eekly periodical published
in Baltimore from 1811 to 1849, is a never-failing resource for the
current of public opinion.

CHAPTER IX

THE ABOLITIONISTS

The overthrow of the Democratic party in 1848 was due, not to the
ruthless exploitation of Mexico nor to dissatisfaction with the new
economic policy, but to the abiding distrust of the aristocratic South
and its slavery system by the small business men and farmers of the
North. The greater the success of Polk, the greater the danger to the
older virtues of the Republic, a simple life and faith in the ideals of
freedom and equality. As we have seen, the South had given up these
ideals, and the tobacco, cotton, and sugar planters governed there with
increasing success and acceptability.

There had been persistent economic and religious opposition to the
growth of the plantation system. In the closing years of the eighteenth
century most people in the South disliked slavery, and in Kentucky
majorities of the voters sustained the first abolition movement of
radical tendencies in the country; but the excitement over the Alien and
Sedition Laws eclipsed at the critical moment the public interest in the
anti-slavery struggle. Other outcroppings of the same hostility to
slavery, as already noted, were made evident in the meetings of
Presbyterian and Methodist church conferences between 1815 and 1825 in
Maryland, western Virginia, Tennessee, and North Carolina. But all these
efforts failed and the Southern abolitionists, as we have seen, having
"fought the good fight," emigrated to the Northwest about 1830, when
Virginia failed to rid herself of the growing "incubus." Just as Birney
and Rankin "took up arms" in Ohio there arose a fiercer champion of
their cause in the East, where distance from the scene, lack of intimate
knowledge of "the system," and a strong popular dislike of the South
gave unwonted strength to the new evangelism. William Lloyd Garrison,
son of a Massachusetts sea captain, was in a humor to reform a world
which "sat in darkness." He declared negro slavery the one great evil of
his generation, and the Federal Constitution, which protected it, "an
agreement with Hell." After some ill-luck and untoward experience in
Baltimore, he set up in Boston, in 1831, his famous _Liberator_, in
which he said he would be heard, and henceforth his paper appeared every
week until the close of the Civil