Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.Stowe, Harriet Beecher
History
Men of Our Times; Or, Leading Patriots of the Day: Being narratives of the lives and deeds of statesmen, generals, and orators. Including biographical sketches and anecdotes of Lincoln, Grant, Garrison, Sumner, Chase, Wilson, Greeley, Farragut, Andrew, Colfax, Stanton, Douglass, Buckingham, Sherman, Sheridan, Howard, Phillips and Beecher.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
United States -- Biography; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865 -- Biography
He had a period of great enjoyment at Berlin, where, in the Berlin
Museum, under the instructions of Waagen the director of arts, he
examined that historical collection, said to be the richest and most
scientifically arranged series to mark the history of art which can be
found in Europe. The scenery of Switzerland and the art galleries of
Northern Italy also helped to refresh his mind and divert him from the
great national affliction that weighed on his spirit.
At Paris, he met the news of the battle of Gettysburg and the taking
of Vicksburg, and recognized in them the only style of argument which
could carry the cause through Europe. Grant was a logician after his
own heart.
Mr. Beecher, on his return to England, was again solicited to speak in
public, and again declined. So immutable was his idea that this was a
battle that Americans must fight out, and which could not be talked out.
He was at last, however, made to see his duty to that small staunch
liberal party who had been maintaining the cause of America against
heavy odds in England, and he felt that if they wished him to speak, he
owed himself to them; that they were brave defenders hard beset; and
that their cause and ours was one. Such men as Baptist Noel, Newman
Hall, Francis Newman and others of that class, were applicants not to
be resisted.
He therefore prepared himself for what he always has felt to have
been the greatest effort and severest labor of his life, to plead the
cause of his country at the bar of the civilized world. A series of
engagements was formed for him to speak in the principal cities of
England and Scotland.
He opened Friday, October 9th, in the Free Trade Hall, in Manchester,
to a crowded audience of 6,000 people. The emissaries of the South had
made every preparation to excite popular tumult, to drown his voice and
prevent his being heard. Here he treated the subject on its merits, as
being the great question of the rights of working men, and brought out
and exposed the nature of the Southern confederacy as founded in the
right of the superior to oppress the inferior race. Notwithstanding the
roar and fury and interruptions he persevered and said his say, and the
London Times next day, printed it all with a column or two of abuse by
way of condiment.
October 13th, he spoke in the city hall at Glasgow, discussing slavery
and free labor as comparative systems. The next day, October 14th,
he spoke in Edinburgh in a great public meeting in the Free Church
Assembly Hall, where he discussed the existing American conflict from
the historical point of view.
This was by far the most quiet and uninterrupted meeting of any. But
the greatest struggle of all was of course at Liverpool. At Liverpool,
where Clarkson was mobbed, and came near being thrown off the wharf
and drowned, there was still an abundance of that brutal noisy
population which slavery always finds it useful to stir up to bay and
bark when she is attacked.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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