Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/80

70 But now another problem pressed to the front, far more portentous than all the questions of banks and deposits and lands, which agitated the public mind under Jackson's turbulent presidency. In Benton's “Abridgment of the Debates of Congress” the following short foot-note is attached to the Senate proceedings of January 7, 1836: “At this session the slavery discussion became installed in Congress, and has too unhappily kept its place ever since.” The slavery question had assumed a new character.

The great excitement called forth by the admission of Missouri had been allayed by compromise. During the decade which followed, the slave-holding interest had indeed made itself felt in politics, but usually in disguise. The subject of slavery in its large moral and political aspects had been the occasional topic of discussion, but only in a passing way, except among a class of people who soon were to rise into unlooked-for importance, — the “abolitionists.”

A few old anti-slavery societies had continued a quiet existence, most of them in the South, without creating any alarm. Then appeared on the stage, with all his peculiar strength, that formidable revolutionary factor in human affairs, the man of one idea. Anti-slavery missionaries came forth, who carried the word, spoken and written, from place to place: first, Benjamin Lundy, a mild-mannered Quaker mechanic, whose “heart was deeply grieved at the gross abomination,” when he