Feeling ran high in the University during the period just before the Civil War. The students were nearly all strong and vigorous products of pioneer life, good hunters and rifle shots, with a love of individual liberty and free speech. Many were studying for the ministry. Anti-slavery sentiment was all but unanimous, except for the one or two students from the South, but few could be called out and out abolitionists. It is difficult nowadays to understand the sentiment which led to the mobbing of an abolitionist speaker, Parker Pillsbury, some months before war was declared. He knew from personal experience that the South was arming and came to urge the citizens of the North to prepare for the struggle. Yet when he attempted to speak in Ann Arbor a mob collected and would have none of his advice; they stormed the little Free Church on North State Street, driving audience and speaker out of the rear windows and gutting the building. Similar troubles were threatened when Wendell Phillips was advertised to speak on abolition a month or so later. In view of the first experience, there was great difficulty in finding a hall, but finally the trustees of the old Congregational Church decided that if the building "must be razed to the ground, let it go down in behalf of free speech and the great cause of liberty." The class of '61 also decided that free speech must be protected, and on the appointed evening was present in force with hickory clubs, twelve members in front and more scattered about inside. While the church was packed there was no demonstration, though the mob "howled outside." Most of the students who heard Phillips that night left confirmed abolitionists, and some were among the first to take up arms. To us, nowadays, the state of public opinion at that time seems almost incomprehensible. Few of the individual members of those mobs were in real sympathy with the South, but party affiliations were strong and, in the words of Judge Cheever, '63, who describes these troubles, they were held back from openly showing abolitionist principles by "their fear that an open contest would lead to the destruction of the government." Within a year a good part of the rioters were in the Union Army. Throughout the troubled period preceding the actual outbreak of war, President Tappan was circumspect in his public utterances, and was considered conservative on the slavery question though he presided at the Wendell Phillips meeting. The professorial radical of those days was the young Andrew D. White. He was in closer touch with the students than his colleagues, and his personal influence and brilliant lectures on modern history swept his students on into bold opinions and resolute action.