North--an easy-going wish to
avoid direct issue with the South on a question supposed to be
peculiarly theirs. But the winds of Heaven owned to no decorous limit in
Mason and Dixon's line; and there were larger winds blowing than
these--winds rising in the vast laboratories of the general human heart,
and destined to sweep into all the vast spaces of human want and woe.
The South was finding, through her blacks' perpetual defiance of torture
and death for freedom, that there was perhaps something, even in a
negro, which most vexatiously refused to be counted in with the figures
of the auctioneer's bill of sale; and now the North's lesson was coming
to her--that the soul of a century's civilization was still less
purchasable than the soul of a slave. A growing feeling of humanity was
stirring through the northern States. It was not the work, I think, of
any man or body of men; it was rather itself a creative force, and made
men and bodies of men the results of its awakening influence. To such a
power, my father's nature was quickly responsive. Both his head and his
heart recognized the terrible wrongs of the enslaved, and the urgency
with which they pressed for remedy; but where was the means? From the
first, he felt that the movement which brought Freedom and Slavery
fairly into the field and squarely against each other, threw unnecessary
obstacles in its own way by the violence with which it was begun and
prosecuted. If he were to work at all in the cause, he determined to
work within the limits of recognized law. The Colonization Society held
out a good hope; at least, he could see no other as close to the true
but closer to the feasible; and, after connecting himself with it, he
seems to have been content for a while on the score of political
matters, and to have devoted himself to what he had adopted as his chief
purpose in life. This was, enlarging the sphere of female education, and
giving it a more vigorous tone. To this he tasked all his abilities. His
convictions on the subject were very earnest; his strength of character
sufficient to bear them out; so that, in a short time, he was able to
establish his school so firmly in the respect of this community, that,
for twenty-five years, all the odium that his activity in the
Anti-slavery cause drew upon him did not for a moment abate the public
confidence accorded to his professional power.

It was in 1836, in one of his vacations, that his mind was violently
turne