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[38] morning discourse on the state of the country to an1 audience that filled Music Hall and applauded his2 strongest utterances. A week later, he and Mr. Phillips3 conducted the funeral services of Francis Jackson, who passed away, after a long illness, on the 14th of November, in his 73d year.4 Like Charles F. Hovey, he left a noble bequest to the cause so dear to them both, and provided a fund which lasted beyond the abolition of slavery and helped to swell the contributions for the education of the freedmen.5 More fortunate than Hovey, he survived to see the beginning of the end, and to know that the sum of all villanies was fast tottering to its fall.

By the capture of Port Royal and Beaufort in November, and the immediate emancipation thus effected of the thousands of slaves in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, the problem of the education and civilization of the degraded blacks of the rice and cotton belt of that section was presented to the consideration of the philanthropic people of the North, and a few weeks later it was seriously accepted and grappled with; but the last weeks of the year were absorbed in exultation over the victory on the Carolina coast and the seizure of the rebel emissaries Mason and Slidell on the steamer Trent. That the chief promoter of the Fugitive Slave Law should himself be6 incarcerated in a Boston fort seemed a rare bit of poetic justice, and it was natural that Mr. Phillips's allusion to it in his lecture (on ‘The War’) at New York, in7 December, should be rapturously applauded. The lecture itself

1 Nov. 10, 1861;

2 Lib. 31.182.

3 Nov. 18.

4 They were held in the same parlors of the old Hollis Street house in which the ladies of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society met after the mob of 1835, and received a new ally in Harriet Martineau (ante, 2: 52, 57, 60).

5 The amount was $10,000, subsequently increased by residuary rights. Mr. Garrison, who for twenty-five years was constantly indebted to Mr. Jackson's generous help in meeting the deficit of the Liberator, was also the recipient of a liberal bequest, and the sum of $5,000 was given in aid of the Woman's Rights movement. Through a contest of the will and an unjust decision of the Supreme Court, this last provision was subsequently annulled, in consequence of which a daughter of Mr. Jackson (Mrs. Eliza F. Eddy) twenty years later bequeathed over $50,000 for the same object, as her protest against the violation of her father's will.

6 James M. Mason.

7 Dec. 19.

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