Autobiography, diary and correspondence

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892 Excerpt: ...It is evident that Mr. Clarke's first acquaintance with slaveholders was an exceptionally favorable one. In the volume of Mr. Clarke's, entitled " Anti-Slavery Days," from which the above passages are taken, the open manner in which slavery was at that date discussed in Kentucky, in public as well as in private, is quite fully described, and instances of such discussions are given. In them Mr. Clarke was.not silent. He took part in a public debate in Louisville, lasting three nights, which ended with a majority against slavery. And in the Louisville "Journal," then edited by George D. Prentice, he wrote in opposition to slavery. But his chief field and opportunity for making his sentiments known, not in Louisville only, but throughout an extensive Western region, were furnished by his editorial connection with the "Western Messenger," of which we must now give a somewhat particular account. In April, 1836, Mr. Clarke assumed the editorship of the "Western Messenger," a monthly magazine, of which eight numbers had already been published in Cincinnati. In the first number published in Louisville, he printed copious extracts from Dr. W. E. Channing's work entitled "Slavery," which had just appeared in Boston. These extracts occupied about twelve pages of the "Messenger," and gave Mr. Clarke the opportunity to manifest the attitude which, as an editor of a Christian journal, he felt it his duty to take on the subject 1 At a later day, two sons of Judge Speed carried out the lessons of their home in a way to make them effective in the country's history. Joshua Speed was the intimate friend of Abraham Lincoln, and in daily intercourse with him, for five years of their early life in Springfield, Illinois....