s broken up after John Brown's raid, but after the
war was revived as Berea College. But as a rule free speech in the South
was at an end before 1840. No man dared use language like that of
Patrick Henry and Madison; and Jefferson's _Notes on Virginia_, if newly
published, would have been excluded from the mails and its author
exiled.

South Carolina passed a law under which negro seamen on ships entering
her ports were put in jail while their vessel remained, and if the jail
fees were not paid, they were sold into slavery. When Massachusetts
seamen suffered under this law, the State government in 1844 dispatched
an eminent citizen, Samuel Hoar, to try to secure a modification of the
enactment. Arriving in Charleston, accompanied by his daughter, Mr. Hoar
was promptly visited in his hotel by a committee of prominent men and
obliged to leave the city and State at once.

The North had its share of violence. In Connecticut a school for negro
children, kept by two white women, was forcibly broken up. In Illinois
in 1837 an anti-slavery newspaper office was destroyed by a mob, and its
proprietor, Elijah P. Lovejoy, was murdered.

In the Presidential election of 1840 slavery was almost forgotten. The
Whigs were bent on overthrowing the Democratic administration, to which
they attributed the hard times following 1837; and they raised a popular
hurrah for the candidate of the "plain people," William Henry Harrison
of Indiana, who had won a victory over the Indians at Tippecanoe. In a
canvass where "log-cabins" and "hard cider" gave the watchwords and
emblems, national politics played little part. But now first those
resolute anti-slavery men who were determined to bring their cause
before the people as a political issue, and fight it out in that arena,
with solid ranks be their forces ever so small,--came together and
nominated for the Presidency James G. Birney. They could give him but a
handful of votes, but it was the raising of a flag which twenty years
was to carry to victory. Birney, never an extremist, had grown to a full
recognition of all that was at stake. He wrote in 1835: "The contest is
becoming--has become--not one alone of freedom for the blacks, but of
freedom for the whites.... There will be no cessation of the strife
until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty destroyed."

For a dozen years there had been only skirmishing. Now came on a battle
royal, or rather a campaign, from 1844 to 1850,--the annexati