of gradual abolition."
He chose for his motto: "Immediate and unconditional emancipation!" He
promised his readers that he would be "harsh as truth and uncompromising
as justice"; that he would not "think or speak or write with
moderation." Then he flung out his defiant call: "I am in earnest--I
will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single
inch--and I will be heard....

'Such is the vow I take, so help me God.'"

Though Garrison complained that "the apathy of the people is enough to
make every statue leap from its pedestal," he soon learned how alive the
masses were to the meaning of his propaganda. Abolition orators were
stoned in the street and hissed from the platform. Their meeting places
were often attacked and sometimes burned to the ground. Garrison himself
was assaulted in the streets of Boston, finding refuge from the angry
mob behind prison bars. Lovejoy, a publisher in Alton, Illinois, for his
willingness to give abolition a fair hearing, was brutally murdered; his
printing press was broken to pieces as a warning to all those who
disturbed the nation's peace of mind. The South, doubly frightened by a
slave revolt in 1831 which ended in the murder of a number of men,
women, and children, closed all discussion of slavery in that section.
"Now," exclaimed Calhoun, "it is a question which admits of neither
concession nor compromise."

As the opposition hardened, the anti-slavery agitation gathered in force
and intensity. Whittier blew his blast from the New England hills:

"No slave-hunt in our borders--no pirate on our strand;
No fetters in the Bay State--no slave upon our land."

Lowell, looking upon the espousal of a great cause as the noblest aim of
his art, ridiculed and excoriated bondage in the South. Those
abolitionists, not gifted as speakers or writers, signed petitions
against slavery and poured them in upon Congress. The flood of them was
so continuous that the House of Representatives, forgetting its
traditions, adopted in 1836 a "gag rule" which prevented the reading of
appeals and consigned them to the waste basket. Not until the Whigs were
in power nearly ten years later was John Quincy Adams able, after a
relentless campaign, to carry a motion rescinding the rule.

How deep was the impression made upon the country by this agitation for
immediate and unconditional emancipation cannot be measured. If the
popular vote for those candidates who opposed not sl