[Illustration: J. MILLER McKIM]
[Illustration: REV. WILLIAM H. FURNESS]
[Illustration: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON]
[Illustration: LEWIS TAPPAN]
In the freedmen's work, he traveled extensively, and worked hard,
establishing schools at the South and organizing public sentiment in the
free States. In the spring of 1865, he was made corresponding secretary
of the American Freedman's Commission, which he had helped to establish,
and took up his residence in the city of New York. This association was
afterwards amplified, in name and scope, into the American Freedman's
Union Commission, and Mr. McKim continued with it as corresponding
secretary, laboring for reconstruction by means of Freedman's schools,
and impartial popular education. On the 1st of July, 1869, the
Commission, by unanimous vote on his motion, disbanded, and handed over
the funds in its treasury to its constituent State associations. Mr.
McKim retired from his labors with impaired health, and has since taken
no open part in public affairs. He is one of the proprietors of the New
York _Nation_, in the establishment of which, he took an effective
interest.
Mr. McKim's long and assiduous career in the anti-slavery cause, has
given evidence of a peculiar fitness in him for the functions he
successively discharged. His influence upon men and the times, has been
less as a speaker, than as a writer, and perhaps still less as a writer
than as an organizer, a contriver of ways and means; fertile in
invention, prepared to take the initiative, and bringing to the
conversion of others, an earnestness of purpose and a force of language
that seldom failed of success. In an enterprise where theory and
sentiment were fully represented, and business capacity, and what is
called "practical sense," were comparatively rare, his talents were most
usefully employed; while, in periods of excitement--and when were such
wanting? his caution, sound judgment, and mental balance were qualities
hardly less needed or less important.