One said to me, that masters, before they died, by their wills sometimes
freed their slaves, and he thought that a _type_ that they should become
free.
One Saturday evening one of them asked me to call and see him at his
home the next morning. I did so, and he handed me a Bible belonging
to his mistress, who had died a few days before, and whose bier I had
helped to carry to the family vault. He wanted me to read to him the
eleventh chapter of Daniel. It seemed, that, as one of the means of
keeping them quiet, the white clergymen during the winter and spring
had read them some verses from it to show that the South would prevail,
enforcing passages which ascribed great dominion to "the king of the
South," and suppressing those which subsequently give the supremacy to
"the king of the North." A colored man who could read had found the
latter passages and made them known. The chapter is dark with mystery,
and my auditor, quite perplexed as I read on, remarked, "The Bible is a
very mysterious book." I read to him also the thirty-fourth chapter of
Jeremiah, wherein the sad prophet of Israel records the denunciations
by Jehovah of sword, pestilence, and famine against the Jews for not
proclaiming liberty to their servants and handmaids.
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