"These are the times foretold by the Prophets, 'when a nation shall be born in a day'," declared the call for a black political gathering in 1865. A Tennessee newspaper commented in 1869 that freedmen habitually referred to slavery as Paul's Time, and Reconstruction as Isaiah's Time (referring perhaps to Paul's message of obedience and humility, and Isaiah's prophecy of cataclysmic change brought about by violence). God, who had "scourged America with war for her injustice to the black man," had allowed his agent Lincoln, like Moses, to glimpse the promised land of "universal freedom" and then mysteriously removed him before he "reached its blessed fruitions."