lavery only in the District of Columbia, in the territories, and at
sea, where the absolute jurisdiction of the general Government was
admitted by nearly all. Nevertheless, southern hostility to them was
indescribably ferocious and uncompromising. They were charged with
instigating all the slave insurrections and insubordination that
occurred, and with having made necessary the new, more diabolical
discipline over blacks, both bond and free. Southern papers and
Legislatures incessantly commanded that Abolitionists be delivered up to
southern justice, their societies and their publications suppressed by
law, and abolitionist agitation made penal. There were northerners quite
ready to grant these demands. Rage against abolitionism, much of it, if
possible, even more unreasoning, prevailed at the North. Garrison says
that he found here "contempt more bitter, detraction more relentless,
prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slave-owners
themselves." The Church, politics, business--all interests save
righteousness--seemed to bow to the false god. Of all utterances against
abolitionism, those of clergymen and religious journals were the
bitterest. To call slavery sin was the unpardonable sin.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
Wm. Lloyd Garrison.

[1834-1836]

In 1834, on July 4th, a mob broke up a meeting of the American
Anti-Slavery Society in New York. A few days after, Lewis Tappan's house
was sacked in the same manner, as well as several churches,
school-houses, and dwellings of colored families. At Newark, N. J., a
colored man who had been introduced into a pulpit by the minister of the
congregation, was forcibly wrenched therefrom and carried off to jail.
The pulpit was then torn down and the church gutted. In Norwich, Conn.,
the mob pulled an abolitionist lecturer from his platform and drummed
him out of town to the Rogues' March. In 1836 occurred the murder of
Rev. E. P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Ill. He was the publisher of The Observer,
an abolitionist sheet, which had already been three times suspended by
the destruction of his printing apparatus. It was at a meeting held in
Faneuil Hall over this occurrence that Wendell Phillips first made his
appearance as an anti-slavery orator. Also in 1836 the office at
Cincinnati in which James G. Birney published The Philanthropist, was
sacked, the types scattered, and the press broken and sunk in the river.
Birney was a southerner by birth, and had been a slav