The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

CHAPTER XXVII.

EXCITING TIMES--WE JOIN A COLONY OF PIONEERS AND
START FOR KANSAS - CHICAGO IN THE FIFTIES -THE
WAR CLOUD BURSTS.
Increasing Excitement on the Subject of Slavery -An Approaching
Crisis -Rendition of Burns and Sims to Their Southern MastersMy Husband Sorely Smitten with "Western Fever" - We Join a
Colony and Start for Kansas - My Tastes and Training Opposed to a
Pioneer Life--Detained in Chicago by Sickness--My Husband
Enters on a New Phase of Life, as Editor and Publisher -My
Capacity for Work - Chicago in the Fifties--No Gas, Sewerage, or
Water - Stuck in the Mud en route to Church - Going to a Tea Party
in a Four-Horse Wagon - " Tears and the Dumps " - Uneasy Times -
The Impending Crisis - The Beginning of the War for the Union -
The Great Awakening --Exciting Events and Scenes.
T HE intense excitement of the anti-slavery reform, then
approaching its crisis, made the pastoral relation, at
that time, a most difficult one. The South was solid in its
determination to maintain slavery at any cost. It scorned
the idea of being limited to any territory, or of being kept
within any bounds. Robert G. Toombs of South Carolina
declared on the floor of Congress, that he would yet " call
the roll of his slaves on Bunker Hill," and that the slave
states would brook neither interference nor dictation. It
began to be evident to the most superficial observer, that
the country must eventually become "' all free or all slave,"
and, as the North had developed hostility toward this relic
of barbarism that could not be silenced, and would not surrender, men and women alike looked forward to the future
with anxiety, and wondered what the end would be.
Ministers who accepted invitations to become pastors of
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