diate emancipation,
even at the cost of the Union and all that its destruction involved,
it was said that he was influenced by a mean spirit of expediency and
a base truckling to the rank and wealth which sustained this insult to
humanity.

They little knew him. The man who at twenty-five had torn himself from
the associations and friendships of his youth, and, moved solely by love
of truth, had imperilled all his worldly hopes by joining himself to a
small religious body, despised and hated as heretics by most of those
whom he had been trained to love and respect, was not the man at fifty
to blanch from the expression of any honest conviction; and, to sum
up all in one word, he held his views upon this subject, as upon all
others, bravely and honestly, and stated them clearly and positively,
when he felt it his duty to speak, although evasion or silence would
have been the more comfortable alternative. "I doubt," says Mr.
Chadwick,[129] "if Garrison or Parker had a keener sense than his of
the enormity of human slavery. Before the first Abolitionist Society
had been organized, he was one of the organizers of a committee for
the discussion and advancement of emancipation. I have read all of
his principal writings upon slavery, and it would be hard to find more
terrible indictments of its wickedness. He stated its defence in terms
that Foote and Yancey might have made their own, only to sweep it all
away with the blazing ubiquity that the negro was a man and an immortal
soul. Yet when the miserable days of fugitive-slave rendition were
upon us, he was with Gannett in the sad conviction that the law must
be obeyed. We could not see it then; but we can see to-day that it was
possible for men as good and true as any men alive to take this stand.
And nothing else brings out the nobleness of Dewey into such bold relief
as the fact, that the immeasurable torrent of abuse that greeted his
expressed opinion did not in any least degree avail to make him one of
the pro-slavery faction. The concession of 1850 was one which he would
not have made, and it must be the last. Welcome to him the iron flail
of war, whose tribulation saved the immortal wheat of justice and purged
away the chaff of wrong to perish in unquenchable fire!"

His feelings retained their early sensitiveness

[FN The Rev. John W. Chadwick, of Brooklyn, N. Y., In a sermon preached
after Dr. Dewey's death.]

[130] in a somewhat remarkable degree. In a letter wri