the Government. Bold, honest, outspoken fidelity to freedom was fatal to political ambition.

But these aggressions had aroused the attention and awakened the indignation of the free States. A few zealous and determined men called at Philadelphia, in December, 1833, a National Anti-Slavery Convention. It was attended by sixty delegates from ten States. This convention organized the American Anti-Slavery Society. This was the acorn germ of that oak, the branches of which, in 1860, overshadowed the land. This and other kindred associations, were the beginning of the organization which twenty-seven years thereafter, effectively aided in the election of the Illinois backwoods democrat to the Presidency. Lundy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Owen Lovejoy, Gerrit Smith, Dr. Channing, John Quincy Adams, J. R. Giddings, Henry Ward Beecher, Cassius M. Clay, were among the pioneers of those, who, differing as to means and views, yet in various ways sought to arouse the public mind to the dangerous encroachments and enormities of the slave power.

Among the most worthy, persistent, and distinguished of these founders of the anti-slavery organization, was William Lloyd Garrison. His name should be forever associated with the emancipation of the slave. His life has been devoted with unselfish singleness of purpose to this great object. Consecrating himself to this grand aim he lived to see it triumph. For more than forty years, through poverty, persecution and indignity, he gave his pen and his voice with great intellectual and high moral power to pleading the cause of the poor, down-trodden, despised African. When the morning of final triumph dawned, he visited President Lincoln at the White House, to thank him for the proclamation of emancipation, and himself received from the lips of that great man, the thanks of humanity as one of the pioneers in the great work of emancipation.

The anti-slavery men and abolitionists, frequently encountered mobs and personal violence. Their printing presses were destroyed, and they themselves persecuted like the early christians. The newspaper press of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was destroyed at Alton, Illinois, and he was murdered

because he firmly persisted in discussing slavery. This was in 1835, and he was the first martyr in the contest for liberty and a free press. Pennsylvania Hall, erected for free discussion, was burned by a mob because abolitionists were allowed to hold meetings there. At Cincinnati, Ohio, a mob destroyed for the third time the printing press of an anti-slavery paper. Large pecuniary rewards were offered by Governors of slave States for the persons of prominent men in the free States, because of their opposition to slavery.

Governor Wise of Virginia said, "the best way to meet abolitionists is with powder and cold steel." He has been a leader among those who tried the experiment. Verily he sowed the "wind, and has reaped the whirlwind." The house of this proud aristocrat has, during the war, been used as a school house for negro children, taught by a New England abolitionist. Governor McDuffie, of South Carolina, recommended that abolitionists be punished with death without benefit of clergy. Under the administration of Amos Kendall, the United States mails were violated to suppress the circulation of anti-slavery documents. Fruitless efforts were made in New York, and in the legislatures of several of the other free States, to suppress by penal enactments, freedom of speech and of the press on the subject of slavery. These efforts failed, and seemed only to increase the numbers and stimulate the zeal of the friends of freedom. Neither mob violence, nor threats of legal penalties could silence the eloquent voices, nor stop the pens of the advocates of liberty. The abolitionists flooded Congress with petitions praying for the abolition of slavery at the National Capital. These were suppressed by what was known as "gag rules," by which it was declared that petitions on the subject of slavery should neither be received, read, nor considered by Congress. The right of petition on this subject was suppressed in the American Congress from 1836 to 1845.

John Quincy Adams was probably the most cultivated and best trained statesman our country has produced; educated by his father with express reference to public life, he enjoyed the best advantages both at home and abroad, and had the benefit of association with the best intellects of Europe and

America. His memory was wonderfully ready and retentive, and he contined to grow in intellect even to advanced years, and well deserved the name of "the old man eloquent." With all the courage and persistence with which his noble father had advocated Independence, he advocated the right of petition. Commencing in Congress almost alone, he bravely withstood the violence and denunciation, the threats and insults of the slaveholders, until gradually he aroused the people and they rallied to his aid. District after district gradually sent champions to his side, until finally, in 1845, the obnoxious gag rules were abolished and the right of petition vindicated. He, not only by his eloquence, courage and persistence, triumphed and secured the right of petition in Congress, but introduced an amendment of the Constitution abolishing slavery throughout the United States. This proposition he submitted on the 25th of February, 1839. The institution was then far too powerful to be even shaken by the efforts of any man, however great. It was suffered by Providence to go on in its course of aggression and imperious power,until it should dig its own grave and die a suicide by the very means by which it undertook to overthrow the Government.

