its own. Our question is only unnecessarily burdened with it. It cannot be kept within the convenient limits of this enterprise, for this Woman's Rights Convention is not man's convention; and I hold that I, as a man, have an exactly equal interest in the essential question of marriage as woman has."

Mr. Phillips moved to lay the resolutions on the table, and even went so far as to object to their being entered on the journal of the convention. Mr. Garrison, while concurring "in opinion with his friend Mr. Phillips," thought that the resolutions ought to be adopted.

The question being put, Mr. Phillips's motion was lost. The resolutions, reported by the business committee, were then adopted without dissent.

In 1861 came the "war of the Rebellion." The women who had so perseveringly worked for their own enfranchisement, now gave all their time and thought to saving the nation, and caring for its brave defenders. Whilst fathers and sons, husbands and lovers, were fighting and bleeding under the stars and stripes, mothers, wives, and sweethearts were busily plying their fingers in the sewing-circles, lending their assistance in the sanitary movement, watching the sick in the hospitals, or closing the eyes of the dying on the battlefield, as if all this were not enough to have made "justice to woman" the spontaneous cry on the return of the first days of peace.

"It is not the woman's, but the negro's, hour:"

"after the slave, then the woman," said Phillips, in his stirring speeches of the time.

From the beginning of the civil war to 1866, there is no record to be found of any public meeting on the subject of woman's rights, in which any Massachusetts speaker appeared.

CHAPTER XII.

THE PREPARATION FOR WAR.

The Politics of 1853. - Franklin Pierce, President. The "Kansas and Nebraska Bill."-The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Sumner foresees the "Beginning of the End." —A Convention of the Free-soil Party.-The Republican Party. - Workings of the Fugitive-slave Act. - Arrest of Anthony Burns. — A Famous Meeting. — Indictments found against Phillips, Parker, and Others. The Result.-A Petition for the Removal of "Slave Commissioner" Loring. - Mr. Phillips's Argument. -"The Crime against Kansas." Assault on Charles Sumner. - Election of James Buchanan. - The Signs of the Times. — The John Brown Raid. Mr. Phillips's Eulogy. - His Lecture in Brooklyn. Mr. Slack's Recollections. Riotous Feeling in New York and Elsewhere. Anniversary Meeting in Boston. - A Riot prevented.

"Insurrection of thought always precedes the insurrection of arms."

"God gives us knowledge, keeps for us the weapon: all we need ask for is courage to use it."

"You and I are never to see peace, we are never to see the possibility of putting the army of this nation, whether it be made up of nineteen or thirty-four States, on a peace-footing, until slavery is destroyed."

"A civil war can hardly be any thing but a political war. That is, all civil wars are a struggle between opposite ideas, and armies are but the tools."-PHILLIPS.

FRANKLIN PIERCE took the oath of office on

the 4th of March, 1853. Thoroughly incapable of comprehending the past history of his country, it was not strange that his dull or diseased brain should fail

to forecast even the near or immediate future. The most remarkable event in the progress of the antislavery conflict happened during his administration. But for this event, which will ever perpetuate his name, President Pierce would long ago have faded out of remembrance.

In December, 1853, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois proposed a bill in the United-States Senate, to organize the immense region extending from the confines of Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota to the crest of the Rocky Mountains, and from 36° 30′ north latitude to the British Possessions, into two territories, to be known as Kansas and Nebraska. This bill contained a clause repealing the Missouri Compromise, under the plea that it was "inconsistent with the principle of non-intervention by Congress with slavery in the States and Territories, as recognized by the compromise measures of 1850." The people were taken by surprise; for the question, so destructive to national harmony, and which it was hoped had been settled forever, had assumed a new form. The Missouri Compromise had been deemed a sacred compact between the North and South, and, as such, for the third of a century had received the sanction of all parties.

The debates on the bill extended over many weeks. On the 25th of May, 1854, it passed Congress, and, having been signed on the following day by the President, at once became the law of the land.

"It is at once the worst and the best bill [exclaimed Charles Sumner] on which Congress ever acted! It is the worst bill, inasmuch as it is a present victory of slavery. . . . It is the best bill, for it prepares the way for that 'All hail hereafter' when slavery must disappear. Standing at the very grave of freedom in Kansas and Nebraska, I lift myself to the vision of that happy resurrection by which freedom will be secured hereafter, not only in these Territories, but everywhere under the National Government. More clearly than ever before, I now see 'the beginning of the end'of slavery. Proudly I discern the flag of my country, as it ripples in every breeze, at last become, in reality as in name, the flag of freedom, undoubted, pure, and irresistible. Sorrowfully I bend before the wrong you are about to enact: joyfully I welcome all the promises of the future."

On the 31st of May a State convention of the Freesoil party was held in Boston, in Faneuil Hall, at which a series of resolutions, denunciatory of the Fugitive-slave Bill and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, was passed. “The time has come," it was said, "to forget the past, obliterate the Fugitive-slave Act, and to do what we can to place the country perpetually on the side of freedom."

Shortly afterwards a strong effort was made in the State, to unite the opponents of the repeal of the Missouri prohibition, and to form a political organization that should be untrammelled by slaveholding alliances. On the 20th of July a mass convention of the people at Worcester declared in favor of a new organization, to be called the "Republican" party; and on the 7th