ston called its meeting to abolish the Abolitionists. It was the month
of August, and the heat of men's passions was as great as the heat of
the August sun. The moral atmosphere of the city was so charged with
inflammable gases that the slightest spark would have sufficed to
produce an explosion. The Abolitionists felt this and carried themselves
the while with unusual circumspection. They deemed it prudent to publish
an address to neutralize the falsehoods with which they were assailed by
their enemies. The address drawn up by Garrison for the purpose was
thought "too fiery for the present time," by his more cautious followers
and was rejected. The _Liberator_ office had already been threatened in
consequence of a fiery article by the editor, denouncing the use of
Faneuil Hall for the approaching pro-slavery meeting. It seemed to the
unawed and indignant champion of liberty that it were "better that the
winds should scatter it in fragments over the whole earth--better that
an earthquake should engulf it--than that it should be used for so
unhallowed and detestable a purpose!" The anti-abolition feeling of the
town had become so bitter and intense that Henry E. Benson, then clerk
in the anti-slavery office, writing on the 19th of the month, believed
that there were persons in Boston, who would assassinate George Thompson
in broad daylight, and doubted whether Garrison or Samuel J. May would
be safe in Faneuil Hall on the day of the meeting, and what seemed still
more significant of the inflamed state of the public mind, was the
confidence with which he predicted that a mob would follow the meeting.
The wild-cat-like spirit was in the air--in the seething heart of the
populace.

The meeting was held August 21st, in the old cradle of liberty. To its
call alone fifteen hundred names were appended. It was a Boston audience
both as to character and numbers, an altogether imposing affair, over
whom the mayor of the city presided and before whom two of the most
consummate orators of the commonwealth fulmined against the
Abolitionists. One of their hearers, a young attorney of twenty-four,
who listened to Peleg Sprague and Harrison Gray Otis that day, described
sixteen years afterward the latter and the effects produced by him on
that audience. Our young attorney vividly recalled how "'Abolitionist'
was linked with contempt, in the silver tones of Otis, and all the
charms that a divine eloquence and most felicitous diction could