ves free. The students burned him in effigy; the college authorities
forced him to resign; a mob attacked him and he was driven from the
State. It was in the same State that a college professor's right to free
speech on a burning social question was vindicated by his students, his
colleagues, and the community, in 1903, and that Trinity College became
a leader in courageous and progressive sentiment on the questions of
the hour. Few were the men bold enough even to try the question of
personal independence in 1856. The suppression of free speech was in
itself one of the strongest possible arguments for the Republican cause.
The liberty of white men was at stake.

Conservatism, apprehension, timidity, in various phases, told against
the new party and its candidate. Northern commerce was largely bound up
with Southern interests. The threat of disunion weighed with some;
Grant, in his memoirs, says it was this that led him to vote for
Buchanan. Others shrank from trusting the helm in a tempest to hands as
untried as Fremont's. The mob who hated "niggers" swelled the opposition
vote. Taking advantage of the Know-nothing feeling, the fiction was
persistently circulated that Fremont was a Catholic. The disorder in
Kansas was pacified by the dispatch of a new Governor, Geary, to
reassure the North. Finally, money was spent on a scale unknown before
to defeat the Republican party,--itself in the stage of poverty and
virtue,--and spent probably with decisive effect in the critical October
election in Pennsylvania.

Against these disadvantages the young party made head gallantly. It
fired the youth of the North with an ardor unknown since the early days
of the republic. It inspired the poets of the people. Great crowds sang
the strains of the Marseillaise, with the refrain:

Free speech, free press, free soil, free men, Fremont and victory!

The older heads were satisfied by the moderation and wisdom of the
party's principles. The reasonable element among the Abolitionists
hailed this first great popular advance, and allied themselves with it.
Whittier was the chief minstrel of the campaign. Of those to whom "the
Union" had been the talismanic word, that part which cared for nothing
better than the Union as it was, with slavery and freedom mixed,
supported Buchanan or Fillmore. The part that loved the Union as a means
to justice and freedom were for Fremont.

The October elections in Pennsylvania and Indiana showed that