s of slavery; for by thus kindling
the Protestant jealousy of our people against the Pope, and enlisting
them in a crusade against the foreigner, the South could all the
more successfully push forward its schemes.

On this ground, as an anti-slavery man, I opposed it with all my
might from the beginning to the end of its life. For a time it
carried everything with a high hand. It was not only irresistible
in numbers, but it fought in the dark. It pretended to act openly
and in friendly conference with its enemies as to questions which
it had already settled in secret conclave. Its opponents did not
know how to wage war against it, because they did not know who were
their friends. If a meeting was called to expose and denounce its
schemes, it was drowned in the Know-Nothing flood which, at the
appointed time, completely overwhelmed the helpless minority. This
happened in my own county and town, where thousands of men, including
many of my old Free Soil brethren, assembled as an organized mob
to suppress the freedom of speech; and they succeeded by brute
force in taking possession of every building in which their opponents
could meet, and silencing them by savage yells. At one time I
think I had less than a dozen political friends in the State, and
I could see in the glad smile which lighted up the faces of my old-
time enemies that they considered me beyond the reach of political
resurrection. But I never for a moment intermitted my warfare, or
doubted that in the end the truth would be vindicated, although I
did not dream that in less than two years I would be the recognized
leader of the men composing this mob, who would be found denying
their membership of this secret order, or confessing it with shame.
It was a strange dispensation; and no record of independent journalism
was ever more honorable than that of the "New York Tribune" and
"National Era," during their heroic and self-sacrificing fight
against this organized scheme of bigotry and proscription, which
can only be remembered as the crowning and indelible shame of our
politics. It admits of neither defense or palliation, and I am
sorry to find Henry Wilson's "History of the Rise and Fall of the
Slave Power" disfigured by his elaborate efforts to whitewash it
into respectability, and give it a decent place in the records of
the past.

Such were the elements which mingled and commingled in the political
ferment of 1854, and out of which an anti-slave