Twenty-five years ago slavery was a question upon which feeling was not only strong, but roused, stung, and goaded to a height of passion [128] where all argument was swept away by the common emotion as futile, if not base. My father, thinking the system hateful in itself and productive of nearly unmingled evil, held nevertheless that, like all great and established wrongs, it must be met with wise and patient counsel; and that in the highest interest of the slave, of the white race, of the country, and of constitutional liberty, its abolition must be gradual. To the uncompromising Abolitionists such views were intolerable; and by some of those who demanded immediate emancipation, even at the cost of the Union and all that its destruction involved, it was said that he was influenced by a mean spirit of expediency and a base truckling to the rank and wealth which sustained this insult to humanity. They little knew him. The man who at twenty-five had torn himself from the associations and friendships of his youth, and, moved solely by love of truth, had imperilled all his worldly hopes by joining himself to a small religious body, despised and hated as heretics by most of those whom he had been trained to love and respect, was not the man at fifty to blanch from the expression of any honest conviction; and, to sum up all in one word, he held his views upon this subject, as upon all others, bravely and honestly, and stated them clearly and positively, when he felt it his duty to speak, although evasion or silence would have been the more comfortable alternative. "I doubt," says Mr. [129]Chadwick,{10} "if Garrison or Parker had a keener sense than his of the enormity of human slavery. Before the first Abolitionist Society had been organized, he was one of the organizers of a committee for the discussion and advancement of emancipation. I have read all of his principal writings upon slavery, and it would be hard to find more terrible indictments of its wickedness. He stated its defence in terms that Foote and Yancey might have made their own, only to sweep it all away with the blazing ubiquity that the negro was a man and an immortal soul. Yet when the miserable days of fugitive-slave rendition were upon us, he was with Gannett in the sad conviction that the law must be obeyed. We could not see it then; but we can see to-day that it was possible for men as good and true as any men alive to take this stand. And nothing else brings out the nobleness of Dewey into such bold relief as the fact, that the immeasurable torrent of abuse that greeted his expressed opinion did not in any least degree avail to make him one of the pro-slavery faction. The concession of 1850 was one which he would not have made, and it must be the last. Welcome to him the iron flail of war, whose tribulation saved the immortal wheat of justice and purged away the chaff of wrong to perish in unquenchable fire!"