[19] found that the business was not more than one person could do, and not enough to support two families. So he withdrew from the co-partnership with Boggs, and in May 1860 removed to Galena, Illinois, and took a clerkship in a leather shop there belonging to his father. Politics now began to interest him, and his reflexions on them at the moment when the War of Secession was approaching I must quote:
Up to the Mexican war there were a few out and out abolitionists, men who carried their hostility to slavery into all elections, from those for a justice of the peace up to the Presidency of the United States. They were noisy but not numerous. But the great majority of people at the North, where slavery did not exist, were opposed to the institution, and looked upon its existence in any part of the country as unfortunate. They did not hold the States where slavery existed responsible for it, and believed that protection should be given to the right of property in slaves until some satisfactory way could be reached to be rid of the institution. Opposition to slavery was a creed of neither political party. But with the inauguration of the Mexican war, in fact with the annexation of Texas, the inevitable conflict commenced. As
