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7th (search for this): chapter 10
love of liberty which at last made him turn the scale. Then came the John Brown affair, as described in a previous chapter; and there followed after this, in the winter of 1860, a curious outbreak in New England itself of the old proscriptive feeling. There ensued an interval when the Boston Abolitionists were again called upon to combine, in order to prevent public meetings from being broken up and the house of Wendell Phillips from being mobbed. Phillips was speaking at that time on Sundays at the Boston Music Hall, and it was necessary to protect the assembly by getting men to act together, under orders, and guard the various approaches to the hall. I was placed at the head of a company formed for this purpose, and it was strange to find how little advance had been made beyond the old perplexity in organizing reformers. There was more willingness to arm than formerly, but that was all. Mr. George W. Smalley has lately given a graphic description of that period, and has desc
August (search for this): chapter 10
Rufus Saxton, U. S. A., an officer with whom, by a curious coincidence, I was later to have the most intimate connection. I had been engaged upon this organization between October, 1861, and February, 1862, and the renewed disappointment was very hard to bear. In several of my printed essays, especially at the end of that called A letter to a young contributor, I find traces of this keen regret; and when finally a new nine months regiment, the Fifty-First Massachusetts, was called out, in August, my wife being in somewhat better health, I could keep out of the affair no longer, but opened a recruiting office in Worcester. Being already well known among the young men there, through the athletic clubs and drill clubs, I had little difficulty in getting much more than the required number, giving a strong nucleus for a second company, which was transferred to the command of my friend John S. Baldwin, now of the Worcester Spy. It is almost impossible here to reproduce the emotions of
1857 AD (search for this): chapter 10
Court in carrying their slaves with them into Free States and holding them there. Such things accounted for the temporary development of a Northern disunion feeling about that time; and a national convention at Cleveland, following the state convention, had been fully planned by a committee of which I was chairman,--the call for this receiving the names of more than six thousand signers, representing all of the Free States,--when there came the formidable financial panic which made the year 1857 so memorable. As this calamity had begun in Ohio, and was felt most severely there, it was decided that the convention should be postponed, and this, as it proved, forever. In the following year Senator Seward made his great speech in which he accepted fully the attitude, which was the basis of our position, that the whole anti-slavery contest was a thing inevitable,--an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces, --and that the United States must and would sooner or lat
January 2nd, 1857 AD (search for this): chapter 10
eedful, in a certain contingency, to let the Union slide; and when Whittier had written in the original form of his poem on Texas,-- Make our Union-bond a chain, We will snap its links in twain We will stand erect again! These men were not Garrisonians or theoretical disunionists, but the pressure of events seemed, for the moment, to be driving us all in their direction. I find that at the jubilant twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (January 2, 1857) I said, in Faneuil Hall, To-morrow may call us to some work so stern that the joys of this evening will seem years away. To-morrow may make this evening only the revelry by night before Waterloo. Under this conviction I took an active part with the late Francis W. Bird and a few other Republicans and some Garrisonian Abolitionists in calling a state disunion convention at Worcester on January 15, 1857; but the Republican party was by no means ready for a movement so extreme, though s
January 15th, 1857 AD (search for this): chapter 10
twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (January 2, 1857) I said, in Faneuil Hall, To-morrow may call us to some work so stern that the joys of this evening will seem years away. To-morrow may make this evening only the revelry by night before Waterloo. Under this conviction I took an active part with the late Francis W. Bird and a few other Republicans and some Garrisonian Abolitionists in calling a state disunion convention at Worcester on January 15, 1857; but the Republican party was by no means ready for a movement so extreme, though some of its leaders admitted frankly that it was well for the North to suggest that freedom was more valuable than even the Union. The Kansas question, it must be remembered, was yet impending, and it was obviously possible that it might result in another Slave State, leading the way to others still. Moreover, passports were now for the first time refused to free colored men, under the Taney decision, o
1860 AD (search for this): chapter 10
