Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1886 edition. Excerpt: ...that General Wm. Birney is now engaged on a biography of his late father which will be of great value and interest. Frank Wade, it was insisted, must leave his party and join it. Mr. Giddings was denounced, yet he was to abandon his organization while Wade still grasped its remains, fossilized in his hands. If the Whigs hated it, the Garrisonians did the more abundantly, and so the wars within a war would go on. Men in the struggling grasp of a common great enemy will still find time to clutch each other's throats over the things of means and leaderships. This many-cornered war was to gather strength and fierceness till everything was hidden and lost in the smoke and din of the battlefield, no longer a figure of speech. Much important matter occurring in congress must be passed without note. Mr. Slade of Ver-.mont, early in the twenty-sixth congress, presented his memorials against slavery in the District of Columbia, which caused the southern representatives, under Mr. Wise, to withdraw in a body from the house--the first secession. Mr. Giddings entered this congress. It was the one during which, under the lead of Atherton, inspired by Calhoun, slavery secured the adoption of the famous twenty-first rule, which sent everything touching slavery, to the tomb of the table without a word. Those were the days when the ponderous Lewis of Alabama left the house to inspect "coffles of slaves" from Maryland, halted in front of the east portico for that purpose, -and the hall of representatives was the scene of constantly recurring disorder, caused by the brutal violence of southern members, under provocations of Mr. Adams and Mr. Giddings. The "Amistad case," so productive of abolition sentiment, had arisen, and other things of the same tendency....