Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict

Transcriber’s Note: Cover created by Transcriber and placed in the Public Domain.
BY SAMUEL J. MAY.
BOSTON: FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO. 1869.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by SAMUEL J. MAY in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.

Many of these Recollections were published at intervals, during the years 1867 and 1868, in The Christian Register . They were written at the special request of the editor of that paper; and without the slightest expectation that they would ever be put to any further use. But so many persons have requested me to republish them in a volume, that I have gathered them here, together with several more recollections of events and transactions, illustrative of the temper of the times as late as the winter of 1861, when our guilty nation was left “to be saved so as by the fire” of civil war.
My readers must not expect to find in this book anything like a complete history of the times to which it relates. The articles of which it is composed are fragmentary and sketchy. I expect and hope they will not satisfy. If they whet the appetites of those who read them for a more thorough history of the conflict with slavery in our country and in Great Britain, they will have accomplished their purpose. That in the two freest, most enlightened, most Christian nations on earth there should have been, during more than half of the nineteenth century, so stout a defence of “the worst system of iniquity the world has ever known,” is a marvel that cannot be fully studied and explained, without discovering that the mightiest nation, as well as the humblest individual, may not with impunity consent to any sin, nor persist in unrighteousness without ruin.
I am happy to announce that in due time a somewhat elaborate history of the rise and fall of the slave power in America may be expected from the Hon. Henry Wilson. He is competent to the undertaking. He is cautious and candid as well as brave and explicit. He was an Abolitionist before he became a politician. He has never ignored the rights of humanity, for the sake of partisan success or personal aggrandizement. Mr. Wilson, I believe, did as much as any one of our prominent statesmen to procure the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and to effect its subversion throughout the country.