that she had been to the reformer in his struggle with slavery.  She was a providential woman raised up to be the wife and helpmate of her husband, the strenuous man of God.  “As a wife for a period of more than twenty-six years,” he wrote her on the completion of her fiftieth year, “you have left nothing undone to smooth the rugged pathway of my public career—­to render home the all-powerful magnet of attraction, and the focal point of domestic enjoyment—­to make my welfare and happiness at all times a matter of tender solicitude—­and to demonstrate the depth and fixedness of that love which you so long ago plighted to me....  Whatever of human infirmity we may have seen in each other, I believe few have enjoyed more unalloyed bliss in wedded life than ourselves.”  For twelve years after that sad December night the lovely invalid was the object of her husband’s most tender and assiduous care.  And when at last she left him in January, 1876, the loneliness which fell upon his heart seemed more than he could bear.

Differences with old associates was a grievous thorn which came to the pioneer during the progress of the war.  The first marked disagreement between him and them occurred at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society not a month after his wife’s prostration.  The clash came between the leader and his great coadjutor Wendell Phillips over a resolution introduced by the latter, condemning the Government and declaring its readiness “to sacrifice the interest and honor of the North to secure a sham peace.”  Garrison objected to the severity of this charge.  He believed that there was but one party at the North of which it was true, and that was the party of Copperheads.  He endeavored, therefore, to modify the harshness of the resolution by giving it a more moderate tone.  But the anti-Lincoln feeling of the Convention proved too strong for his resistance, and Mr. Phillips’s resolution was finally adopted as the sentiment of the society.

The discordant note thus struck grew sharper and louder during the year.  The divergence of views in the ranks of the Abolitionists touching the Southern policy of the Administration grew wider, until the subject of Mr. Lincoln’s renomination sundered the little band into two wings—­one for renomination, headed by Garrison, the other against renomination, and led by Phillips.  These differences presently developed into, if not positive antagonism, then something closely akin to it between the two wings and the two leaders.  No little heat was generated from the strong, sharp things said on both sides.  Garrison was wiser than Phillips in his unwillingness to have the country, in the homely speech of the President, “swap horses while crossing a stream.”

Serious differences of opinion sprang up also between the two leaders and the two wings in relation to the proper time for dissolving the anti-slavery organizations.  Garrison held on one side that this time had come with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery, while Phillips held on the other that the societies should continue their operations until the negro was invested with the right to vote.  And here it seems that Phillips was wiser than Garrison in his purpose not to abandon in 1865 the old machinery for influencing public sentiment in the negro’s interest.