You, perhaps, wonder why I have been BO slow in writing to yon, bot if you knew how busy I am, just worting up to or past tha limit of my strength. Traveling, conversing, addressing day and Sunday-schools (picking up scraps of information, takes up a large portion of my time), |