No shadow of its tremendous influence as a political power seemed to have arrested for a brief instant his attention.

He could copy into his paper this atrocious sentiment which Edward Everett delivered in Congress, without the slightest comment or allusion.

"Sir, I am no soldier.

My habits and education are very unmilitary, but there is no cause in which I would sooner buckle a knapsack on my back, and put a musket on my shoulder than that of putting down a servile insurrection at the South." The reason is plain enough.

Slavery was a _terra incognito_ to him then, a book of which he had not learned the ABC.