perty _is_ property,"
and described his slaves as "being well fed and clad," and as
looking "sleek and hearty." "Go home, Mr. Mendenhall," said he,
"and mind your own business, and leave other people to take care
of theirs." Mr. Mendenhall was an anti-slavery Quaker; but Mr.
Clay, while rebuking him severely, took pains to compliment the
society itself on its practically pro-slavery attitude, and thus
stung into redoubled earnestness and zeal the men who had recently
been driven out of it on account of their "abolitionism." On the
day following this speech, which was the Sabbath, he was escorted
to the yearly meeting by Elijah Coffin, its clerk, seated in a very
conspicuous place, honored by every mark of the most obsequious
deference, and thus made the instrument of widening the breach
already formed in the society, while feeding the anti-slavery fires
which he was so anxious to assuage.

The work of agitation was still further kept alive by conflicts
between the Northern and Southern States respecting the reclamation
of fugitives from crime. Virginia had demanded of New York the
surrender of three colored sailors who were charged with having
aided a slave to escape. Governor Seward refused to deliver them
up, for the reason that the Constitutional provision on the subject
must be so understood as that States would only be required to
surrender fugitives accused of an offense considered a crime in
the State called upon to make the surrender as well as in the State
asking for it. Similar controversies occurred between other States,
in all of which the South failed in her purpose. The anti-slavery
spirit found further expression in 1843 in Massachusetts, whose
Legislature resolved to move, through the Representatives of the
State in Congress, an Amendment to the Constitution, basing
representation on the free population only of the States; which
proposition gave rise to a most memorable debate in the national
House of Representatives. It was in the August of the same year
that the voting Abolitionists held a National Convention in Buffalo,
in which all the free States, except New Hampshire, were represented;
while in the following year the Methodist Episcopal Church was rent
in twain by the same unmanageable question, which had previously
divided other ecclesiastical communions.

In the meanwhile, the question of Texan annexation had been steadily
advancing to the political front, and stirring the blood of the