gasp. The assassination of President Lincoln was the dying blow of
slavery, aimed through him at the Union which he had maintained.
Appalling as was the deed, it was vain, for the Union was saved, and
liberty forever secured to the new-born nation. As Garrison remarked at
the tomb of Calhoun, on the morning that Lincoln died, "Down into a
deeper grave than this slavery has gone, and for it there is no
resurrection."

CHAPTER XXI

THE LAST.

"Garrison," said George Thompson on the steamer which was conveying the
Government party out of Charleston Harbor on their return trip;
"Garrison you began your warfare at the North in the face of rotten eggs
and brickbats. Behold you end it at Charleston on a bed of roses!" The
period of persecution had indeed ended, the reign of missiles had
ceased, but with the roses there came to the pioneer not a few thorns.
Bitter was the sorrow which visited him in the winter of 1863. Without
warning his wife was on the night of December 29th, stricken with
paralysis, which crippled her for the rest of her life. No words can
adequately express all that she had been to the reformer in his struggle
with slavery. She was a providential woman raised up to be the wife and
helpmate of her husband, the strenuous man of God. "As a wife for a
period of more than twenty-six years," he wrote her on the completion of
her fiftieth year, "you have left nothing undone to smooth the rugged
pathway of my public career--to render home the all-powerful magnet of
attraction, and the focal point of domestic enjoyment--to make my
welfare and happiness at all times a matter of tender solicitude--and to
demonstrate the depth and fixedness of that love which you so long ago
plighted to me.... Whatever of human infirmity we may have seen in each
other, I believe few have enjoyed more unalloyed bliss in wedded life
than ourselves." For twelve years after that sad December night the
lovely invalid was the object of her husband's most tender and assiduous
care. And when at last she left him in January, 1876, the loneliness
which fell upon his heart seemed more than he could bear.

Differences with old associates was a grievous thorn which came to the
pioneer during the progress of the war. The first marked disagreement
between him and them occurred at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society not a month after his wife's prostration. The clash
came between the leader and his great coa