Page:Thoreau - His Home, Friends and Books (1902).djvu/190

164 treasures, the lofty ideals and noble principles which were his.

During these same years national affairs were also approaching their crucial expression. The compromise of 1850, the new, more stringent, fugitive slave law of the same year, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, the long, fierce struggle in Kansas, the attack upon Charles Sumner in the Senate in 1856, the Dred Scott case, and the final message of the President urging the admission of Kansas with the stigma of slavery as her entrance-fee,—these and similar acts of this intense period awakened the lethargic North, and especially New England, to a realization of the deluge of tyranny which threatened to sweep over the republic and bear away her sacred "name and fame." Concord had long been excited over the question of anti-slavery. In 1837, Emerson had made there an address on this subject and to Concord, at sundry times, for personal and political sympathy, had come the four great leaders of abolition,—Garrison and Parker, Phillips and Sumner. As in all New England towns, however, there was a division of sentiment, deep, almost violent. In Boston and her contiguous towns the higher grades of society opposed the movement and visited, with social scorn, their own representatives, Phillips and Sumner, no less than the men of the