than for his briefs. The "Herald of Freedom" was established in Concord by the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society in 1835. Its first editor was Joseph Horace Kimball, who, in 1837, was sent, in company with James A. Thome, to observe and report the results of emancipation in the British West Indies. Not long after his return from this expedition he died of consumption, when Mr. Rogers, by the spontaneous suffrages of the Abolitionists of New Hampshire, was selected to fill his place. He made the paper as brilliant as it was able. His style was remarkable for terseness, for vivid flights of imagination, for odd and striking turns of thought, and for a wit all his own. The paper attained high popularity under his management, while personally he became a great favorite with all who had the privilege of his acquaintance. He was a man of exquisite taste and refinement, warm-hearted and hospitable, and therefore a most delightful host as well as guest. In the early days of the cause he was strictly Orthodox in opinion and feeling, but grew liberal, as many others did, as he observed how the clergy and the churches hardened their hearts against the cry of the slave. He attained at length to the honor of excommunication by a church that thought it worse to be an Abolitionist with a deficient creed than to be a slaveholder. During the later years of his life he carried his ideas of individual freedom so far that he could not tolerate a presiding officer in an anti-slavery meeting. This brought him into conflict with the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, which had founded the "Herald of Freedom," and made him its editor. The publisher claimed that the title to the paper had in some way lapsed, and that it was no longer the property of the Society. The Society, however, or its Executive Committee, still claimed it. Mr. Garrison, Mr. Quincy and others were summoned from Boston, as umpires in the dispute. They decided

that the title remained with the Society. It was the universal wish, however, that Mr. Rogers should continue to edit it. His health was seriously impaired at the time, and such was his extreme nervous sensibility that he took offence at the decision, and refused to acquiesce in it. A most unfortunate controversy was the result, and he became alienated from Mr. Garrison, without cause or reasonable provocation, as the latter thought and many others believed. In this state of mind he died in 1846. His estrangement from his old friends, and especially from Mr. Garrison, was a subject of general lamentation. It never could have happened, I am sure, but for a morbid sensitiveness that was the result of ill-health. This, I know, was the opinion of many of his best friends, though not of all of them. Mr. Garrison loved him tenderly, and was never for an instant conscious that he had done him wrong. Mr. Rogers remarked, at the time of the secession from the old Society, that "the quarrels of Abolitionists were better than other people's peace"; but I am afraid this philosophy did not console him in this last extremity. But I am sure that he and Garrison and Quincy are friends now. Surviving Abolitionists everywhere will gladly forget any faults of his last days the fruit, no doubt, of nervous prostration — and remember only his noble nature, his rare endowments, his ripe culture and his consecration to the cause of the slave. It is greatly to be regretted that the Rev. John Pierpont, in his Introduction to "A Collection from the Newspaper Writings" of Mr. Rogers, allowed himself to make statements of a partisan and most preposterous character respecting the controversy between Mr. Rogers and his old friends, for which he was afterwards constrained to apologize, and which he promised to correct in another edition which, however, was never published. Aside from this most mistaken partisanship, the book is a worthy monument of Mr. Rogers's character and genius.

Abby Kelley (now Mrs. Stephen S. Foster) was the first woman, after the Grimké sisters, to enter the field as an anti-slavery lecturer. No one who ever knew her doubted that she felt herself called of God to the work, and she entered upon it in a spirit of selfconsecration that inspired the deepest respect of all observers. She did not begin in any careless or random way, but studied her subject thoroughly. She no doubt expected to become a target for the pro-slavery press, but I am sure she did not anticipate the weight of odium that fell upon her on account of the brave step she felt it her duty to take. There are newspapers that ought to be blushing to-day, and editors who should be clothed in sackcloth and ashes, for their shameful abuse of this noble woman. Her exalted worth did not exempt her from insinuations of the vilest sort. She was denounced and ridiculed by the pulpit as well as the press, and her meetings were sometimes assailed by mobs. She bore all this load of reproach with unmurmuring patience, keeping quietly on in her work, until at last she conquered her true place in the public esteem. She was a very popular and successful lecturer, and labored much not only in New England, but in New York, Pennsylvania and the West. In Ohio, and particularly on the Western Reserve, she did a noble work. She may be said with truth to have founded "The Anti-Slavery Bugle," and I doubt if the Western Anti-Slavery Society, which, as an auxiliary of the National Society, did such noble work, especially in Eastern Ohio, would ever have been organized but for her. James Russell Lowell describes her in these lines:

"A Judith there, turned Quakeress,

Sits Abby, in her modest dress.

No nobler gift of heart or brain,

No life more white from spot or stain,
Was e'er on Freedom's altar laid

Than hers- the simple Quaker maid."

It was Mrs. Foster's misfortune to be often confounded by the press (sometimes mischievously) with Abigail Folsom, an innocent monomaniac on the subject of free speech, who used to torment the anti-slavery meetings with grotesque interruptions, and who was not unfrequently removed by gentle force. The mobocratic fringe that so often hung around the doors at anti-slavery gatherings always cheered this woman vociferously whenever she arose to speak. She accepted such cheers as "the voice of the people," and sometimes annoyed us excessively by her insane talk, which, however, was frequently spiced with the keenest wit. Once I assisted in carrying her gently out of the Marlboro' Chapel. She made it a point of conscience not to resist. She was placed in a chair, and as Wendell Phillips, William A. White and myself were carrying her down the aisle, through a crowd, she exclaimed, "I'm better off than my Master was; He had but one ass to ride I have three to carry me." Mrs. Folsom was perfectly rational on every subject except that of free speech. She was a woman of rare benevolence, and Theodore Parker and others often made her their almoner.

XVIII.

Formation of the Liberty Party - Complicated with "New Organization" - Mr. Garrison's Opposition, and the Reasons thereof Samuel E. Sewall and John G. Whittier Parties Limited by the Constitution - In Danger of Degenerating-Slavery Abolished by Southern Madness rather than by Northern Principle Moral Agitation of Paramount Importance-Testimony of Frederick Douglass.

WHILE the divisions of which I have given an account in previous chapters had their origin mainly in sectarian fears and jealousies, and in the delusion that large numbers of Orthodox ministers and laymen stood ready to espouse the cause if they could only do so without endorsing or following the lead of Mr. Garrison, they were yet complicated, to a large extent, with the organization of the Liberty political party. It is probably true that the first man to suggest such a party, and to take steps toward its formation, was the late Hon. Myron Holley, of Rochester, N. Y., who was, I suspect, as profoundly indifferent as any man could well have been to the complaints of Orthodox Abolitionists in respect to Mr. Garrison. Many of the New Organizationists, however, seized upon that movement, and used it as a makeweight to effect their ends. The organization of the Liberty party, if it had stood simply upon its own merits, might and probably would have left the anti-slavery societies intact, to pursue the work for which they were formed. It might have weakened, but could hardly have destroyed them. Mr. Garrison and others would have opposed the measure strenuously, but not in such a way as to give