ward
of New York, to send to Virginia three sailors charged with having aided
a slave out of bondage. Seward declined, on the ground that by New York
law the sailors were guilty of no crime, as that law knew nothing of
property in man. He accompanied his refusal with a discussion of slavery
and slave law quite in the abolitionist vein. To a like call from
Georgia, Seward responded in the same way, and his example was followed
by other northern governors. The Liberty Party took the field in 1840,
Birney and Earle for candidates, who polled nearly 7,000 votes. Four
years later Birney and Morris received 62,300.

It would be a mistake, let us remember, to regard the anti-abolitionist
temper at the North wholly as apathy, friendliness to slavery, or the
result of truckling to the South. Besides sharing the general fanaticism
which mixed itself with the movement, the Abolitionists ignored the
South's dilemma--the ultras totally, the moderates too much. "What
would you do, brethren, were you in our place?" asked Dr. Richard
Fuller, of Baltimore, in a national religious meeting where slavery was
under debate; "how would you go to work to realize your views?" Dr.
Spencer H. Cone, of New York, roared in reply, "I would proclaim liberty
throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof." But the thing
was far from being so simple as that. Denouncing the Constitution as
Garrison did could not but affront patriotic hearts. It was impolitic,
to say the least, to import English co-agitators, who could not
understand the intricacies of the subject as presented here.

[Illustration: facsimile of Heading of the "Liberator."]

The fact that, defying slave-masters and sycophants alike, the cause of
abolition still went on conquering and to conquer, was due much less to
the strength of its arguments and the energy of its agitation than to
the South's wild outcry and preposterous effrontery of demand.
Conservative northerners began to see that, bad as abolitionism might
be, the means proposed for its suppression were worse still, being
absolutely subversive of personal liberty, free speech, and a free
press. More serious was the conviction, which the South's attitude
nursed, that such mortal horror at Abolitionists and their propaganda
could only be explained by some sort of a conviction on the part of the
South itself that the Abolitionists were right, and that slavery was
precisely the heinous and damnable evil they declared i