Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/454

A series of important events followed soon after the second inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, conspicuous amongst which was the fall of Richmond. The strongest endeavor, and the best generalship of the Rebellion, was employed to hold that place, and when it fell, the pride, prestige, and power of the rebellion fell with it, never to rise again. The news of this great event found me again in Boston. The enthusiasm of that loyal city cannot be easily described. As usual when anything touches the great heart of Boston, Faneuil Hall became vocal and eloquent. This hall is an immense building, and its history is correspondingly great. It has been the theater of much patriotic declamation from the days of the "Revolution," and before; as it has since my day been the scene where the strongest efforts of the most popular orators of Massachusetts have been made. Here Webster, the great "expounder," addressed the "sea of upturned faces." Here Choate, the wonderful Boston barrister, by his weird, electric eloquence, enchained his thousands; here Everett charmed with his classic periods the flower of Boston aristocracy; and here, too, Charles Sumner, Horace Mann, John A. Andrew, and Wendell Phillips, the last equal to most, and superior to many, have for forty years spoken their great words of justice, liberty, and humanity, sometimes in the calm and sunshine of unruffled peace, but oftener in the tempest and whirlwind of mobocratic violence. It was here that Mr. Phillips made his famous speech in denunciation of the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy in 1837, which changed the whole current of his life, and made him pre-eminently the leader of anti-slavery thought in New England. Here, too, Theodore Parker, whose early death not only Boston, but the lovers of liberty throughout the world, still mourn, gave utterance to his deep and life-giving thoughts in words of fullness and power. But I set out to speak of the meeting which was held there, in