Page:Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Higginson).djvu/140

122 In this case the charge has an especial interest, because Margaret Fuller lived in the day when a great moral agitation was beginning to sweep over the land, and she, like all her contemporaries, must be judged in part by the test it applied.

It is a point never yet wholly cleared up, either by her printed memoirs or private letters, why she entered with somewhat tardy sympathy into the anti-slavery movement. Her personal friends were identified with it, including Dr. Channing, and more especially Mr. and Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring; also her nearest intimates of her own age, Messrs. Clarke and Channing. Miss Martineau, whom she admired, had entered ardently into it; but it was not until the agitation in regard to the annexation of Texas in 1844 that Miss Fuller was strongly aroused in regard to the encroachments of slavery. It is possible that the influence of her father, as a Jeffersonian Democrat, worked the other way; yet he had opposed the Missouri Compromise of 1820; and the anti-slavery tradition was strong in the family. It certainly was not the social influence of those who belonged to her classes and came to her conversations, for their influence tended, as will be presently shown, in a different direction.

In her diary of 1844, she wrote as follows: —

“Mrs. Loring here. They want something of me about Texas. Went to walk, but could not think about it. I don’t like to do anything else just yet, don’t feel ready. I never can do well more than one thing at