162 POLITICAL LIFE-VIII 



These emissaries of ours pretend to be patriotic and pious ; 

 they pull long faces and say Let us pray ; but they spell 

 it p-r-e-y. The people of the South hate them, and they 

 ought to hate them.&quot; 



At this we in the audience looked at each other in 

 amazement; for, standing close beside Mr. Greeley, at 

 that very moment, most obsequiously, was perhaps the 

 worst &quot;carpet-bagger&quot; ever sent into the South; a man 

 who had literally been sloughed off by both parties; 

 who, having been become an unbearable nuisance in New 

 York politics, had been &quot;unloaded&quot; by Mr. Lincoln, in an 

 ill-inspired moment, upon the hapless South, and who was 

 now trying to find new pasture. 



But this was not the most comical thing; for Mr. 

 Greeley in substance continued as follows : 



&quot;Fellow Citizens: You know how it is yourselves. 

 There are men who go to your own State Capitol, nomi 

 nally as legislators or advisers, but really to plunder and 

 steal. These men in the Northern States correspond to the 

 4 carpet-baggers in the Southern States, and you hate 

 them and you ought to hate them.&quot; Thus speaking, Mr. 

 Greeley poured out the vials of his wrath against all this 

 class of people ; blissfully unconscious of the fact that on 

 the other side of him stood the most notorious and cor 

 rupt lobbyist who had been known in Albany for years ; 

 a man who had been chased out of that city by the sheriff 

 for attempted bribery, had been obliged to remain for a 

 considerable time in hiding to avoid criminal charges of 

 exerting corrupt influence on legislation, and whom both 

 political parties naturally disowned. Comical as all this 

 was, it was pathetic to see a man like Greeley in such a 

 cave of Adullam. 



During this summer of 1871 occurred the death of 

 one of my dearest friends, a man who had exercised a 

 most happy influence over my opinions and who had con 

 tributed much to the progress of anti-slavery ideas in 

 New England and New York. This was the Rev. 

 Samuel Joseph May, pastor of the Unitarian Church in 



