in Ohio, that they might have been
easily toppled over to the South. Indeed, at that time it is a problem
how Massachusetts would have voted on a proposition to "slaveryize"
her soil. The surprising thing, as we look back to that period, is
that slavery did not get a foothold in some of the free States, if not
in all of them.

But by the time the South was ready to play its trump card, it was too
late. The game was lost. Public opinion had become revolutionized
throughout the North. The leaven of Abolitionism had got in its work.
The men and women, few in number and weak in purse and worldly
position as they were, who had enlisted years before in the cause of
emancipation, and had fought for it in the face of almost every
conceivable discouragement, had at last won a great preliminary
victory. Slavery, through their exertions, had become impossible, both
in the Territories and in the free States of the North, the United
States Supreme Court and all the forces of the slave power to the
contrary notwithstanding. Then came to the South a not unanticipated,
and to many of her leaders a not unwelcome political Waterloo, in the
election of Lincoln. This gave the argument for secession that was
wanted. The South had then to yield--which she had no idea of
doing--or to go into rebellion. She went out of the Union very much as
she would have gone to a frolic. She had no thought that serious
fighting was to follow. She did not believe, as one of the Southern
leaders expressed it, that the Northern people would go to war for the
sake of the "niggers."

CHAPTER VI

ANTI-SLAVERY PIONEERS

The early Abolitionists were denounced as fanatics, or "fan-a-tics,"
according to the pronunciation of some of their detractors. They were
treated as if partially insane. The writer when a boy attended the
trial of a cause between two neighbors in a court of low grade. It was
what was called a "cow case," and involved property worth, perhaps, as
much as twenty dollars. One of the witnesses on the stand was asked by
a lawyer, who wanted to embarrass or discredit him, if he were not an
Abolitionist. Objection came from the other side on the ground that
the inquiry was irrelevant; but the learned justice-of-the-peace who
presided held that, as it related to the witness's sanity, and that
would affect his credibility, the question was admissible. It is not,
perhaps, so very strange that in those days, in view of the
disreputableness of th