follow, and whose voices, though but faintly heard in the whirlwind of 1840, were made significantly audible in 1844. Although they were everywhere totally misunderstood and grossly misrepresented, they clearly comprehended their work and courageously entered upon its performance. Their political creed was substantially identical with that of the Free Soilers of 1848 and the Republicans of 1856 and 1860. They were anything but political fanatics, and history will record that their sole offense was the espousal of the truth in advance of the multitude, which slowly and finally followed in their footsteps. But the war against slavery was not at all intermitted by the victory of the Democrats. Events are schoolmasters, and this triumph only quickened their march toward the final catastrophe. Cassius M. Clay, who had espoused the Whig cause in this canvass with great vigor and zeal, and on anti-slavery grounds, re-enlisted in the battle against slavery, and resolved to prosecute it by new methods. He had been sorely tried by Mr. Clay's Alabama letter and the Whig defeat, but he was now armed with fresh courage, and resolved to "carry the war into Africa" by the establishment of his newspaper, the "True American," in Lexington, in his own State. His arraignment of slavery was so eloquent and masterly that a large meeting of slave-holders appointed a committee to wait on him, and request the discontinuance of his paper. His reply was: "Go, tell your secret conclave of cowardly assassins that Cassius M. Clay knows his rights, and how to defend them." These words thrilled all lovers of liberty, and sounded to them like a trumpet call to battle. Another fruitful event was the effort of Massachusetts, in the fall of this year, to protect her colored seamen in the ports of Charleston and New Orleans, where they were seized on merchant ships and sold into slavery under local police regulations. When Mr. Hoar visited Charleston as the accredited agent of his State for the purpose of taking measures to test the constitutionality of these regulations, the Legislature of South Carolina, by a vote of one hundred and nineteen against one, passed a series of outrageous resolutions culminating in a request to the Governor to expel him from the State as a confessed disturber of the peace. He was obliged summarily to depart, as the only means of escaping the vengeance of the mob. This open and insolent defiance of the national authority could not fail to strengthen anti-slavery opinion in the Northern States. The same end was served by an unexpected movement in New Hampshire. This State, like Massachusetts and Vermont, had taken ground against annexation, but it wheeled into line after Polk was nominated. John P. Hale, however, then a Democratic member of Congress from that State, refused to follow his party, and for this reason, after he had been formally declared its choice for re-election, he was thrown overboard, and another candidate nominated.