30 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



party in the community — a circumstance which count- 

 ed for much with Mrs. Youmans, but for little or noth- 

 ing with her husband, who cared not if he stood alone, 

 so long as he satisfied himself that he was right. For a 

 long time questions of religious belief were not dis- 

 cussed in the famil}^ ; for in that one field the father 

 had abdicated his reason, w^hile the mother had no 

 temptation to exercise her reason. But as the chil- 

 dren grew up the case was altered. All seemed to 

 have inherited the father's mental tendency, and thus 

 there was awakened in the mother a painful solicitude, 

 for their religious welfare, which kept the subject 

 alive and ready at any moment to be brought forward. 

 A political situation, here as in many an American 

 family at that time, came in to complicate matters. In 

 the eastern counties of New York the antislavery agi- 

 tation was just beginning. Vincent Youmans was the 

 first man in his town to declare himself an abolitionist, 

 and he gave hearty support to any friend of that cause 

 who came in his way. Antislavery speeches, pam- 

 phlets, and books — of many of which the acrid and 

 violent tone was an index of the intensity of ill-nature 

 that opposition to great reforms is sure to evoke — 

 soon formed the staple of his reading and added fresh 

 pungency to his talk. This marked and isolated atti- 

 tude of the father at once put the family on the de- 

 fensive everywhere. They were obliged to sustain 

 themselves against ridicule and abuse by their own in- 

 ward sense of what was right. For a while Mrs. You- 

 mans had little to say on the subject of the antislavery 

 crusade, but presently it assumed a shape that aroused 

 her antagonism. The Church was assailed by the abo- 

 litionists — and not without much reason — as afraid to 

 oppose slavery and indifferent to the fate of the negro. 



