The feeling against the negroes' friends--the Abolitionists--was not
confined to children in years. It was present in all classes. It
entered State and Church alike, and dominated both of them. The
Congressional Representative from the district in which I lived in
those days was an able man and generally held in high esteem. He made
a speech in our village when a candidate for re-election. In
discussing the slavery question--everybody discussed it then--he spoke
of the negroes as being "on the same footing with other cattle." I
remember the expression very well because it shocked me, boy that I
was. It did not disturb the great majority of those present, however.
They cheered the sentiment and gave their votes for the speaker, who
was re-elected by a large majority.

About the same time I happened to be present where a General Assembly
of one of our largest religious denominations was in session, and
listened to part of an address by a noted divine--the most
distinguished man in the body--which was intended to prove that
slavery was an institution existing by biblical authority. He spent
two days in a talk that was mostly made up of scriptural texts and his
commentaries upon them. This was in Ohio, and there was not a
slave-owner in the assembly, and yet a resolution commendatory of the
views that had just been declared by the learned doctor, was adopted
by an almost unanimous vote.

In the neighborhood in which I lived was an old and much respected
clergyman who was called upon to preach a sermon on a day of some
national significance. He made it the occasion for a florid panegyric
upon American institutions, which, he declared, assured freedom to all
men. Here he paused, "When I spoke of all men enjoying freedom under
our flag," he resumed, "I did not, of course, include the Ethiopians
whom Providence has brought to our shores for their own good as well
as ours. They are slaves by a divine decree. As descendants of Ham,
they are under a curse that makes them the servants of their more
fortunate white brethren." Having thus put himself right on the
record, he proceeded with his sermon. No one seemed to take exception
to what he said.

In the same neighborhood was a young preacher who had shortly before
come into it from somewhere farther North. In the course of one of his
regular services he offered up a prayer in which he expressed the hope
that the good Lord would find a way to break the bands of all who were
i