audacious declaration, but he was right.

The writer, when a boy, was witness to an exhibition of the same spirit. A kinsman of his was a zealous Abolitionist, although not particularly gifted with controversial acumen. He and his minister, as often happened, were discussing the slavery question. The minister, like many of his cloth at that time, was a staunch supporter of "the institution," which, according to his contention, firmly rested on biblical authority.

"How do you expect to destroy slavery, as it exists in Kentucky, by talking and voting abolition up here in Ohio?" asked the clergyman.

"We will crush it through Congress when we get control of the general government," said my kinsman.

"But Congress and the general government have, under the Constitution, absolutely no power over slavery in the States. It is a State institution," replied the clergyman.

It is unnecessary to follow the discussion, but, one after another, the quicker-witted and better-informed preacher successfully combated all the propositions advanced by my relative in trying to give a reason for the faith that was in him, until he was completely cornered. "Well," said he at last, "the good Lord has not taken me into His confidence, and I don't know what His plans for upsetting slavery are, but He will be able to manage it somehow."

My kinsman lived long enough to see the day

when there was not a slave on American soil, and the minister lived long enough to become a roaring Abolitionist.

It was doubtless their confidence in ultimate triumph, a result of their absolute belief in the righteousness of their cause, that, as much as anything else, armed and armored the Abolitionists against all opposition. It was one main element of their strength in the midst of their weakness. Without it they could not have persisted, as they did, in their separate or "third party " political action, that cleared the way and finally led up to a victorious organization. Year after year, and for many years, they voted for candidates that had no chance of election. Their first presidential ticket got only seven thousand votes in the whole country. The great public, which could not see the use of acting politically for principle alone, laughed at their simplicity in "throwing away their votes." "Voting in the air" was the way it was often spoken of, and those who were guilty of such incomprehensible folly were characterized as "one idea people." They, however, cared little for denunciation or ridicule, and kept on regularly nominating their tickets, and as regularly giving them votes that generally appeared in the election returns among the "scattering." They were not abashed by the insignificance of their party.

"They were men who dared to be
the right with two or three,"

according to the poet Lowell.

In the county in which I lived when a boy, there

was one vote polled for the first Abolitionist presidential ticket. The man who gave it did not try to hide his responsibility—in fact, he seemed rather proud of his aloneness—but he was mercilessly guyed on account of the smallness of his party. His rejoinder was that he thought that he and God, who was, he believed, with him, made a pretty good-sized and respectable party.

CHAPTER IV

PRO-SLAVERY PREJUDICE

The intensity—perhaps density would be a better word in this connection—of the prejudice that confronted the Abolitionists when they entered on their work is not describable by any expressions we have in our language. In the South it was soon settled that no man could preach Anti-Slaveryism and live. In the North the conditions were not much better. Every man and woman—because the muster-roll of the Abolition propagandists was recruited from both sexes—carried on the work at the hazard of his or her life. Sneers, scowls, hootings, curses, and rough handling were absolutely certain. One incident throws light on the state of feeling at that time.

When Pennsylvania Hall, which the Abolitionists of Philadelphia—largely Quakers—had erected for a meeting place at a cost of forty thousand dollars was fired by a mob, the fire department of that city threw water on surrounding property, but not one drop would it contribute to save the property of the Abolitionists.

Why was it that this devotion to slavery and this hostility to its opposers prevailed in the non-slaveholding States? They had not always existed. Indeed,

there was a time, not so many years before, when slavery was generally denounced; when men like Washington and Jefferson and Henry, although themselves slave-owners, led public opinion in its condemnation. Everybody was anticipating the day of universal emancipation, when suddenly—almost in the twinkling of an eye—there was a change. If it had been a weather-cock—as to a considerable extent it was, and is—public opinion could not have more quickly veered about.

Slavery became the popular idol in the North as well as in the South. Opposition to it was not only offensive, but dangerous. It was sacrilege.

So far as the South was concerned the revolution is easily accounted for. Slavery became profitable. A Yankee magician had touched it with a wand of gold, and from being a languishing, struggling system, it quickly developed into a money-maker.

Whitney, the Connecticut mechanical genius, by the invention of the cotton-gin, made the production of cotton a highly lucrative industry. The price of negroes to work the cotton fields at once went up, and yet the supply was inadequate. Northernly slave States could not produce cotton, but they could produce negroes. They shared in the golden harvest. Such cities as Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Wheeling, and Louisville became centers of a flourishing traffic in human beings. They had great warehouses, commonly spoken of as "nigger pens," in which the "hands" that were to make the cotton were temporarily gathered, and long coffles—that is, processions of men and women, each with a hand attached to a common rope or

chain—marched through their streets with faces turned southward.

The slave-owners were numerically a lean minority even in the South, but their mastery over their fellow-citizens was absolute. Nor was there any mystery about it. As the owners of four million slaves, on an average worth not far from five hundred dollars each, they formed the greatest industrial combination—what at this time we would call a trust—ever known to this or any other country. Our mighty Steel Corporation would have been a baby beside it. If to-day all our great financial companies were consolidated, the unit would scarcely come up to the dimensions of that one association. It was not incorporated in law, but its union was perfect. Bound together by a common interest and a common feeling, its members—in the highest sense co-partners in business and in politics, in peace and in war—were prepared to act together as one man.

But why, I again ask, were the Northern people so infatuated with slavery? They raised no cotton and they raised no negroes, but many of them, and especially their political leaders, carried their adulation almost to idolatry.

When Elijah P. Lovejoy was shot down like a dog, and William Lloyd Garrison was dragged half naked and half lifeless through the streets of Boston, and other outrages of like import were being perpetrated all over the North, it was carefully given out that those deeds were not the work of irresponsible rowdies, but of "gentlemen"—of merchants, manufacturers, and members of the professions. They claimed the credit for such achievements.

There were reasons for such a state of things—some very solid, because financial.

The North and the South were extensively interlaced by