simple eulogy--have been more and more inclined to attribute the
overthrow of slavery to the efforts of a few men, and particularly one
man, who, after long opposition to, or neglect of, the freedom
movement, came to its help in the closing scenes of a great conflict,
while the earlier, and certainly equally meritorious, workers and
fighters have been quite left out of the account. The writer does not
object to laborers who entered the field at the eleventh hour, sharing
with those who bore the heat and burden of the day; but when there is
a disposition to give to them all the earnings he does feel like
protesting.

The case of the Abolitionists is not overstated when it is said that,
but for their labors and struggles, this country, instead of being all
free, would to-day be all slaveholding. The relative importance of
their work in creating, by means of a persistent agitation, an
opposition to human slavery that was powerful enough to compel the
attention of the public and force the machine politicians, after long
opposition, to admit the question into practical politics, cannot well
be overestimated.

They alone and single-handed fought the opening battles of a great
war, which, although overshadowed and obscured by later and more
dramatic events, were none the less gallantly waged and nobly won. It
is customary to speak of our Civil War as a four years' conflict. It
was really a thirty years' war, beginning when the pioneer
Abolitionists entered the field and declared for a life-and-death
struggle. It was then that the hardest battles were fought.

I write the more willingly because comparatively few now living
remember the mad excitement of the slavery controversy in ante-bellum