be
a young Free Soiler in Massachusetts. I had pretty good company,
not in the least due to any merit or standing of my own, but
only because the men who were enlisted for the war in the
great political battle against slavery were bound to each
other by a tie to which no freemasonry could be compared.
Samuel G. Howe used, when his duties brought him to Worcester
on his monthly visit, to spend an hour or two of an afternoon
in my office. I was always welcome to an hour's converse
with Charles Allen, the man who gave the signal at Philadelphia
for breaking away from the Whig Party. Erastus Hopkins occasionally
spent a Sunday with me at my boarding house. When I went
to Boston I often spent an hour in Richard Dana's office,
and was sure of a kindly greeting if I chanced to encounter
Sumner. The restless and ubiquitous Henry Wilson, who, as
he gathered and inspired the sentiment of the people, seemed
often to be in ten places at once, used to think it worth
his while to visit me to find out what the boys were thinking
of. In 1851 I was made Chairman of the Free Soil County Committee
of Worcester County. I do not think there was ever so good
a political organization in the country before, or that there
ever has been a better one since. The Free Soilers carried
all but six, I think, of the fifty-two towns in that county.
I was in correspondence with the leading men in every one
of them, and could at any time summon them to Worcester, if
there were need.

We acquired by the Mexican War nearly six hundred thousand
square miles of territory. When the treaty was signed, the
struggle began between freedom and slavery for the control
of this imperial domain. No reader of the history of Massachusetts
will doubt her interest in such a struggle. Three things
stood in the way of lovers of liberty in the Commonwealth.

First, the old attachment to the Whig party;
Second, her manufacturing interests; and
Third, her devotion to Daniel Webster.

Massachusetts was a Whig State. There were many things which
tended to give that great political organization a permanent
hold on her people. Its standard of personal character was
of the highest. Its leading men--Saltonstall, Reed, Lawrence,
Lincoln, Briggs, Allen, Ashmun, Choate, Winthrop, Davis, Everett,
and their associates--were men whose private and public honor
was without a stain. Its political managers were not its
holders of office or its seekers of office.