After completing his studies, he returned with fond hopes to his home in Virginia. But it was only to find that, as an abolitionist, his own flesh and blood regarded him as a leper. Eventually a company of young men confronted him in the street, and warned him that he must henceforth regard himself as a perpetual exile from Virginia, kindly adding that he had been spared tar and feathers solely on his parents' account. Thereupon he again turned his steps towards the free North, and in 1854 he was appointed minister of the Unitarian church in Washington, but did not long find rest for the sole of his foot. An antislavery sermon which he preached, in denunciation of the dastardly outrage on Senator Sumner by Preston Brooks, led to his dismissal by the most liberal and antislavery congregation in Washington, In 1856 he was invited by the Unitarians of Cincinnati to become their pastor, and there some of his most useful and brilliant discourses were delivered. But his mind was absorbed in the impending conflict with the slave-power, and he ultimately became an abolitionist lecturer in Ohio and the Middle States. And his pen was as busy in the work of emancipation as his tongue. In 1858 were published "Tracts for To-day; " in 1861 came "The Rejected Stone;" in 1862, "The Golden Hour." All these were powerful weapons put into the hands of the abolitionists; "The Rejected Stone," in particular, making a deep impression on the mind of the martyr-president, Abraham Lincoln. Subsequently he became the first editor of "The Boston Commonwealth,"—a high-class weekly, primarily started as an abolition organ. Meanwhile, his father and his two brothers threw in their lot with the secessionists, the young men both receiving wounds in the fratricidal struggle.
