Where there is the will there is a way, and it was but a few months after that conversation when Dr. Bailey forwarded one hundred dollars to Mrs. Stowe as a retaining fee for her services in the cause of the slave, and lo! the result, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”  As it progressed he sent her another, and then another hundred dollars.  Was ever money so well expended?

That grand old lion, Joshua R. Giddings, had also passed through the mob, and as I went with him to be presented to President Taylor, a woman in the crowd stepped back, drew away her skirts, and with a snarl exclaimed,

“A pair of abolitionists!”

The whole air of Freedom’s capital thrilled and palpitated with hatred of her and her cause.  On the question of the pending Fugitive Slave Bill, the feeling was intense and bitterly partisan, although not a party measure.  Mr. Taylor, the Whig President, had pronounced the bill an insult to the North, and stated his determination to veto it.  Fillmore, the Vice-President, was in favor of it.  So, Freedom looked to a man owning three hundred slaves, while slavery relied on “a Northern man with Southern principles.”  President Taylor was hated by the South, was denounced as a traitor to his section, while Southern men and women fawned upon and flattered Fillmore.  Webster, the great Whig statesman of the North, had bowed the knee to Baal, while Col.  Benton, of Missouri, was on the side of Freedom.

The third, or anti-slavery party, represented by Chase and Hale in the Senate, was beginning to make itself felt, and must be crushed and stamped out at all hazards—­the infant must be strangled in its cradle.

While abolition was scoffed at by hypocritical priests as opening a door to amalgamation, here, in the nation’s capital, lived some of our most prominent statesmen in open concubinage with negresses, adding to their income by the sale of their own children, while one could neither go out nor stay in without meeting indisputable testimony of the truth of Thomas Jefferson’s statement:  “The best blood of Virginia runs in the veins of her slaves.”  But the case which interested me most was a family of eight mulattoes, bearing the image and superscription of the great New England statesman, who paid the rent and grocery bills of their mother as regularly as he did those of his wife.

Pigs were the scavengers, mud and garbage the rule, while men literally wallowed in the mire of licentiousness and strong drink.  In Congress they sat and loafed with the soles of their boots turned up for the inspection of the ladies in the galleries.  Their language and gestures as they expectorated hither and thither were often as coarse as their positions, while they ranted about the “laws and Constitution,” and cracked their slave-whips over the heads of the dough-faces sent from the Northern States.