‘
[
74]
of Wards I and 2 of the
Town of
Cambridge, Mass. (known as East Cambridge and Cambridge Port).’
He records spending Sunday morning at home, the first time he had missed church-going for a year and a half, to prepare the petition.
One hundred and sixty-six of the signatures were feminine and he pasted them all on a long strip of cloth and pressed them with a borrowed flatiron.
Somewhat later he reported to his mother:—
At Cambridge we are in peace since the Texas petition thirteen feet long, double column, went off. . . . I have pretty much concluded that a consistent Abolitionist (which last every person who thinks and feels must be whether nominally or not) must choose between the Liberty Party and the Disunion Party.
I don't like the dilemma at all, but fear I must come to it. . . . In the Liberty Bell which appears in a week at the Faneuil Hall Anti-Slavery Fair will be a sonnet of mine which may rather astonish some of my friends.
Do not be afraid of seeing my name [signed] to pieces in papers.
In the midst of these absorbing public interests the young student was agitated by personal problems; and when his first year at the school was nearly over, he wrote this startling letter to his mother.
It must have fallen like a bomb into quiet ‘
Boscobel’:—
That the cup of your joy may not be more full than is good for you, I write to say that I have finally
