Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[105] us adjourn and go home, and come here on Saturday night; and, as that may be the most important meeting of our lives, let us all be here and our friends with us: I don't think we shall see any of our enemies.

At that moment somebody called out: “There was a Whig meeting notified this afternoon to be held here Saturday evening.”

“Very well, we give them notice that the working-men of Lowell want their hall on Saturday evening, and we give them further notice that the windows are wide, and that we don't want to be disturbed in our meeting, and anybody who comes here to disturb us will find out how wide the windows are. Now, unless something further is suggested, this meeting will stand adjourned until Saturday evening at eight o'clock at this place.”

The meeting did adjourn, in a state of most intense excitement that broke out when the people got into the streets. It was not shown by any disorder, but by the most determined expressions of what ought to be done, so that I began to fear that I might not be able to control the storm that I had raised. Knots of men gathered at the corners of the streets all over the city discussing the matter. I spent two or three hours visiting these groups, encouraging and advising them that all would go well if they stood firm and orderly; and so the night passed off in quietness.

This meeting was understood to be wholly my own ten-hour affair. Neither the Democratic party nor the Free-Soil party made any public sanction of what I had done. The corporations were apparently as averse to having my speech published as the Coalition committee were to have notice of threats to turn off working-men known. On the next day the corporation organ came out with a statement repudiating this notice, and declaring that there was no such purpose on the part of the corporations.

To ascertain if the notice was fully and thoroughly repudiated, Mr. Linus Child, who was at the head of the Boot corporation, was waited upon by two members of the city committee, one of whom had been elected to the legislature at the first election. They asked Mr. Child what would be the action of the corporations regarding the men who should vote the ten-hour ticket, and they made oath that he answered them in the following language: “The men who vote the Coalition ten-hour ticket will not be employed by our company.”