to read the signs of the times, and especially those who had the spiritual instinct to interpret the meaning of God's providences.
The anti-slavery reformers, who had sought, through the peaceful agencies of the press, the pulpit, and the platform, to secure the abolition of slavery, went into the war with an ardour they never could have felt in the struggle of a slave-holding nation for mere political existence. No young men responded to the call for troops more heartily than those whose boyhood homes had been stations on the Underground Railway—that unique line whose stock was never offered in market, whose trains ran only by night, whose tracks were country by-roads, whose coaches were plain farm waggons, whose passengers were fugitive slaves, whose terminus was the free soil of Canada. The first detachment of Union troops that passed through Baltimore on their way to Washington made the streets of that sullen city ring with a song in honour of old John Brown, the abolitionist of Harper's Ferry. And regiment after regiment of volunteers, the pride and flower of half a million Northern homes, "rallied round the flag, shouting the battle-cry of freedom."
The slaves, too, utterly ignorant as they were of common political issues and the proportions of the struggle, almost everywhere and at once read the significance of the great conflict. Tidings of every turn in the fortunes of war passed from cabin to cabin by some mysterious telegraphy, and every Union victory was the signal for secret thanksgiving services.
