In the midst of slavery's increasing power how had the often feeble flame on Liberty's altar been preserved? Harvests are not gathered without the sowing of seed. Some power had so nourished the love of freedom that a great army had been marshaled by a single call ! The years between 1830 and 1860 have been called the martyr age of America, and the history of that time has not yet been written. In 1833, when a hand­ful of men and women organized the Amer­ican Anti-Slavery Society, what a small cloud it was on the political horizon. In i 86o, with what meaning the heavens were darkened. So intensely individual were they that many and various were the theories entertained by the Abolitionists in regard to the abolishment of slavery; but in the main they were non-resistants. Garrison was a man of peace. Stephen Foster, the most vehement of all those who went about calling for repentance, continually allowed himself to be cast out from lecture hall and church; bruised by blows, his coat torn to shreds, but on no account would he have resisted violence with violence. When John Brown calmly, even cheerfully, ascended the gallows which slavery erected among the Virginia hills, the Abolition­ists mourned alike for their hero and his methods. Acknowledging that -

               "Above the brave old fighter's head

                            The martyr's halo bent".

Maj. Gen. Geo B. McClellan

Image from "When The Tide Turned"

Parker Pillsbury remembered with sadness the ancient prophecy, "He that taketh the sword shall perish by the sword". Before 1860 in the North, as well as the South, the Bible was opened frequently where the pages sanctioned slavery. John Randolph's words were prophetic, for long before this he had said, "The South does not rule by her slaves at home, but by her slaves in the North".

Before 1860, not alone south of the Ohio, but in Puritan New England as well, was free speech endangered. Yet, in defiance of personal danger, and above the hoarse roar of the mob, the voice of the great preacher, Theodore Parker, in Music Hall, Boston, was heard naming the almost fatal illness of the Nation. "It is slavery," he said, "That hideous snake which Southern regions breed; with fifteen unequal feet it has crawled Northward, fold on fold, coil on coil, until now the whole land is poisoned with its breath".  And still, as the evil they fought seemed to 

strengthen, the zeal of the Abolitionists was ever a holy zeal, consuming time and strength and every worldly interest. With faces zionward they worked on. The grave of Lovejoy was a constant reminder in the West, and from the very heart of slavery, from South Carolina and proud Charleston, came the Grimke sisters, their consecrated souls discovered in their faces, as they announced to the North, "You that are not of the South cannot know the horrors of slavery".

From the constant pens of Whittier and Lowell came words to swell the chorus of freedom. And Charles Sumner stood in the United States Senate in the terrible storm and stress of that time, "Ever steering boldly for the Pole Star". Nightly the faith­ful Quakers and their helpers made up the trains for the Underground Railroad, and what did it avail? O doubting multitude and faithful few No miracle, this wild enthusiasm of sixty-one; but a harvest from long years of patient seed-time; for the devoted men who had for years borne the ridicule of the two strong parties; who had, in the language of these party leaders, "thrown away their votes", the men called "Conscience Whigs", the men of the Liberty and Free soil parties, that holy minority, had at last turned the scale and made it possible to elect a president in whose Cabinet no slave­holder would be found. A president whose sad eyes contradicted his cheerful words; the man whose memory grows greater and dearer as the nation he helped to rescue grows more grateful with its years. Yet, it is not strange that this important factor in his election in  1860 felt grieved, and unrepresented, in that clause in his first inaugural, which acknowledged disinclination to touch the plague spot in the Nation's heart. But now on the April air the sound of Sumter's guns rolls Northward, and men look into each others' faces and inquire, "Are we a nation? Or, is the North but a suburb of South Carolina"?

In less than a month from the delivery of Stephens' speech, the first soldiers to die in the Civil War, the men of the sixth Massa­chusetts, lay dead in the streets of Baltimore. "Send them home tenderly," telegraphed Governor Andrew, and later he said, "For every hair of their bright young heads laid low, God shall enter judgment against traitors". And Wendell Phillips said, "Mas­sachusetts blood has consecrated the pavements of Baltimore; they are now too sacred to be trodden by slaves". Strange that such words then fell upon a nation apparently deaf to their significance, a nation para­lyzed alike to duty and danger.

Arriving in Washington before preparation could be made for them, these first vol­unteers in the great army were quartered in the Capitol; and but few of these soldiers realized that because of the bad legislation in those great halls they were now filled with soldiers and their shining muskets. Citizens and soldiers alike refused to believe that the war was a struggle between medie­val and modern thought; between barbar­ism and civilization; between freedom and slavery. And then began the terrible lessons taught in the summer of 1861. The North advanced with uplifted sword in one hand while the other hand was heavy with com­promise for the common sin. The magni­tude of the approaching struggle was not apparent; still the North had no conception of the terrible sincerity of the South; for never since the days of the crusaders were leaders more fanatical or followers more faithful than the majority of the Confederate army.