I write the more willingly because comparatively few now living remember the mad excitement of the slavery controversy in ante-bellum days.  The majority—­the living and the working masses of to-day—­will, doubtless, be gratified to have accurate pictures of scenes and events of which they have heard their seniors speak, that distinguished the most tempestuous period in our national history—­the one in which the wildest passions were aroused and indulged.  Then it was that the fiercest and bitterest agitation prevailed.  The war that followed did not increase this.  It rather modified it—­sobered it in view of the crisis at hand—­and served as a safety-valve for its escape.

For the same reason, the general public has now but slight comprehension of the trials endured by the Abolitionists for principle’s sake.  In many ways were they persecuted.  In society they were tabooed; in business shunned.  By the rabble they were hooted and pelted.  Clowns in the circus made them the subjects of their jokes.  Newspaper scribblers lampooned and libelled them.  Politicians denounced them.  By the Church they were regarded as very black sheep, and sometimes excluded from the fold.  And this state of things lasted for years, during which they kept up a steady agitation with the help of platform lecturers, and regularly threw away their votes—­so it was charged—­in a “third party” movement that seemed to be a hopeless venture.

Another inducement to the writer to take up the cause of the Abolitionists is the fact that he has always been proud to class himself as one of them.  He came into the world before Abolitionism, by that name, had been heard of; before the first Abolition Society was organized; before William Lloyd Garrison founded his Liberator, and before (not the least important circumstance) John Quincy Adams entered Congress.  He cannot remember when the slavery question was not discussed.  His sympathies at an early day went out to the slave.  He informed himself on the subject as well as a farmer boy might be expected to do in a household that received the most of its knowledge of current events from the columns of one weekly newspaper.  He cast his first vote for the ticket of the Abolitionists while they were yet a “third party.”

The community in which he then lived, although in the free State of Ohio, was strongly pro-slavery, being not far from the Southern border.  The population was principally from Virginia and Kentucky.  There were a few Abolitionists, and they occasionally tried to hold public meetings, but the gatherings were always broken up by mobs.

The writer very well remembers the satisfaction with which he, as a schoolboy, was accustomed to hear that there was to be another Abolition “turn-out.”  The occasion was certain to afford considerable excitement that was dear to the heart of a boy, and it had another recommendation.  The only room in the village—­“town” we called it—­for such affairs, except the churches, which were barred against “fanatics,” was the district schoolhouse, which, by common consent, was open to all comers, and as the windows and doors, through which missiles were hurled during Anti-Slavery gatherings, were always more or less damaged, “we boys” usually got a holiday or two while the building was undergoing necessary repairs.