s was the beginning of the new
Abolitionist movement. The Abolitionists, in the main, were
impracticable people; Garrison in the end proved otherwise. Under the
existing Constitution, they had nothing to propose but that the free
States should withdraw from "their covenant with death and agreement with
hell"--in other words, from the Union,--whereby they would not have
liberated one slave. They included possibly too many of that sort who
would seek salvation by repenting of other men's sins. But even these
did not indulge this propensity at their ease, for by this time the
politicians, the polite world, the mass of the people, the churches (even
in Boston), not merely avoided the dangerous topic; they angrily
proscribed it. The Abolitionists took their lives in their hands, and
sometimes lost them. Only two men of standing helped them: Channing, the
great preacher, who sacrificed thereby a fashionable congregation; and
Adams, the sour, upright, able ex-President, the only ex-President who
ever made for himself an after-career in Congress. In 1852 a still more
potent ally came to their help, a poor lady, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, who in
that year published "Uncle Tom's Cabin," often said to have influenced
opinion more than any other book of modern times. Broadly speaking, they
accomplished two things. If they did not gain love in quarters where
they might have looked for it, they gained the very valuable hatred of
their enemies; for they goaded Southern politicians to fury and madness,
of which the first symptom was their effort to suppress Abolitionist
petitions to Congress. But above all they educated in their labour of
thirty years a school of opinion, not entirely in agreement with them but
ready one day to revolt with decision from continued complicity in wrong.

6. _Slavery and Southern Society_.

In the midst of this growing America, a portion, by no means sharply
marked off, and accustomed to the end to think itself intensely American,
was distinguished by a peculiar institution. What was the character of
that institution as it presented itself in 1830 and onwards?

Granting, as many slave holders did, though their leaders always denied
it, that slavery originated in foul wrongs and rested legally upon a vile
principle, what did it look like in its practical working? Most of us
have received from two different sources two broad but vivid general
impressions on this subject, which seem hard to reconcile