ngelical revival, and Wilberforce was its
leader. These English abolitionists were coming to "immediatism" from
1824, and their influence told in America.

Among the most unselfish and devoted laborers for the slave was Benjamin
Lundy. He was a Quaker by birth and training; he overtaxed his strength
and permanently impaired his hearing by prematurely trying to do a man's
work on his father's farm in New Jersey, and settled at the saddler's
trade in Wheeling, Va., in 1808. With the outlawing of the African slave
trade, there was beginning the sale of slaves from Virginia to the
Southern cotton-fields, and the sight of the sorrowful exiles moved
Lundy's heart to a lifelong devotion of himself to pleading the cause of
the slave. Infirm, deaf, unimpressive in speech and bearing, trudging on
long journeys, and accepting a decent poverty, he gave all the resources
of a strong and sweet nature to the service of the friendless and
unhappy. He supported himself by his trade, while he lectured and wrote.
He established in 1821 a weekly _Genius of Universal Emancipation_, at
Mt. Pleasant, O., starting without a dollar of capital and only six
subscribers; and at first walking twenty miles every week to the
printing press, and returning with his edition on his back. Four years
later he moved his paper to Baltimore. Anti-slavery agitation was still
tolerated in the border States, though once Lundy was attacked by a
bully who almost murdered him. When the impending election of Jackson
in 1828 came as a chill to the anti-slavery cause, the waning fortunes
of his paper sent Lundy to Boston to seek aid. There he found sympathy
in a number of the clergy, though fear of arousing the hostility of the
South kept them cautious. Dr. Channing wrote to Daniel Webster,
expressing the fullest sympathy with Lundy's devotion to freedom, but
also the gravest apprehension that unless the slaveholders were
approached in a spirit of friendliness rather than denunciation, there
would result a sectional strife fraught with the greatest danger. We
should say to the South, wrote Channing, "Slavery is your calamity and
not your crime"; and the whole nation should assume the burden of
emancipation, meeting the expense by the revenue from the sale of public
lands. In this brief letter of Channing's there is more of true
statesmanship than in all the utterances of the politicians of his day.

But Lundy (himself not given to denunciation) made one convert of a v