if any more of them come along and need help to go home, don’t fail to call on me—I like to help on a good cause.”
That was many years ago, and many a ten-dollar bill did he give for the same object and with similar advice, still holding his standing good as a Democrat, until the Democratic party tired on the old flag at Sumter, since which time he has not been counted worthy of a name in the party; for copperheads are not made of such men as he—indeed, I do not know a man from whom we ever received aid and comfort in this enterprise, who is now in that party.
There are now living within twenty miles of Fredonia village, several men who were active agents on the U. G. R. R., and voted the Democratic ticket up to 1860, and others who had believed themselves Democrats “dyed in the wool,” but had been converted from five to twenty years earlier just by the simple process of “taking stock” in this institution. I think I promised you some time ago that I would relate how a Democrat was converted in connection with the active business of the U. G. R. R., and as I once heard him relate the incident to a crowd of copperheads who had surrounded him in the town of Randolph, Cattaraugus Co., about the time that McClellan was nominated at Chicago, I will give it in his own language as near as I can recollect. The gentleman, Captain Chapman, I allude to, was a successful cultivator and dealer in fruits and garden vegetables, and being in Randolph one day with a load of fine fruit, his wagon was surrounded by a crowd of people of all classes, when a coppery old fellow remarked to the crowd that the fruit had a “niggery smell,” and he didn’t want any of it. Another man who had known him in his boyhood said, “Capt. C., you were brought up a Democrat of the straitest sect, and now you go for nigger
