, _Memoirs of John A. Dix_, Vol. 1, p. 319.]

This campaign also welcomed into political life a young man whose
first speech made it plain that a new champion, with bright and
well-tempered sword, had taken up the cause of freedom with the
courage of the cavalier. George William Curtis was then thirty-two
years old. He had already written the Howadji books, which earned him
recognition among men of letters, and _Prue and I_, which had secured
his fame as an author. In the campaign of 1856, the people for the
first time saw and knew this man whose refined rhetoric, characterised
by tender and stirring appeal, and guided by principle and conviction,
was, thereafter, for nearly forty years, to be heard at its best on
one side of every important question that divided American political
life. Nathaniel P. Willis, who drove five miles in the evening to hear
him deliver a "stump speech," thought Curtis would be "too handsome
and too well dressed" for a political orator; but when he heard him
unfold his logical argument step by step, occasionally bursting into a
strain of inspiring eloquence that foreshadowed the more studied work
of his riper years, it taught him that the author was as caustic and
unconstrained on the platform as he appeared in _The Potiphar Papers_.

Curtis' theme was resistance to the extension of slavery. His wife's
father, Francis G. Shaw, had stimulated his zeal in the cause of
freedom; and he treated the subject with a finish and strength that
came from larger experience and longer observation than a young man of
thirty-two could usually boast. To him, the struggle for freedom in
Kansas was not less glorious than the heroic resistance in 1776, and
he made it vivid by the use of historic associations. "Through these
very streets," he said, "they marched who never returned. They fell
and were buried, but they can never die. Not sweeter are the flowers
that make your valley fair, not greener are the pines that give your
valley its name, than the memory of the brave men who died for
freedom. And yet no victim of those days, sleeping under the green
sod, is more truly a martyr of Liberty than every murdered man whose
bones lie bleaching in this summer sun upon the silent plains of
Kansas. And so long as Liberty has one martyr, so long as one drop of
blood is poured out for her, so long from that single drop of bloody
sweat of the agony of humanity shall spring hosts as countless as the
forest leaves and migh