. 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