expectation that in New England I should be left in loneliness. In
this I was disappointed; courtesy and kindness met me on my first
landing, and attended me to the time of my departure. The
manifestations of comity and hospitality, given by the generous and
the noble, aroused the petty hostility of the more extreme of the
Black Republicans, and their newspapers assailed me with the low abuse
which for years I had been accustomed to receive at their hands. I had
always despised their malice and defied their enmity; their assaults
did not surprise me, but when I found them echoed in Southern papers,
it did astonish, I will confess, it did pain me, not for any injury
apprehended to myself, but for its evil effect upon the cause with
which I was identified.

Was it expected that to public and private manifestations of kindness
by the people of Maine, I should return denunciation and repel their
generous approaches with epithets of abuse? If they had deserved such
reproach, they could not merit it at my hands. A guest hospitably
attended, it would have been inconsistent with the character of a
gentleman, to have done less than acknowledge their kindness, and it
was not in my nature to feel otherwise than grateful to them for the
many manifestations of a desire to render pleasant and beneficial the
sojourn of an invalid among them. But they did not deserve it, and I
am happy to state as the result of my acquaintance with them, that we
have a large body of true friends among them, men who maintain our
constitutional rights as explicitly and as broadly as we assert them,
and who have performed this service with the foreknowledge that they
were thereby to sacrifice their political prospects, at least, until
through years of patient exertion they should correct error, suppress
fanaticism, and build for themselves a structure on the basis of
truth, which had long been unwelcome and might not soon be understood.