● ● ●  And tremble when I wake, for all the wealth
That sinews bought and sold have ever earn’d.¹⁵³

During her stay in the South, Mrs. Glover was probably shielded from the uglier aspects of slavery and saw only the cheerful domestic face it turned to the visitor; yet she can hardly have helped being deeply shaken by the fact of slavery. In later years she told of sending pseudonymous antislavery articles to the local papers while she was there, but almost certainly they were never published.¹⁵⁴ In those heated times, if her antislavery views were known at all they may easily have caused her to be labeled an “abolitionist,” even though she was not an abolitionist in the political sense for some years to come.

The Jacksonian Democrats detested the abolitionist agitation because it alienated the white South, whose support was vitally necessary to carry through the economic reforms to which they were dedicated. Intensely loyal to the political faith in which she had been brought up, Mrs. Glover found herself involved in contradictions—as, in fact, the whole country was.

Thus when the political campaign of 1844 got under way, she entered the lists not on the side of the abolitionist candidate, James Birney, or even of Henry Clay and the Whig governor of North Carolina, John Morehead, who was as antislavery as a southern governor could be. Instead, she went all out for the Democrats, including Morehead’s opponent, Michael Hoke. It is an interesting sidelight that her cousin Hildreth Smith, frustrated in his desire to marry her, was later to wed a relative of Hoke’s and that their son, Hoke Smith, would one day be governor of Georgia.

When Clay campaigned through the South in April, Governor Morehead and a delegation of Whigs went to Charleston to escort him to Wilmington. Mrs. Glover seized the occasion to send an anti-Clay jingle to the newspapers. Two months later she was asked by Hoke to  ● ● ●