ing out of the North and out of the
South. Everywhere the chaos of the winds has burst, and the anarchy of
the "live thunder."

Benton with his customary optimism from a Southern standpoint, rejoiced
in the year 1836 that the people of the Northern States had "chased off
the foreign emissaries, silenced the gabbling tongues of female dupes,
and dispersed the assemblies, whether fanatical, visionary, or
incendiary, of all that congregated to preach against evils that
afflicted others, not them, and to propose remedies to aggravate the
disease which they pretended to cure." Calhoun's pessimism was clearer
eyed. The great nullifier perceived at once the insuppressible nature of
the Abolition movement and early predicted that the spirit then abroad
in the North would not "die away of itself without a shock or
convulsion." Yes, it was as he had prophesied, the anti-slavery reform
was, at the very moment of Benton's groundless jubilation, rising and
spreading with astonishing progress through the free States. It was
gaining footholds in the pulpit, the school, and the press. It was a
stalwart sower, scattering broadcast as he walked over the fields of the
then coming generation truths and antipathies of social principles,
which were to make peace impossible between the slave-holding and the
non-slave-holding halves of the Union.

In the year 1836 the anti-slavery leaven or residuum for instance, was
sufficiently potent to preserve the statutes of the free States, free
from repressive laws directed against the Abolitionists. This was much
but there was undoubtedly another phase of the agitation, a phase which
struck the shallow eye of Benton, and led him into false conclusions. It
was not clear sailing for the reform. It was truly a period of stress
and storm. Sometimes the reform was in a trough of the sea of public
opinion, sometimes on the crest of a billow, and then again on the bosom
of a giant ground swell. In Boston in this selfsame year which witnessed
Benton's exultation over the fall of Abolitionism, the Massachusetts
Anti-Slavery Society was not able to obtain the use of hall or church
for its annual meeting, and was in consequence forced into insufficient
accommodations at its rooms on Washington street. The succeeding year
the society was obliged, from inability to obtain the use of either hall
or church in the city, to occupy for its annual meeting the loft over
the stable connected with the Marlborough Hotel. I