s is not overstated when it is said that,
but for their labors and struggles, this country, instead of being all
free, would to-day be all slaveholding. The relative importance of
their work in creating, by means of a persistent agitation, an
opposition to human slavery that was powerful enough to compel the
attention of the public and force the machine politicians, after long
opposition, to admit the question into practical politics, cannot well
be overestimated.

They alone and single-handed fought the opening battles of a great
war, which, although overshadowed and obscured by later and more
dramatic events, were none the less gallantly waged and nobly won. It
is customary to speak of our Civil War as a four years' conflict. It
was really a thirty years' war, beginning when the pioneer
Abolitionists entered the field and declared for a life-and-death
struggle. It was then that the hardest battles were fought.

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