Ebook Neighbor Jackwood

Few of the later generation of readers will remember the fugitive salve cases that agitated the country about the middle of the present century, one of which, that of Anthony Burns, shook the conservative town of Boston as by a moral earthquake. To this affair especially, and to two or three similar cases, I owed, in a large measure, the powerful im pulse that urged me to the writing of an anti-slavery novel. How I was influenced by them; how, almost in spite of my self, and against my own literary taste and judgment, I was led to construct a story with the one tabooed and abominated subject craftily concealed (as was charged at the time) in the very heart of it, a surprise to be exploded like a bombshell in the face of unsuspecting readers; how I came to commit this atrocity, if it was one, I shall endeavor to show in this chapter of reminiscences.

I early imbibed a prejudice against any agitation of the slavery question. In the small community in western New York where I was brought up, I knew, in my boy hood, only two outspoken abolitionists. One of these was our good Presbyterian minister, Mr. Sedgwick, a worthy man with an unfortunate hobby, as it was deemed, and as perhaps it was.