This was pre-eminently true in Indiana, and especially so as to myself. The leaders of Grant, borrowing the spirit of the campaign, set all the canons of decency at defiance. "Sore head," "Renegade," "Apostate," "Rebel," and "deadbeat," were the compliments constantly lavished. Garbled extracts from my old war speeches were plentifully scattered over the State, as if we had been still in the midst of the bloody conflict, and I had suddenly betrayed the country to its enemies. Garbled and forged letters were peddled and paraded over the State by windy political blatherskites, who were hired to propagate the calumnies of their employers. In fact, my previous political experience supplied no precedent for this warfare of my former Republican friends. But I was not unprepared for it, and fully availed myself of the right of self-defense and counter attack. I would not make myself a blackguard, but I met my assailants in every encounter with the weapons of argument and invective, and stretched them on the rack of my ridicule; while their prolonged howl bore witness to the effectiveness of my work. My whole heart was in it. The fervor and enthusiasm of earlier years came back to me, and a kindred courage and faith armed me with the strength which the work of the canvass demanded. The novelty of the canvass was indeed remarkable in all respects. The Liberal Republicans had not changed any of their political opinions, nor deserted any principle they had ever espoused, touching the questions of slavery and the war; and yet they were now in the fiercest antagonism with the men who had been politically associated with them ever since the organization of the party, and who had trusted and honored them through all the struggles of the past. They were branded as "Apostates" from their anti-slavery faith; but slavery had perished forever, and every man of them would have been found fighting it as before, if it had been practicable to call it back to life; while many of their assailants had distinguished themselves by mobbing Abolitionism in the day of its weakness. How could men apostatize from a cause which they had served with unflinching fidelity until it was completely triumphant? And how was it possible to fall from political grace by withdrawing from the fellowship of the knaves and traders that formed the body-guard of the President, and were using the Republican party as the instrument of wholesale schemes of jobbery and pelf? To charge the Liberal Republicans with apostasy because they had the moral courage to disown and denounce these men was to invent a definition of the term which would have made all the great apostates of history "honorable men."