contest
with a will; and from that time forth I was subjected to a torrent
of billingsgate which rivalled the fish market. Words were neither
minced nor mollified, but made the vehicles of political wrath and
the explosions of personal malice. The charge of "abolitionism"
was flung at me everywhere, and it is impossible now to realize
the odium then attaching to that term by the general opinion. I
was an "amalgamationist" and a "woolly-head." I was branded as
the "apostle of disunion" and "the orator of free-dirt." It was
a standing charge of the Whigs that I carried in my pocket a lock
of the hair of Frederick Douglass, to regale my senses with its
aroma when I grew faint. They declared that my audiences consisted
of "eleven men, three boys, and a negro," and sometimes I could
not deny this inventory was not very far from the truth. I was
threatened with mob violence by my own neighbors, and treated as
if slavery had been an established institution of the State, with
its machinery of overseers and background of pauperized whites;
while these same Whigs, as if utterly unconscious of the irony of
their professions, uniformly resolved, in their conventions, that
"the Whig party is the only true Free Soil party."

I was not, of course, a non-resistant in the warfare, and for two
months I gave myself up to the work absolutely. I was seriously
embarrassed in the outset by the question of transportation, having
neither horse nor carriage, nor the financial ability to procure
either; but an anti-slavery Quaker, and personal friend, named
Jonathan Macy, came to my rescue. He furnished me an old white
horse, fully seventeen hands high, and rather thin in flesh, but
which served my purpose pretty well. I named him "Old Whitey," in
honor of General Taylor's famous war steed, and sallied forth in
the work of the campaign. Having a first-class pair of lungs and
much physical endurance, I frequently spoke as often as three times
a day, and generally from two to three hours at each meeting. I
spoke at cross-roads, in barns, in pork houses, in saw-mills, in
any place in which a few or many people would hear me; but I was
rarely permitted to enter any of the churches. I was so perfectly
swallowed up in my work and dominated by the singleness of my
purpose, that I took no thought of anything else; and the vigor of
my invective in dealing with the scurrilous attacks of my assailants
was very keenly realized, and, I believe