'
His whole life was an incessant warfare with the rapidly advancing
spirit of slavery, that was coiling like a serpent around everything.
"At a time when the Southerners were like so many excited tigers and
rattlesnakes,--when they bullied, and scoffed, and sneered, and
threatened, this old man rose every day in his place, and, knowing
every parliamentary rule and tactic of debate, found means to make
himself heard. Then he presented a petition from _negroes_, which
raised a storm of fury. The old man claimed that the right of petition
was the right of every human being. They moved to expel him. By the
rules of the house a man, before he can be expelled, may have the
floor to make his defense. This was just what he wanted. He held the
floor for _fourteen days_, and used his wonderful powers of
memory and arrangement to give a systematic, scathing history of the
usurpations of slavery; he would have spoken fourteen days more, but
his enemies, finding the thing getting hotter and hotter, withdrew
their motion, and the right of petition was gained.
"What is remarkable in this journal is the minute record of going to
church every Sunday, and an analysis of the text and sermon. There is
something about these so simple, so humble, so earnest. Often
differing from the speaker--but with gravity and humility--he seems
always to be so self-distrustful; to have such a sense of sinfulness
and weakness, but such trust in God's fatherly mercy, as is most
beautiful to see.
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