ti-slavery. The Covenanters, before it was adopted, denounced it as a
"Covenant with death and an agreement with hell." I had long ago become
familiar with the arguments on that side, and I concluded they were
fallacious, and could not go back to them even for a welcome into the
abolition ranks.

The political action wing of the anti-slavery party had given formal
notice that no woman need apply for a place among them. True, there was
a large minority who dissented from this action, but there was division
enough, without my furnishing a cause for contention. So I took pains to
make it understood that I belonged to no party. I was fighting slavery
on the frontier plan of Indian warfare, where every man is
Captain-lieutenants, all the corporals and privates of his company. I
was like the Israelites in the days when there was no king, and "every
man did that which, was right in his own eyes."

It seemed good unto me to support James G. Birney, for President, and to
promulgate the principles of the platform on which he stood in the last
election. This I would do, and no man had the right or power to stop
me. My paper was a six column weekly, with a small Roman letter head, my
motto, "Speak unto the children of Israel that they go forward," the
names of my candidates at the head of the editorial column and the
platform inserted as standing matter.

It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did the
American eagle catch sight of it, than he swooned and fell off his
perch. Democratic roosters straightened out their necks and ran
screaming with terror. Whig coons scampered up trees and barked
furiously. The world was falling and every one had "heard it, saw it,
and felt it."

It appeared that on some inauspicious morning each one of three-fourths
of the secular editors from Maine to Georgia had gone to his office
suspecting nothing, when from some corner of his exchange list there
sprang upon him such a horror as he had little thought to see.

A woman had started a political paper! A woman! Could he believe his
eyes? A woman! Instantly he sprang to his feet and clutched his
pantaloons, shouted to the assistant editor, when he, too, read and
grasped frantically at his cassimeres, called to the reporters and
pressmen and typos and devils, who all rushed in, heard the news, seized
their nether garments and joined the general chorus, "My breeches! oh,
my breeches!" Here was a woman resolved to steal their panta