the next "conductor," or, if that were too dangerous, gave the slave all necessary instructions, and set his face towards the North Star.
The Abolitionists I propose to tell you about first are: Elias Hicks, Benjamin Lundy, and William Lloyd Garrison, and the history of their work will give us some insight into the early Abolition movement, in which these men took so prominent a part.
Elias Hicks, as doubtless most of you know, was a Quaker. He published his first work upon African slavery in the year 1814. His unvarying hostility to slavery gave much offence to the Friends, and charges were brought against him which ended in a division of their body. The opponents of Hicks were henceforth called "The Orthodox," and his adherents "Hicksites," or "Friends." So uncompromising was his opposition to slavery, that he not only preached against it in the North and in the South, in New York and Pennsylvania, in Virginia and the Carolinas, but he would not eat anything, nor wear anything, produced by the labor of slaves. We are told how, when he lay dying, his friends happened to put a cotton coverlet over him. He pushed it from him with all his feeble strength, and not until the coverlet was changed for a woollen blanket did he become tranquil. Elias Hicks was denounced by the clergy as an Atheist, and but a few years ago a representative was expelled from the Legislature on the ground that he was a "Hicksite."
But a man who did far more effective service in the early stage of the great anti-slavery movement was Benjamin Lundy. Born in New Jersey in 1789, of Quaker parents, he went, at the age of nineteen, to Wheeling, in Western Virginia, where he worked for a saddler. Wheeling was at this time a great thoroughfare of the slave-trade, and "coffles" of slaves were frequently passing through the city. The lad's heart was much moved. "I heard," he says, "the wail of the captive, I felt his pang of distress, and the iron entered my soul." Words which, if we may judge from his after life, must truly have pictured his feelings when he beheld the coffles of manacled victims. In 1815, Benjamin Lundy formed an anti-slavery society in Ohio, where he had settled with his family. It was called the "Union Humane Society," and soon had 500 members in that part of the state. He then started a paper called the Genius of Universal Emancipation, which after a few months he took to Tennessee. From Tennessee he went to Philadelphia—six hundred miles on horseback in midwinter—to attend the American Convention for the Abolition of Slavery. In 1824 he moved his paper from Tennessee to Baltimore, journeying thither on foot. On the way he delivered his first anti-slavery lecture at Deep Creek, in North Carolina, and then gave fifteen or twenty more lectures in
