Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/581

Rh she gained an audience—in the open air, in school house, barn, depot, church, or public hall, on week day or Sunday, as she found opportunity." And, incredible as it will soon seem, if it does not appear so already, "for listening to her on Sunday many men and women were expelled from their churches."

When the abolitionists of Rhode Island were seeking to defeat the restricted constitution of the Dorr party, already referred to in this volume, Abby Kelley was more than once mobbed in the old town hall in the city of Providence, and pelted with bad eggs.

And what can be said of the gifted authoress of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Harriet Beecher Stowe? Happy woman must she be that to her was given the power in such unstinted measure to touch and move the popular heart! More than to reason or religion are we indebted to the influence which this wonderful delineation of American chattel slavery produced on the public mind.

Nor must I omit to name the daughter of the excellent Myron Holly, who in her youth and beauty espoused the cause of the slave, nor of Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown, for when the slave had few friends and advocates they were noble enough to speak their best word in his behalf.

Others there were who, though they were not known on the platform, were none the less earnest and effective for anti-slavery in their more retired lives. There were many such to greet me and welcome me to my newly-found heritage of freedom. They met me as a brother, and by their kind consideration did much to make endurable the rebuffs I encountered elsewhere. At the anti-slavery office in Providence, Rhode Island, I remember with a peculiar interest Lucinda Wilmarth, whose acceptance of life's duties and labors, and whose heroic struggle with sickness and death, taught me more than one