Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/89

 therefore, the effort of Brown could not be justified by logic or reconciled with the duty to obey the law, there was an undercurrent of hope that in some way he might succeed, and when he was captured, tried and hanged, the result was accepted with the sense that the incident had not been altogether closed.

Jesse Conway lived in a little stone house at the entrance of the bridge which crossed the Schuylkill and there gathered the tolls—one penny for a foot passenger, five cents for a one-horse carriage and ten cents for a two-horse carriage. He and our neighbors, the Jacobs family, were Abolitionists. The men of the Whitaker family, old-line Whigs turned adrift, supported Fillmore in 1856 and Bell in 1860, but the women, more emotional, agreed with the Jacobs family, and I shouted in 1856 as loudly as I could for Fremont. John Jacobs subscribed for the New York Tribune, which daily lay at the toll house until he called for it, and there I managed to read doctrine which could not be found at home. One day I sat on the wooden bench in front of the toll house and read a speech delivered the night before at the Cooper Institute in New York by a man named Lincoln, from Illinois. It made a great impression upon me and when John Jacobs came along I called his attention to it as the argument of a man of great ability and absolutely unanswerable.

The political feeling became intense, for the reason that the issues had been swept away from questions of mere sordid interest and now appealed to the underlying human sympathies. John Hickman, the member of Congress from Chester County, a lifelong Democrat, no doubt somewhat influenced by the Quaker sentiment surrounding him abandoned Buchanan when the President supported the Lecompton Constitution maintaining slavery in Kansas, and established a national reputation. He was a slim, dark-eyed man with a power for vigorous, sarcastic and even vindictive eloquence. When he made a speech something or somebody was rended. A story whispered around over 6