ing parties. I remember when Hon. George Thompson, of England, was in Rochester, a round of evening parties was given in his honor. Mr. and Mrs. Wilder gave the most elegant one in their large, handsome house. Mr. Thompson was in brilliant mood, sang delightful songs, told merry anecdotes, and talked charmingly. Still, I thought the company incomplete without the presence of Frederick Douglass. I was ashamed of the stupid prejudice that excluded him. A lively young gentleman said to me, 'To have Douglass here this evening might strangle the young infant University to death.' And yet the time may come when Rochester will be only known as the place where Frederick Douglass once lived. This color exclusion was keenly felt by so sensitive a nature as F. D.'s, admirably suited to enjoy and reciprocate the genial flow and glow of cultured society, by his rare innate refinement and the glimpses his peculiar experience had gained from association with our true American noblesse, who had thrown all their advantages of birth, wealth, and social position into the scale of humanity against the prevalent spirit of caste and prejudice.

Of these conspicuously was the 'noblest name in the Empire State,' Hon. Gerrit Smith-that peerless philanthropist, whose princely fortune was devoted, beyond precedent, to the service of humanity, as simple, transparent and unaffectedly devout a follower of the Christian precepts of human brotherhood as Count Tolstoi, from whose table and delightful drawing-room Frederick Douglass was never made to feel the ban of color. That charming Peterboro' mansion dispensed generous and unique hospitality-alike to the beauty and chivalry of the city and the State, and to the lowly fugitive slave and his advocates, who stood nowhere else on such footing as in that splendid domain, inherited from the partner of John Jacob Astor. Gerrit Smith ever welcomed Douglass 'as a brother beloved.'

"So in Boston did the highest and proudest in family distinction, Wendell Phillips, condescend to him of low estate. His invalid, but magnificent-hearted wife, a cousin of Copley, the

painter, precluded domestic entertainment. But on every steamboat, in every omnibus, railroad car, where Douglass was tabood, solely because of color, there was Wendell Phillips ready to take his seat beside his 'despised and rejected' brother, vastly to the annoyance of conductors and agents, who couldn't help feeling the scandal and disgrace of the miserable colorphobia, so pointedly rebuked. To crown all the rest, once in an anti-slavery family-too poor to offer two beds to their guests of a night-Wendell Phillips so far forgot the hateful proscription as to share the bed of Frederick Douglass. Mr. P. may have had this in his mind when later, in his exquisite addresses, he used to tell the anecdote of Washington making the chilled and sieepy negro servant of Colonel Pickering, watching with him in the same tent, lie down beside him and sleep out the night under the same blanket.

"I once heard Douglass in a speech in Rochester, in a strain of subdued yet powerful eloquence, say: 'I sometimes forget the color of my skin, and remember that I am a man. I sometimes forget that I am hated of men, and remember I am loved of God. Has the white man religious aspirations? So have I. Thoughts that wander through eternity, affections that climb up and twine around the Universal Father.'

"While the élite of Rochester shrank from the social equality, implied in an invitation to its table, there were households, like Miss Porter's, that keenly enjoyed a chance call, or interview, with one known then to be a lion;' and its diverse members would quickly assemble in the parlor to bask in the inimitable play and sparkle of his wit and fancy, or to be thrilled by his indignant and caustic allusions to passing events at home and abroad, whenever it was noised through the house that Frederick Douglass was calling on his friends. Chief of all these triumphs over 'race, color and previous condition of servitude ' was that in the superb Corinthian Hall, then the handsomest audience chamber in all that part of the State. Its brilliantlylighted interior was an enchantment to everybody, with the delicate and dainty white lilies pouring out of their lovely

chalices the blazing gas-jets, upon rich and poor, white and black, high and low, assembled to hear the unsurpassed eloquence of Frederick Douglass, on the crime and shame of our country, which permitted, sanctioned, and defended, with all its machinery of government and religion, the horrible merchandise in men, women and children-himself but lately redeemed from the clutches of the foul demon of slavery by the philanthropy of English friends, who admiringly placed his bust in white marble on its grand Merchant's Exchange in London. Where could Campbell's stinging satire sound so impressively as from those lips in Corinthian Hall in 1850?

"United States, your banner wears

"One incident of that Rochester life is indelibly engraved on my mind. My dear friend, Maria Porter, took me with her to ever holy Mount Hope. Her valued sister Jane's was the new grave we were visiting. As we stood there by it, I saw a small, newly-made mound, and knowing of no child's death in their circle, I asked in surprise whose grave is that? Why that is little Anna Douglass's. Mr. Douglass had selected no lotand poor, dear, little Anna grieved herself to death with fright and terror over her father's flight to England, to escape the fate of old John Brown. Mrs. Douglass wished to have the precious body placed in the receiving tomb of the city till Mr. Douglass's return, and choice and purchase of a lot for its final repose. Do you know the city authorities utterly refused to let that innocent child lie in its common tomb? So S. D. Porter and we all said, "Lay her in our lot; " and there she lies beside our blessed Jane.''

CHAPTER IX.

66 BEWARE OF A YANKEE WHEN HE IS FEEDING."

FORTUNATE is the biographer whose hero supplies such headings for chapters. No words could better indicate the quarter from which suddenly came reinforcements that completely changed the position of the Abolitionists. Previous to 1854 they were like the rebel Jews who resisted Titus, shut up in their holy city, surrounded by an overwhelming army of the heathen, fighting fiercely against the besiegers and even more fiercely among themselves. The parallel would be a closer one, if Jerusalem had held out long enough to find a friendly emperor mount the throne. Hitherto we have looked only at the little anti-slavery bands and the great pro-slavery host. We have not yet had much occasion to notice the existence of the neutral North. The number of Northerners who were in favor of slavery was small compared to that of the men who regretted its existence, but saw no way of getting rid of it; who found little fault with the Garrisonian principle, but much with the method; who kept aloof from the Free Soil party, because they were afraid of throwing away their votes; and who tried to elect one proslavery candidate after another, partly because he seemed less pro-slavery than his opponent, and partly

because they liked subordinate features of the platform. This neutral position was the most advanced one which had yet been taken, except by isolated individuals, in the Northwest; and this was the attitude of the vast majority of the clergy, even in New England where most of the ministers really sympathized with the slave, but not so warmly as to overcome the combined influence of dislike at those innovations which were allied with Garrisonianism, of indignation at the censures which the Church received from Abolitionists, and of deference to the conservatism, not only of wealthy laymen, but of leading divines. It was not because the Southerners had so much cordial support, but because they had so little active opposition at the North, that they were able to pass the Fugitive Slave Bill, to recover hundreds of bondmen under it, and to elect a President who wished to have it "respected cheerfully," with a vote so large as seemed to have swept not only the hostile Free Soilers out of existence as a party, but also the lukewarm Whigs.

This victory of 1852 emboldened the South to insist that slavery should be carried beyond the boundary to which it had been restricted by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and should take possession of a new region ten times as large as Massachusetts, with a much less severe climate, and with a soil fertile beyond comparison. Before the close of 1853 it was proposed in Congress that the compromise should be set aside, that settlers should be allowed to bring their slaves into the Territories, about to be organized under the names of Kansas and Nebraska, and that the final decision, whether`