Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/85

Rh stability, cursing everybody who, as he thought, “wanted to make trouble;” there was the man who “had always been opposed to slavery as much as anybody,” but who detested the abolitionists be cause they would sacrifice the country to their one idea, presumed to sit in judgment upon other good people's motives, and accused them of “compounding with crime;” there was the rabble, bent upon keeping the negro still beneath them in the social scale, and delighting in riotous excesses as a congenial pastime, — all these elements coöperating in the persecution of a few men, who in all sincerity followed the dictates of their consciences, and, somewhat ahead of their time, demanded the general and immediate application of principles which, at the North, almost everybody had accepted in the abstract.

But this violent persecution could not accomplish its object. On the contrary, it could scarcely fail to strengthen the cause it was designed to put down. Many of the “intelligent and respectable citizens,” who had countenanced it, remembered it with shame when the first heat was over. Who, after all, were the abolitionists, those “incendiaries,” “fiends,” “enemies of human society”? Who were the Lundys, Garrisons, and Tappans? They were men of pure lives who, believing slavery to be a great wrong which must be abolished, the great crime of the age which must be expiated, devoted themselves to an unpopular cause, and, serving it, suffered obloquy and social ostracism