ent further; for a time at least he held that all human
governments, as resting on force, were sinful, and to be ignored, or
passively submitted to, without taking active part. He declared the
Union, as a compact with slave-holders, was worthy only to be dissolved.
But how even dissolve it, since he counselled his followers not to vote?
And if it were dissolved, how would the slaves be any nearer freedom?
Was there any possible good outcome to non-voting and dissolution of the
Union, except that there would then be no complicity with slave-holders?
And would such escape from complicity be any help to the slave, any
service to humanity, anything more than an egotistic separation from
political society, a mere refined selfishness?

Such questions never troubled Garrison. Instead of answering them, he
found something else to denounce. The churches he thought were derelict,
in that they did not bear testimony against slavery. True, most of the
great religious bodies of the country were soon rent asunder on the
question: Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, were divided between
North and South, because neither side could tolerate the other's
position on slavery. But nothing satisfied Mr. Garrison. To him the
churches were "cages of unclean birds and synagogues of Satan."

But if the gun was ill-aimed, at least the recoil was prodigious. It is
unreasonable to attribute principally to the violence of the _Liberator_
the new and determined rally of the South in defense of
slavery,--Calhoun and his followers had far wider grounds for their
action than that,--but undoubtedly that violence helped to consolidate
and intensify the Southern resistance. The Abolitionist papers were at
first sent all over the South. The Southerners saw little difference
between such papers as the _Liberator_ and such direct incitements to
insurrection as Walker's _Appeal_; and the horrors of Nat Turner's
rising were fresh in mind. They put all Abolitionist teaching under a
common ban. At the North, the anti-slavery cause became associated in
the popular mind with hostility to the government, to the churches, to
the established usages of society. It was Charles Sumner who said: "An
omnibus load of Boston Abolitionists had done more harm to the
anti-slavery cause than all its enemies."

Garrison's own following was soon divided, and a large part drew away
from him. The most important division came on the question of political
action, when, in the Presi