If questioned about them
he would probably have said, with a laugh, "Oh, those are our
barnacles;" but they were only extreme cases of the general tendency.
It was not the right element for a man of his calibre: he did not become
a spiritualist, nor was he so intolerant as to object to the use of
brandy for cooking purposes; but he published an injudicious and even
intemperate letter to the chief-justice of Massachusetts and the
president of Harvard College, arraigning them for drinking wine at a
public banquet. He exerted himself strenuously to obtain the repeal of
capital punishment; and when that failed, and also an attempt to obtain
a pardon for a miserable murderer, whom it was merely a kindness to
hang, he attacked the governor of the state in a sermon before the
Theodore Parker Society, which was little better than a tirade of
invectives. He never appeared as an advocate of woman suffrage before
the public, but he is said to have approved of it. Neither would he go
to the polls to vote; at first because the national constitution
supported slavery, and afterwards because the government maintained an
army and encouraged war.
He missed a fine opportunity to escape from this narrow routine and
enter the arena of practical politics when the Free-soil party was
formed to prevent the extension of slavery. However, he either did not
think of it, or preferred to hold fast to his former friends, though he
little knew how little they cared for him, and he continued for ten
years longer to lecture on Toussaint and talk moral-suasion,--riding
hard on the Garrisonian formula.
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