e-holder, but had
freed his slaves. Between 1834 and 1840 there was hardly a place of any
size in the North where an Abolitionist could speak with certain safety.

[Illustration: Portrait.]
Wendell Phillip.

The destruction of colored people's houses became for a time an
every-day occurrence in many northern cities. For some years the
condition of the free blacks and their friends was hardly better north
than south. Schools for colored children were violently opposed even in
New England. One kept by Miss Prudence Crandall, at Canterbury, Conn.,
was, after its opponents had for months sought in every manner to close
it, destroyed by fire. The lady herself was imprisoned, and such schools
were by law forbidden in the State. A colored school at Canaan, N. H.,
was voted a nuisance by a meeting of the town; the building was then
dragged from its foundations and ruined. Many who aided in these deeds
belonged to what were regarded the most respectable classes of society.

[1839-1840]

Owing to the vagaries and unpatriotism of the Garrisonians, there was
from 1840 schism in the abolition ranks. Garrison and his closest
sympathizers were very radical on other questions besides that
concerning the sin of slavery. They declared the Constitution "a league
with death and a covenant with hell" because it recognized slavery. They
would neither vote nor hold office under it. They upbraided the churches
as full of the devil's allies. They also advocated community of
property, women's rights, and some of them free love. Others, as Birney,
Whittier, and Gerrit Smith, refused to believe so ill of the
Constitution or of the churches, and wished to rush the slavery question
right into the political arena. The division, far from hindering,
greatly set forward the abolitionist cause. Perhaps neither abolition
society, as such, had, after the schism of 1840, quite the influence
which the old exerted at first, but by this time a very general public
opinion maintained anti-slavery propagandism, pushing it henceforth more
powerfully than ever, as well as, through broader modes of utterance and
action, more successfully. Whittier, Lowell, Longfellow, each enlisted
his muse in the crusade. Wendell Phillips's tongue was a flaming sword.
Clergymen, politicians, and other people entirely conservative in most
things, felt free to join the new society of political Abolitionists.

In 1839 the Governor of Virginia made a requisition on Governor Se