cabins on this place that the Edmondson family established their home
     after moving in from the country.  Miss Miner, speaking of the
     establishment of her school at its new location, says:  “Emily and I
     lived here alone, unprotected except by God, the rowdies occasionally
     stoning the house at evening and we nightly retired in the
     expectation that the house would be fired before morning.  Emily and I
     have been seen practicing shooting with a pistol.”—­Myrtilla Miner,
     “A Memoir,” Congressional Library; “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

The parents of the children, however, were not yet entirely relieved of the fears that had so long haunted them, for there were still the two youngest children, Louisa and Joseph, whom the good mother frequently alluded to as “the last two drops of blood in her heart,” and although she had scarcely ever seen a railroad train, she determined to go to New York herself to see what could be done and to thank the good people who had already brought so much of happiness to herself and family.  While the mother was in that city the girls were brought to see her and in later years she often delighted to tell of their happy meeting and of the good white folks who were brought together to hear her story.  She returned to Washington at the end of a week, carrying the assurance that the money would be provided for the redemption of the last two of her children.

     Mrs. Louisa Joy, the last of the “Edmondson Children,” died only a
     short while ago.

[13] Note.—­This personal narrative of Samuel Edmondson was related by himself at his home in Anacostia where he died several years ago.

LORENZO DOW[1]

This is the record of a remarkable and eccentric white man who devoted himself to a life of singular labor and self-denial.  In any consideration of the South one could not avoid giving at least passing notice to Lorenzo Dow as the foremost itinerant preacher of his time, as the first Protestant who expounded the gospel in Alabama and Mississippi, and as a reformer who, at the very moment when cotton was beginning to be supreme, presumed to tell the South that slavery was wrong.

He arrests attention—­this gaunt, restless preacher.  With his long hair, his flowing beard, his harsh voice, and his wild gesticulation, he was so rude and unkempt as to startle all conservative hearers.  Said one of his opponents:  “His manners (are) clownish in the extreme; his habit and appearance more filthy than a savage Indian, his public discourses a mere rhapsody, the substance often an insult upon the gospel.”  Said another as to his preaching in Richmond:  “Mr. Dow’s clownish manners, his heterodox and schismatic proceedings, and his reflections against the Methodist Episcopal Church, in a late production of his on church government, are impositions on common sense, and furnish the principal reasons why he will be discountenanced by the Methodists.”