Steele, Cox and myself accepted the hospitality of Bro.
Humber. Bro. Cox, being now in the presence of a man reported to be a
live Abolitionist, opened a discussion on the question of slavery.
I had been brought up on the Western Reserve, Ohio, and inherited
intense anti-slavery convictions. But I had learned from the writings
of A. Campbell to judge slave-holders with a charitable judgment. They
had inherited the institution of slavery from their fathers, and like
the aristocratic institutions of the old world, it had come down to
them without any fault of their own. My experiences in Kansas
certainly had not made me love slavery any better; still, all this,
how bitter soever it might be to me, had revealed so much of real
nobility in the hearts of many slave-holders that it had not impaired
my feeling of good will to them. If I were to grant that they had been
associated sometimes with men of desperate morals, had I not also been
associated with Jim Lane, and had I not been compelled to hide myself
behind the old maxims, that "Politics, like poverty, makes us
acquainted with strange bedfellows?"
And so I argued with Bro.
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