" 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.
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