ccount for its origin.

%348. The Antislavery Movement%.--The appearance of the Antislavery
or Liberty party marks the beginning in national affairs of an
antislavery movement which had long been going on in the states. When
the Missouri Compromise was made in 1820, many people believed that the
troublesome matter of slavery was settled. This was a mistake, and the
compromise really made matters worse. In the first place, it encouraged
the men in Illinois who favored slavery to attempt to make it a slave
state by amending the state constitution, an attempt which failed in
1824 after a long struggle. In the second place, it aroused certain men
who had been agitating for freeing the slaves to redoubled energy. Among
these were Benjamin Lundy, James Gillespie Birney, and William Lloyd
Garrison, who in 1831 established an abolition newspaper called the
_Liberator_, which became very famous. In the third place, it led to the
formation all over the North, and in many places in the South, of new
abolition societies, and stirred up the old ones and made them more
active.[1]

[Footnote 1: _James G. Birney and his Times_, Chap. 12.]

For a time these societies carried on their work, each independent of
the others. But in 1833, a convention of delegates from them met at
Philadelphia, and formed a national society called the American
Antislavery Society.[1]

[Footnote 1: Its constitution declared (1) that each state has exclusive
right to regulate slavery within it; (2) that the society will endeavor
to persuade Congress to stop the interstate slave trade, to abolish
slavery in the territories and in the District of Columbia, and to admit
no more slave states into the Union.]

%349. Antislavery Documents shut out of the Mails.%--Thus organized,
the society went to work at once and flooded the South with newspapers,
pamphlets, pictures, and handbills, all intended to arouse a sentiment
for instant abolition or emancipation of slaves. The South declared that
these were inflammatory, insurrectionary, and likely to incite the
slaves to revolt, and called on the North to suppress abolition
societies and stop the spread of abolition papers. To do such a thing by
legal means was impossible; so an attempt was made to do it by illegal
means. In the Northern cities such as Philadelphia, Utica, Boston,
Haverhill, mobs broke up meetings of abolitionists, and dragged the
leaders about the streets. In the South, the postmasters, as at
Char