Her articles created a sensation, and no wonder that they did. For, although she had but little literary culture, she had simplicity and intensity. Her style was modeled on the English of the Bible (which she says was for years the only book that she allowed herself to read, in her dread of becoming wiser than her plodding husband), and on this sturdy stem she grafted the simple, homely, direct illustrations of the rural folk around her. Thus, it arrested the attention of learned and unlettered alike. But there was more than phraseology in her power. She was as intensely in earnest as if she were herself in bonds—that is what “remembering them as bound with them” means. She was one of a few who _meant it_; one of the kind of “fools” that “hear His word and _do_ it.” McDuffee, when he heard that Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang the first seceder, said: “Yes, and he’s just dashed fool enough to do it.” She felt that two races, the white and the black, were to be rescued from the curse of slavery; and for such a cause it was with her as “Hosea Bigelow” says, “P’izen-mad, pig-headed fightin’.” She had been reared an abolitionist, and that which was bred in the bone had been converted into a clear, blazing passion by a year’s residence in Kentucky (1832), where she witnessed scenes, the narration of which make that awful chapter in her biography entitled “Habitations of Horrible Cruelty.” She says: For years there had run through my head the words: “Open thy mouth for the dumb, plead the cause of the poor and needy.” From first to last my articles were as direct and personal as Nathan’s reproof to David. Every man who went to the war (_i. e._, against Mexico), or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the whole list of crimes of which slavery was a synonym. Each one seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul made bare and his idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule, odium, solemn denunciation, old truths from the Bible and history, and the opinions of good men. I had a reckless abandon, for had I not thrown myself into the breach to die there, and would I not sell my life at its full value? I think this keen sense for the weak places in men’s character and reasoning, and her reckless assaults thereon were what made her so formidable. She always struck for the heart, and rarely missed her aim. “Exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized forte,” she says. With what disregard of everything she rode after the oriflamme of humanity let her tell: