On the other hand rose Lorenzo Dow, the foremost itinerant preacher of
the time, the first Protestant who expounded the gospel in Alabama and
Mississippi, and a reformer who at the very moment that cotton was
beginning to be supreme, presumed to tell the South that slavery was
wrong.[1] Everywhere he arrested attention--with his long hair, his
harsh voice, and his wild gesticulation startling all conservative
hearers. But he was made in the mold of heroes. In his lifetime he
traveled not less than two hundred thousand miles, preaching to more
people than any other man of his time. Several times he went to Canada,
once to the West Indies, and three times to England, everywhere drawing
great crowds about him. In _A Cry from the Wilderness_ he more than
once clothed his thought in enigmatic garb, but the meaning was always
ultimately clear. At this distance, when slavery and the Civil War are
alike viewed in the perspective, the words of the oracle are almost
uncanny: "In the rest of the Southern states the influence of these
Foreigners will be known and felt in its time, and the seeds from the
HORY ALLIANCE and the DECAPIGANDI, who have a hand in those grades of
Generals, from the Inquisitor to the Vicar General and down...!!! The
STRUGGLE will be DREADFUL! the CUP will be BITTER! and when the agony is
over, those who survive may see better days! FAREWELL!"

[Footnote 1: For full study see article "Lorenzo Dow," in _Methodist
Review_ and _Journal of Negro History_, July, 1916, the same being
included in _Africa and the War_, New York, 1918.]




CHAPTER V