FROM JACKSON TO FILLMORE- 1832-1851 55 



elected, and under him came the admission of Texas, 

 which caused the Mexican War, and gave slavery a new 

 lease of life. The main result, in my own environment, 

 was that my father and his friends, thenceforward for a 

 considerable time, though detesting slavery, held all aboli- 

 tionists and anti-slavery men in contempt, as unpatriotic 

 because they had defeated Henry Clay, and as idiotic 

 because they had brought on the annexation of Texas and 

 thereby the supremacy of the slave States. 



But the flame of liberty could not be smothered by 

 friends or blown out by enemies; it was kept alive by 

 vigorous counterblasts in the press, and especially fed by 

 the lecture system, which was then at the height of its 

 efficiency. Among the most powerful of lecturers was 

 John Parker Hale, senator of the United States from 

 New Hampshire, his subject being, "The Last Gladiato- 

 rial Combat at Rome." Taking from Gibbon the story of 

 the monk Telemachus, who ended the combats in the arena 

 by throwing himself into them and sacrificing his life, Hale 

 suggested to his large audiences an argument that if men 

 wished to get rid of slavery in our country they must be 

 ready to sacrifice themselves if need be. His words sank 

 deep into my mind, and I have sometimes thought that 

 they may have had something to do in leading John 

 Brown to make his desperate attempt on slavery at Har- 

 per's Ferry. 



How blind we all were ! Henry Clay, a Kentucky slave- 

 holder, would have saved us. Infinitely better than the 

 violent solutions proposed to us was his large statesman- 

 like plan of purchasing the slave children as they were 

 born and setting them free. Without bloodshed, and at 

 cost of the merest nothing as compared to the cost of the 

 Civil War, he would thus have solved the problem; but 

 it was not so to be. The guilt of the nation was not to be 

 so cheaply atoned for. Fanatics, North and South, op- 

 posed him and, as a youth, I yielded to their arguments. 



Four years later, in 1848, came a very different sort of 

 election. General Zachary Taylor, who had shown ster- 