oved too strong for us, and that the union feeling itself was finally aroused to do a work which the antislavery purpose alone could not have accomplished; yet we acted at the time according to our light, and we know from the testimony of Lincoln himself that it was the New England Abolitionists from whom he learned that love of liberty which at last made him turn the scale. Then came the John Brown affair, as described in a previous chapter; and there followed after this, in the winter of 1860, a curious outbreak in New England itself of the old proscriptive feeling. There ensued an interval when the Boston Abolitionists were again called upon to combine, in order to prevent public meetings from being broken up and the house of Wendell Phillips from being mobbed. Phillips was speaking at that time on Sundays at the Boston Music Hall, and it was necessary to protect the assembly by getting men to act together, under orders, and guard the various approaches to the hall. I was plac
January 24th, 1861 AD (search for this): chapter 10
eign of Terror, who took a pinch of snuff from his snuff-box while looking on the crowd. This was never more conspicuously the case than at the annual convention of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, just after a meeting on the anniversary of John Brown's execution had been broken up by a mob of very much the same social grade with that which had formerly mobbed Garrison. I did not happen to be present at the John Brown gathering, being in Worcester; but at the larger convention January 24, 1861), held at Tremont Temple, I was again in service with the same body of followers already described to defend the meeting and the speakers, if needful. The body of the hall was solidly filled with grave Abolitionists and knitting women, but round the doors and galleries there was a noisy crowd of young fellows, mostly well dressed and many of them well educated, who contrived, by shouting and by singing uproarious songs, to drown the voices of the speakers, and to compel Phillips himsel
October, 1861 AD (search for this): chapter 10
t half the necessary ten companies provided for, in different parts of the State, when one of the sudden stoppages of recruiting occurred, and the whole affair proved abortive. It was understood with Governor Andrew that while I was to raise the regiment, I was to be only second in command, the colonel being Captain Rufus Saxton, U. S. A., an officer with whom, by a curious coincidence, I was later to have the most intimate connection. I had been engaged upon this organization between October, 1861, and February, 1862, and the renewed disappointment was very hard to bear. In several of my printed essays, especially at the end of that called A letter to a young contributor, I find traces of this keen regret; and when finally a new nine months regiment, the Fifty-First Massachusetts, was called out, in August, my wife being in somewhat better health, I could keep out of the affair no longer, but opened a recruiting office in Worcester. Being already well known among the young men t
February, 1862 AD (search for this): chapter 10
y ten companies provided for, in different parts of the State, when one of the sudden stoppages of recruiting occurred, and the whole affair proved abortive. It was understood with Governor Andrew that while I was to raise the regiment, I was to be only second in command, the colonel being Captain Rufus Saxton, U. S. A., an officer with whom, by a curious coincidence, I was later to have the most intimate connection. I had been engaged upon this organization between October, 1861, and February, 1862, and the renewed disappointment was very hard to bear. In several of my printed essays, especially at the end of that called A letter to a young contributor, I find traces of this keen regret; and when finally a new nine months regiment, the Fifty-First Massachusetts, was called out, in August, my wife being in somewhat better health, I could keep out of the affair no longer, but opened a recruiting office in Worcester. Being already well known among the young men there, through the at
May, 1862 AD (search for this): chapter 10
and were being rationed, employed, and taught under the direction of missionaries, agents, and teachers from the North; these being sometimes admirable, but sometimes incompetent, tyrannical, or fanatical. Between these and the troops there existed a constant jealousy, and General Saxton, in a position requiring superhuman patience and tact, was obliged to mediate between the two parties. Major-General Hunter, at the head of the department, had been the very first to arm the blacks (in May, 1862), and had adhered, after his fashion, to that policy,--my regiment being a revival of that early experiment; but some of his staff were bitterly opposed to any such enlistment, and thwarted him as soon as his back was turned,--a thing not difficult, as he was indolent, forgetful, changeable, and easily accessible to flattery. While, therefore, my regiment had a nominal support, it was constantly hindered: there were difficulties as to uniforms, medicines, and guns; it was often necessary
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