ood by him in the dark days of the Fugitive Slave Law,
the Chief Justice of the United States,--"Time and the wiser thought will
vindicate the illustrious statesman to whom Massachusetts, the country,
and humanity owe so much, but the state can ill afford the damage to its
own reputation which such a censure of such a man will inflict."

AMESBURY, 3d month, 8, 1873.

THE ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION OF 1833. (1874.)

In the gray twilight of a chill day of late November, forty years ago, a
dear friend of mine, residing in Boston, made his appearance at the old
farm-house in East Haverhill. He had been deputed by the abolitionists
of the city, William L. Garrison, Samuel E. Sewall, and others, to
inform me of my appointment as a delegate to the Convention about to be
held in Philadelphia for the formation of an American Anti-Slavery
Society, and to urge upon me the necessity of my attendance.

Few words of persuasion, however, were needed. I was unused to
travelling; my life had been spent on a secluded farm; and the journey,
mostly by stage-coach, at that time was really a formidable one.
Moreover, the few abolitionists were everywhere spoken against, their
persons threatened, and in some instances a price set on their heads by
Southern legislators. Pennsylvania was on the borders of slavery, and it
needed small effort of imagination to picture to one's self the breaking
up of the Convention and maltreatment of its members. This latter
consideration I do not think weighed much with me, although I was better
prepared for serious danger than for anything like personal indignity. I
had read Governor Trumbull's description of the tarring and feathering of
his hero MacFingal, when, after the application of the melted tar, the
feather-bed was ripped open and shaken over him, until

"Not Maia's son, with wings for ears,
Such plumes about his visage wears,
Nor Milton's six-winged angel gathers
Such superfluity of feathers,"

and I confess I was quite unwilling to undergo a martyrdom which my best
friends could scarcely refrain from laughing at. But a summons like that
of Garrison's bugle-blast could scarcely be unheeded by one who, from
birth and education, held fast the traditions of that earlier
abolitionism which, under the lead of Benezet and Woolman, had effaced
from the Society of Friends every vestige of slave-holding. I had thrown
myself, with a young man's fervid en