64 POLITICAL LIFE- II 



which was acoustically one of the worst halls ever de- 

 vised. And it was not a case of voice and nothing else; 

 his strength of argument, his gift of fit expression, and 

 his wealth of illustration were no less extraordinary. 



On this occasion at Canandaigua he rose to speak, and 

 every word went to the hearts of his audience. "Why," 

 he began, "do they conduct these harassing proceedings 

 against these men! If any one is guilty, I am guilty. 

 With Samuel J. May I proposed the Jerry Rescue. We 

 are responsible for it; why do they not prosecute us?" 

 And these words were followed by a train of cogent rea- 

 soning and stirring appeal. 



The Jerry Rescue trials only made matters worse. 

 Their injustice disgusted the North, and their futility an- 

 gered the South. They revealed one fact which especially 

 vexed the Southern wing of the Democratic party, and 

 this was, that their Northern allies could not be depended 

 upon to execute the new compromise. In this Syracuse 

 rescue one of the most determined leaders was a rough 

 burly butcher, who had been all his life one of the loudest 

 of pro-slavery Democrats, and who, until he saw Jerry 

 dragged in manacles through the streets, had been most 

 violent in his support of the fugitive slave law. The 

 trials also stimulated the anti-slavery leaders and orators 

 to new vigor. Garrison, Phillips, Gerrit Smith, Sumner, 

 and Seward aroused the anti-slavery forces as never be- 

 fore, and the "Biglow Papers " of James Russell Lowell, 

 which made Northern pro-slavery men ridiculous, were 

 read with more zest than ever. 



But the abolition forces had the defects of their quali- 

 ties, and their main difficulty really arose from the stim- 

 ulus given to a thin fanaticism. There followed, in 

 the train of the nobler thinkers and orators, the "Fool 

 Reformers," sundry long-haired men and short-haired 

 women, who thought it their duty to stir good Christian 

 people with blasphemy, to deluge the founders of the 

 Republic with blackguardism, and to invent ever more 

 and more ingenious ways for driving every sober-minded 



