into successful operation. Will you despair
now so many champions are coming to your help, and the trump of jubilee
is sounding long and loud; when is heard a voice from the East, a voice
from the West, a voice from the North, a voice from the South, crying,
_Liberty and Equality now, Liberty and Equality forever_! Will you
despair, seeing Truth, and Justice, and Mercy, and God, and Christ, and
the Holy Ghost, are on your side? Oh, no--never, never despair of the
complete attainment of your rights!"

[Footnote 1: "An Address delivered before the Free People of Color in
Philadelphia, New York, and other cities, during the month of June,
1831, by Wm. Lloyd Garrison. Boston, 1831," pp. 14-18.]

To second such sentiments rose a remarkable group of men and women,
among them Elijah P. Lovejoy, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, John
Greenleaf Whittier, Lydia Maria Child, Samuel J. May, William Jay,
Charles Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John
Brown. Phillips, the "Plumed Knight" of the cause, closed his law
office because he was not willing to swear that he would support the
Constitution; he relinquished the franchise because he did not wish to
have any responsibility for a government that countenanced slavery; and
he lost sympathy with the Christian Church because of its compromising
attitude. Garrison himself termed the Constitution "a covenant with
death and an agreement with hell." Lydia Maria Child in 1833 published
an _Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans_,
and wrote or edited numerous other books for the cause, while the
anti-slavery poems of Whittier are now a part of the main stream of
American literature. The Abolitionists repelled many conservative men by
their refusal to countenance any laws that recognized slavery; but they
gained force when Congress denied them the right of petition and when
President Jackson refused them the use of the mails.

There could be no question as to the directness of their attack. They
held up the slaveholder to scorn. They gave thousands of examples of the
inhumanity of the system of slavery, publishing scores and even hundreds
of tracts and pamphlets. They called the attention of America to the
slave who for running away was for five days buried in the ground up
to his chin with his arms tied behind him; to women who were whipped
because they did not breed fast enough or would not yield to the lust of
planters or overseers; to men who w