was twenty miles to go from Winfield, so we did not arrive in Utica till noon. We drove directly to Uncle Henry Roberts' house, and found that the convention had met at ten o'clock, and succeeded in organizing, but had been dispersed by a mob led by such men as Samuel Beardsley, afterwards Congressman; A. G. Dauby, Postmaster of Utica; R. B. Miller, &c., &c., "gentlemen of property and standing," as their friends called them. That night, the office of the Oneida Standard and Democrat, that had espoused the cause of the slave, was sacked by the mob, the press thrown into the street and broken, the cases of type taken to the street and emptied into a mass that printers call pi; all the anti-slavery books, pamphlets and papers that could be found, taken to the street and scattered. The following winter, Alvan Stewart delivered an anti-slavery lecture in the Congregational Church in Winfield, of which father was then pastor. I was in Ohio; but I heard by letter that rotten eggs were thrown at Mr. Stewart in the pulpit, and stones thrown through the windows. Such outrages, you may well believe, failed to convince father that slavery was right, or that those who were arraying the battle against it were wrong.
"It was in 1840, the first Presidential election after the formation of the Liberty party, that father's antislavery feeling took a more public expression. His feeling was that political action against slavery was immeasurably the most important political action that the time demanded, and that the alliance of both the old parties with slaveholders rendered it impossible for him to act with either.
