Francis Jackson, for instance, had been one of the
fifteen hundred signers of the call for the great Faneuil Hall meeting
of the 21st of August. But on the afternoon of the 21st of October he
threw his house open to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, after
its meeting had been broken up by the mob. It seemed to him then that it
was no longer a mere struggle for the freedom of the slave, but for the
right of free speech and free discussion as well. Dr. Henry I. Bowditch,
a young man, in 1835, eminent professor and physician subsequently,
dates from that afternoon of mob violence his conversion to
Abolitionism. In that selfsame hour seeds of resistance to slavery were
sown in two minds of the first order in the city and State. Wendell
Phillips was a spectator in the streets that day, and the father of
Charles Sumner, the sheriff at the time, fought bravely to save Garrison
from falling into the hands of the mob. The great riot gave those young
men their first summons to enter the service of freedom. It was not long
afterward probably that they both began to read the _Liberator_. From
that event many intelligent and conservative people associated slavery
with lynch law and outrage upon the rights of free speech and popular
assembly.

This anti-slavery reaction of the community received practical
demonstration in the immediate increase of subscribers to the
_Liberator_. Twelve new names were added to the subscription list in one
day. It received significant illustration also in Garrison's nomination
to the legislature. In this way did between seventy and eighty citizens
testify their sympathy for him and their reprobation of mob rule. In yet
another way was its influence felt, and this was in the renewed zeal and
activity which it instantly produced on the part of the Abolitionists
themselves. It operated upon the movement as a powerful stimulus to
fresh sacrifices and unwearied exertions. George W. Benson, Garrison's
brother-in-law, led off bravely in this respect, as the following
extract from a letter written by him in Boston, two days after the riot,
to Garrison, at Brooklyn, well illustrates. He had come up to the city
from Providence the night before, in quest of his sister and her
husband. Not finding them, he turned to the cause which had been so
ruthlessly attacked, and this is the sort of care which he bestowed upon
it. He got Burleigh to write a general relation of the mob for
publication in the _Liberator_