The investigating committee appointed by Congress is being called off. The net thrown out over the country yielded very little. As you know, Captain Brown implicated nobody. To the end he insisted that he and he alone was responsible for all that happened, that he had many friends, but no instigators. In their efforts this committee has signally failed. Now they have asked to be discharged. It is my opinion that the men engaged in this investigation expect soon to be in rebellion themselves, and not a rebellion for liberty, like that of John Brown, but a rebellion for slavery. It is possible that they see that by using their Senatorial power in search of rebels they may be whetting a knife for their own throats. At any rate the country will soon be relieved of the Congressional drag-net, so your liberty is no longer threatened. We are planning a memorial to the grand old man here at Tremont Temple and want you to speak. I know you’ll come. Douglass hastened to Boston. The great mass meeting was more than a memorial. It was a political and social conclave. Arguments and differences of opinions were laid aside. They had a line of action. Douglass saw that he had returned to the United States in time for vital service. “It enabled me to participate in the most important and memorable presidential canvass ever witnesses in the United States,” he wrote, looking back on it later, “and to labor for the election of a man who in the order of events was destined to do a greater service to his country and to mankind than any man who had gone before him in the presidential office. It was a great thing to me to be permitted to bear some humble part in this. It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions, but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.”[19] Not for nearly a hundred years was the country to see such a presidential campaign as the one waged in 1860. Garrison was drawn into the fray early. He mocked the Democrats when they tore themselves apart at their convention in Charleston and cheered “an independent Southern republic.” With the Democrats divided, the Republicans would win; and into the Republican party now came the Abolitionists--including William Lloyd Garrison. Douglass was very happy. A few weeks before the Republicans met in convention at Chicago, Frederick Douglass at his home in Rochester had a caller. The man identified himself as a tradesman from Springfield, Illinois. “I’m here, lookin’ over the shippin’ of some goods, and I took the liberty to come see you, Mr. Douglass,” he said, resting his hands on his knotty knees.