isters of religion. The South held more tenaciously than any other
section to the old-fashioned type of Christianity. In earlier days,
religious teachers--as in the unanimous vote of the Presbyterian General
Assembly in 1818--had held slavery to be "utterly inconsistent with the
law of God, which requires us to love our neighbor as ourselves." But
now the Southern ministers of all denominations appealed for ample
justification to slavery as it was permitted under the Jewish law, and
as it existed in the time of Christ and the Apostles, and was unrebuked
by them. They went further back, and in the curse pronounced by Noah
upon the unfilial Ham and his posterity, they found warrant for holding
the African in perpetual bondage. So the South closed up its ranks, in
Church and State, and answered its critics with self-justification, and
with counterattack on what it declared to be their unconstitutional,
anarchic, and infidel teachings.

The agitation against slavery took on a new phase with the appearance of
Garrison and his founding of the _Liberator_ and the New England
Anti-slavery Society in 1831. Garrison was filled and possessed with one
idea--the wrongs of the slave, and the instant, pressing, universal duty
of giving him freedom. It was in him an unselfish and heroic passion.
For it he cheerfully accepted hardship, obloquy, peril. He saw no
difficulties except in the sin of wrongdoers and their allies; the only
course he admitted was immediate emancipation by the master of his human
property, and the instant cooeperation and urgency of all others to this
end. His words were charged with passion; they kindled sympathetic souls
with their own flame; they roused to a like heat those whom they
assailed; and they sent thrills of alarm, wonder, and wrath, through the
community. Wherever the _Liberator_ went, or the lecturers of the new
anti-slavery societies were heard, there could be no indifference or
forgetfulness as to slavery. Hitherto, to the immense mass of people
throughout the North, it had been a far-away and unimportant matter. Now
it was sent home to the business and bosoms of all men.

The anti-slavery movement changed its character. Garrison entered on a
very active campaign, lecturing and establishing local societies.
Prominent among his assistants was George Thompson, one of the English
Abolitionists, who, after the emancipation of the West India slaves by
the British government at a cost of L20,000,000, c