NORTH STAR. Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Charles Francis Adams, on October 14, before one of the largest and noblest meetings ever held in Faneuil Hall. He found time even then to appear with Sojourner Truth before the Woman's Rights Convention, which was held in Worcester, October 23 and 24, with the result of leading Mrs. Taylor, afterwards Mrs. J. S. Mill, to write a powerful article in the "Westminster Review." But at the close of the month he was back in Boston, active in the defense of William and Ellen Craft. These two slaves had made their escape, eighteen months before, when she traveled North as a white gentleman in delicate health, and took her husband as her servant. They were picked out for the first victims in Boston; but they had too many friends there. She was secreted at once; and he was urged to fly; but he declared that he had run far enough already. He even refused to be bought, and insisted that he wanted to test the law. He is said to have been the coolest man in Boston; and it was all his friends could do to persuade him to keep out of sight, and carry several dirks and pistols. The slave-hunters were themselves arrested, for calling him a thief, and were followed about the streets by hooting crowds. The Vigilance Committee met every night in a darkened room, and there it was finally agreed, in the presence of Douglass, that a deputation should be sent to warn the hunters to leave the town. The name of Theodore Parker was proposed; but Mr. Slack said it would be better not to have any clergyman appointed. "And then," says Douglass, "I got a peep into Parker's soul." He said, "This committee can appoint me to no duty that I will not perform.” The passage quoted from his journal, in the memoir by John Weiss, shows that he did the duty so faithfully that the birds of prey fled from Boston the next after noon. On the very day when Parker spoke thus to the other members of the Vigilance Committee, George Thompson arrived in Boston from England. A reception was given him in Faneuil Hall on November 15, but a party of pro-slavery men entered before Garrison had half-finished his address of welcome, and not another word of it reached the ears of the audience. Phillips tried to get a hearing, but his voice was drowned by continuous cheers for Daniel Webster, a common way in those days of answering anti-slavery speeches. Mr. Thompson himself was greeted by all sorts of noises. Dogs were heard to bark, cocks to crow, and ducks to quack. Yankee Doodle was whistled furiously, and there were loud questions about how many babies Queen Victoria had, and how she was treating the Irish and the Hindoos. The member of Parliament soon left in disgust, and then Mrs. Abby Folsom was persuaded to offer some inappropriate and inaudible remarks. Theodore Parker came forward and stood for some time, pointing to the portrait of Washington, while no one could hear a word, except the loud cries that he had better go and buy a bottle of Bogle's Hyperion Fluid, a kind of hair-oil then in vogue. Neither Parker Pillsbury nor Elizur Wright had any better success, and Douglass stood for some time, pointing his finger at the audience, with the utmost contempt, amid a perfect storm of hisses, and shouts of "Hot Corn," "Charcoal," etc. All sorts of things were thrown at him, and a man who stood near by was hit by one of the big copper cents, then current. Big and little fights were now going on all over the hall; hats were smashed; canes were being flourished briskly; women fled with screams; and there were dances, accompanied by imitations of the Indian war-whoop. At last the biggest policeman in Boston stepped out upon the platform, and made a historic speech, the only one which had been heard from there since Garrison was first interrupted. "Gentlemen," said Captain Adams, "I am requested by the Marshal to inform you that this meeting is now adjourned." There had been no change of feeling since the slave-hunters were driven away, but they and the disunionists were considered equally worthy of execration by many a Bostonian. The North did not like to return fugitives, but it was much too anxious to keep at peace with the South; and it was high time to speak as Frederick Douglass did at Rochester, on December 1, 1850, when he said : While this nation is guilty of the enslavement of three millions of innocent men and women, it is as idle to think of having a sound and lasting peace, as it is to think there is no God to take cognizance of the affairs of men. There can be no peace to the wicked, while slavery continues in the land. It will be condemned; and while it is condemned, there will be agitation. Nature must cease to be nature; men must become monsters; humanity must be transformed; Christianity must be exterminated; all ideas of justice and the laws of eternal goodness must be utterly blotted out from the human soul; ere a system so foul and infernal can escape condemnation, or this guilty republic can have a sound, enduring peace." CHAPTER VII. WITH THE MEN WHO ABOLISHED SLAVERY. 'Against his sovereign, Douglas ne'er -"Lady of the Lake." THE "North Star" fully justified its name by enabling its editor to guide fugitives to freedom; and it also helped him to to free himself from a peculiarly Southern view of the United States Constitution, which deprived the Garrisonians of the influence they deserved, and to rise to that higher view which soon gained the supremacy at the North. estimate, not only of his mental caliber, but of his fidelity to his cause, will depend largely on our opinion about this question; and it must therefore be examined thoroughly. Our The Abolitionists were either disunionists, or else Free Soilers and Liberty party men, according to their view of the Constitution as pro-slavery or antislavery. Douglass had been attacking it as proslavery ever since his first speech in 1841; but on May 7, 1851, when the A. A. S. S. was obliged to meet in Syracuse, because no suitable place could be found in New York City, a resolution was proposed, indorsing the "Liberator" and other papers as anti slavery organs. Some one asked why the paper edited by Frederick Douglass was not on the list. Then he declared that he preferred to be left out, for he had more sympathy with those Abolitionists who were willing to vote, than with those who would not. He had then been carrying on his paper for three years and a half. How he thought at that time may be imagined from what he said, a few years later, in a lecture, entitled "The Anti-Slavery Movement," and published in Rochester, 1855. In speaking of "the different anti-slavery sects," he says: "I shall consider, first, the Garrisonian Anti-Slavery Society. I call this the Garrisonian Society, because Mr. Garrison is, confessedly, its leader. This Society is the oldest of modern anti-slavery societies. It has, strictly speaking, two weekly papers, or organs, employs five or six lecturers, and holds numerous public meetings for the dissemination of its views. Its peculiar and distinctive feature is its doctrine of 'No union with slave-holders.' This doctrine has, of late, become its bond of union, and the condition of good fellowship among its members. Of this Society I have to say, its logical result is but negatively anti-slavery. Its doctrine of 'No union with slaveholders,' carried out, dissolves the Union, and leaves the slaves and their masters to fight their own battles, in their own way. This I hold to be an abandonment of the great idea with which that Society started. It started to free the slave. It ends by leaving the slave to free himself. It started with the purpose to imbue the heart of the nation with sentiments favorable to the abolition of slavery, and ends by seeking to free the North from all responsibility for slavery, other than if slavery were in Great Britain, or under some other nationality. This, I say, the practical abandonment of the idea with which that Society started. It has given up the faith that the slave can be freed short of the overthrow of the Government; and then, as I understand that Society, it leaves the slaves, as it must needs is |