In 1835, South Carolina enacted a law providing that colored persons coming into her ports, should be imprisoned during the stay of the vessel in which they came. Many colored citizens of Massachusetts were thrown into prison under the provisions of this law. The validity of which law and the legality of such imprisonment, Massachusetts denied, and the Governor of that Commonwealth commissioned a venerable citizen, Judge Hoar, to go to South Carolina, investigate the facts and institute suits in the Federal Courts to test the validity of this statute. Judge Hoar was ignominiously expelled the State, by a mob, countenanced by the authorities of the State. While in the free States the outrages and violence of mobs, and the various persecutions to which the anti-slavery men were subjected, served only to add to their strength, and encourage their rapid increase; in the slave states, liberty of the press and freedom of speech on the subject of slavery were completely suppressed.

Anti-slavery men in the slave States could obtain no redress for any outrage. The slaveholders in the slave States had prac tically subverted the Constitution and established a despotism on its ruins. The bludgeon and the bowie knife were the ready instruments to suppress the printing press, and silence the freeman's voice. Civil liberty ceased to exist there. The old fundamental principles of liberty embodied in Magna Charta and the Declaration of Independence ceased to have practical existence. The despotism of the oligarchy was supreme. Neither at the bar, nor in the pulpit, neither from the newspaper, the stump, nor from the bench; among the people, before the courts, nor in the legislative halls, was the voice of liberty secured by law, permitted to be heard. Negroes, fugitives from slavery, were scourged, whipped, and in some cases burned to death. The literature of the English language, school books, and books upon religion, literature and painting, were expurgated, and the generous, manly, eloquent utterances of liberty, stricken from their pages. Such was the dark despotism which settled over the land of Jefferson and Washington. It was against such a power, represented by an aristocracy of slaveholders, many of whom were vulgar, gross, licentious, boasting, cruel and treacherous, that the free spirit of the North now rose and grappled. The slaveholders knowing the devotion of the free States to the Union, and the forbearance of the North, habitually threatened disunion whenever necessary to carry a point.

Indeed, in the light of to-day, it is clear that a conspiracy to dissolve the Union as soon as they ceased to govern it, and establish a slaveholding Confederacy, had long existed at the South.

The impartial historian will find in the celebrated Kentucky and Virginia resolutions of 1798 and 1799, the germ of secession and the rebellion. These resolutions were communicated to the several State Legislatures, but adopted by none, and their author, Madison, subsequently explained and repudiated them. They declared among other things, that, the States, "as in all other cases of compact among powers having no common judge, each party has an equal right to

judge for itself as well of infractions of the compact as of the mode and means of redress."

It is not surprising that Wise, of Virginia, and Breckenridge, of Kentucky, quoted these resolutions in defence of their treason. Nor that Calhoun and Hayne brought them forward in 1832, as a precedent for nullification, but they were then crushed by the inflexible will of Jackson, the eloquence of Clay, the statesmanship of Edward Livingston and the overwhelming logic of Webster.

Notwithstanding the complete and crushing overthrow, which this heresy received at the hands of Webster, in the United States Senate, South Carolina, by a State Convention, declared her withdrawal from the Union, and her determination to proceed to organize a separate State Government. Her Governor announced his paramount allegiance to South Carolina. So did the traitor Robert E. Lee, announce his paramount allegiance to Virginia, and drew his sword against the flag he had sworn to defend. South Carolina prepared for an armed collision with the National Government. She made the tariff the pretext for her revolutionary proceedings. Congress, weakly, under the menace of impending war, modified the obnoxious tariff, and the South Carolinians retraced their steps. The modification of the tariff at that time, and under the circumstances, was a great error. President Jackson desired to vindicate with arms and through the judicial tribunals of his country, the supremacy of the Constitution and the laws. Had this been done and some of the ringleaders tried and executed as Jackson wished, possibly the necessity or the occasion of such vindication through the late terrible civil war might not have occurred. Jackson sent General Scott with a naval and military force to Charleston to maintain the National authority. The contrast between the course taken by the iron Jackson in 1832, and the imbecile, if not treacherous Buchanan, in 1860, is as striking as the difference in the two men.

The encroachments of the slaveholders and the subservence to them of the Whig and Democratic parties, led in 1839, to the formation of a party in direct antagonism to