[26] in Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. His last and most effective speeches were in Brooklyn and New York City, where his apt and witty stories and quiet self-possession gave him both popularity and influence as a speaker. Mounting the steps of the New York Hotel, where ‘the Southerners most do congregate,’ he writes:—
I made the only Republican speech, in all probability, ever listened to from that intensely pro-slavery locality. One man asked me if I approved of John Brown's raid into Virginia. “No,” I said, “ I joined in the disapprobation expressed by the Chicago Platform.” “What did I think of John Brown himself?” “I thought he was a splendid fellow, and I wished there were more men in the country who had the same daring, though I should wish it to be proved in a different way.”He closes his letter with joyful prophecies of the success of the Republican party, and playfully quotes the threats of his opponents:—
We have about a month before “disunion and anarchy,” and balls coming down from .the cockloft, etc., etc. In short, I expect there will be bloodshed and carnage.How little he suspected the deadly purpose which underlay those threats, and which was so soon to display itself in the great Rebellion! He returned to his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts; resumed his legal studies, his literary labors, his social habits, as before. He wrote:—
Do not fear that my head will be turned. . . . . As a nearer approach to politics enables me more clearly to understand the dignity of the pursuit, I see plainly that the way to be good for anything there is to mind my own business first. No man has a right to embark in politics without the capital of knowledge and experience. We are apt, reading our newspaper reports, to forget that the principal part of an M. C.'s work is done in the committee-room. A very little study would enable me to talk glibly on the floor of Congress; but a representative is a working man of business, and the unhappy young men who enter Congress with the notion that fluency and even sense will carry them through with credit, soon find themselves sinking under the multifarious business intrusted to them. To be sure, they may choose to neglect that business, but in
