“Frémont is not the man we need. He hasn’t the capacity, he hasn’t the strength of character to meet the crisis the country would have to face if he should be elected. He’s served a good purpose in this campaign—he’s created enthusiasm and stimulated the growth of Republican sentiment. But that’s all he’s good for.”
“Well, we’ve made a marvelous showing, anyway,” said Hardaker in a triumphant tone, “and we’ve got the South scared and their northern allies shaking in their boots over the safety of their pet institution. In another four years,” he straightened up, his eyes glowing, and went on in a voice of jubilant prophecy, “we’ll sweep the country and show the South that there’s got to be an end of slavery!”
“Yes, we’ll do it next time, if we haven’t this!” exclaimed Lewis Kimball with enthusiasm. “But, as Dr. Ware says, we’ll have to have the best man possible to lead the procession. Who’ll it be? Frémont again? Seward? Governor Chase? What do you think, doctor?”
Rhoda watched her father anxiously as he gazed into the fire. “No, not Frémont—heaven forbid!” he began slowly. “He has revealed his weakness. Governor Chase is with us, heart and soul, but I’m afraid he isn’t quite big enough. Seward?—Perhaps, if he hasn’t proved too conservative by that time. Well, we’ll have to work with all our might during the next four years and trust to God to raise up some man as a leader who’ll have the wisdom of Solomon and the backbone of a granite mountain!”
CHAPTER XIV
Almost as much heartened by the result of the presidential election as if it had been a victory, Dr. Ware and his friends and political co-workers in Hillside lost no time in renewing and extending the work of the campaign.
“If we have polled such a tremendous vote as this,” they said, “when the party in many northern states was no more than a year old, what can we not do in the next four years?”
The Rocky Mountain Club, through which they had carried on the Frémont propaganda, was reorganized and every member went zealously to work again to win converts to their faith and add to their membership. Joshua Giddings, ardent apostle of the anti-slavery cause, journeyed down from his home in the Western Reserve during a recess of Congress and made for them a stirring speech. To another meeting came Governor Chase with words of hope and encouragement and practical advice. And on one memorable night Henry Ward Beecher roused an overflowing hall to a pitch of enthusiastic resolution hardly equaled even during the campaign.
Rhoda attended the meetings with her father and shared his zeal in the work the club was doing. She and Mrs. Hardaker, Horace’s mother, and Marcia Kimball organized an “Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle” which met at the houses of the members and made clothing for such of the refugees as reached the Hillside station ragged and shivering.
Mrs. Ware knew only in a general way of her daughter’s interest and work in connection with this society, and of Rhoda’s connection with the Underground she knew nothing at all. Deeply grieved, but not yet despairing, over the girl’s refusal to marry the son of her old friend, she set herself to combat, in gentle, unobtrusive ways, what she believed to be the harmful influence exerted by her husband over their first-born.