When their song had ceased, Miss Gilson addressed them. She pictured the reality of freedom, told them what it meant and what they would have to do, no longer would there be a master to deal out the peck of corn, no longer a mistress to care for the old people or the children. They were to work for themselves, provide for their own sick, and support their own infirm; but all this was to be done under new conditions. No overseer was to stand over them with the whip, for their new master was the necessity of earning their daily bread. Very soon new and higher motives would come; fresh encouragements, a nobler ambition, would grow into their new condition. Then in the simplest language she explained the difference between their former relations with the then master and their new relations with the northern people, showing that labor here was voluntary, and that they could only expect to secure kind employers by faithfully doing all they had to do. Then, enforcing truthfulness, neatness, and economy, she said,--
"You know that the Lord Jesus died and rose again for you. You love to sing his praise and to draw near to him in prayer. But remember that this is not all of religion. You must do right as well as pray right. Your lives must be full of kind deeds towards each other, full of gentle and loving affections, full of unselfishness and truth: this is true piety. You must make Monday and Tuesday just as good and pure as Sunday is, remembering that God looks not only at your prayers and your emotions, but at the way you live, and speak, and act, every hour of your lives."
Then she sang Whittier's exquisite hymn:--
"O, praise an' tanks,--the Lord he come To set de people free; An' massa tink it day ob doom, An' we ob jubilee. De Lord dat heap de Red Sea wabes, He just as 'trong as den; He say de word, we last night slabes, To-day de Lord's free men."
Here were a thousand people breathing their first free air. They were new born with this delicious sense of freedom. They listened with moistened eyes to every word which concerned their future, and felt that its utterance came from a heart which could embrace them all in its sympathies. Life was to them a jubilee only so far as they could make it so by a consciousness of duty faithfully done. They had hard work before them, much privation, many struggles. They had everything to learn--the new industries of the North, their changed social condition, and how to accept their new responsibilities.