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Southern anti-slavery leaders emigrated to Ohio during the next few years, "leaving Ephraim joined to his idols"; and Southern men in Congress now replied with increasing earnestness to the petitions which came from Northern abolitionists.

Thee mustn't be uneasy. Thee's among friends." A flood of emotions crept over the bosom of Moses when his kind friends left the room. Was this freedom, and was this the long wished for North? and were these the Abolitionists of whom he had heard so much in the South? They who would allure the colored people from their homes in the South and then leave them to freeze and starve in the North?

The excitement and eagerness there were very great, and they were perhaps as great in the North. But in the North the matter seemed to me to be regarded from a different point of view. As a rule, the men of the North are not abolitionists. It is quite certain that they were not so before secession began.

At the beginning of the secession movement the North slumbered and slept. Even South Carolina's withdrawal from the Union caused little alarm. "She will be glad enough to come back before long," prophesied many. As the revolution progressed there was a gradual awakening, but division of opinion paralyzed action. Ultra Abolitionists, with a few others, urged that the South be let go in peace.

Dicey's predilections lead him to make a generous, although discriminating, estimate of those men who, in time past, have endeavored to serve their country by leaving the level commonplaces of respectable citizenship. It is no slight praise to say that his chapter upon the New-England Abolitionists is clear and just.

The abolitionists believed from the first, that the tendency of slavery is to produce, on the part of the whites, looseness of morals, disdain of the wholesome restraints of law, and a ferocity of temper, found, only in solitary instances, in those countries where slavery is unknown.

How different are the statesmen, who insist "on the right to refuse to attend to a petition," from Him, who says, "Whoso stoppeth his ears at the cry of the poor, he also shall cry himself, but shall not be heard." And who are poor, if it be not those for whom the abolitionists cry? They must even cry by proxy.

When in 1856 Herndon and his friends began to organize to support armed resistance in Kansas, Lincoln remonstrated with them successfully. Then came the parting of the ways, Republican, Democrat, or Know-nothing? The Illinois Abolitionists threw themselves heartily into the Republican movement. At its first State convention, at Bloomington, Lincoln was the great figure.

Abolitionists had meantime evolved a precisely contradictory theory. They asserted that the Constitution gave no warrant for property in man, except as held under state laws; that with this exception freedom was guaranteed to all; that Congress had no more right to make a slave than it had to make a king; and that it was the duty of Congress to maintain freedom in all the Territories.

Douglass spoke out on all issues through its pages, and he continued to tour the country lecturing before audiences of both colors and discussing matters of policy with other abolitionists. He did not believe in merely exercising patience and obedience. Rather, he believed it was necessary to prick the white man's conscience with moral persuasion.