sections. To Garrison, from his _Liberator_ outlook, all
seemed "Consternation and perplexity, for perilous times have come."
They had, indeed, come in New York, as witness this from the pen of
Lydia Maria Child, who was at the time (August 15) in Brooklyn. Says
she:

"I have not ventured into the city, nor does one of us dare to
go to church to-day, so great is the excitement here. You can
form no conception of it. 'Tis like the time of the French
Revolution, when no man dared trust his neighbor. Private
assassins from New Orleans are lurking at the corners of the
streets to stab Arthur Tappan, and very large sums are offered
for any one who will convey Mr. Thompson into the slave
States.... There are several thousand Southerners now in the
city, and I am afraid there are not seven hundred among them who
have the slightest fear of God before their eyes. Mr. Wright
[Elizur] was yesterday barricading his doors and windows with
strong bars and planks an inch thick. Violence in some form
seems to be generally expected."

Great meetings to put the Abolitionists down afforded vents during this
memorable year to the pent-up excitement of the free States. New York
had had its great meeting, and had put the Abolitionists down with
pro-slavery resolutions and torrents of pro-slavery eloquence. Boston,
too, had to have her great meeting and her cataracts of pro-slavery
oratory to reassure the South of the sympathy and support of "the great
body of the people of the Northern States." The toils seemed everywhere
closing around the Abolitionists. The huge head of the asp of public
opinion, the press of the land was everywhere busy, day and night,
smearing with a thick and virulent saliva of lies the brave little band
and its leader. Anti-slavery publications, calculated to inflame the
minds of the slaves against their masters, and intended to instigate the
slaves to servile insurrections, had been distributed broadcast through
the South by the emissaries of anti-slavery societies. The Abolitionists
advocated the emancipation of the slaves in the South by Congress,
intermarriages between the two races, the dissolution of the Union, etc.
All of which outrageous misrepresentations were designed to render the
movement utterly odious to the public, and the public so much the more
furious for its suppression.

It was in the midst of such intense and widespread excitement that
Bo