War. Every scrap of news, true or
untrue, which reflected the cruelty of the slavery system, the lust of
some brutal master, or the growing power of the Southern States in
national politics he repeated and exploited. It was "yellow journalism"
in a peculiar sense. But a single weekly paper published in Boston,
where the commercial and industrial interests had created an aristocracy
almost as exclusive as that of the South, could hardly be expected to
accomplish a great deal. The other papers of the city would not publish
his "stories," nor pay any attention to his earnest appeals.

He made another move upon the intrenched position of the enemy. Between
1831 and 1835 he organized abolition societies, whose members took vows
to "fight on and fight ever" till success should be attained. These
societies were naturally numerous in all those sections of New England,
the Middle States, and the Northwest where hostility and even hatred to
the masterful South prevailed. Pure idealists, small farmers, village
merchants, the unsuccessful, and debtors who dreamed of an America of
which the Declaration of Independence speaks became abolitionists.
Orators were employed, speaking campaigns were arranged, and the slogan
was always immediate and uncompensated abolition of negro slavery. The
more democratic churches were invaded and their preachers were enlisted;
or, when these resisted, placarded as unfriendly to mankind. Before 1840
not less than fifteen thousand Methodists refused association with other
Methodists who would not declare war on slavery. Nearly all of these
lived in western Massachusetts and upper New York. These revolutionists
carried their cause to the Methodist General Conference in New York in
1844, and the great Church was broken into two branches: a Northern and
a Southern. The Baptists of New England refused the same year to support
a missionary who was also a slaveholder, and immediately the Alabama
Baptists refused to fellowship their Northern brethren. The Southern
Baptist Convention, head of the denomination for all the Southern
States, was organized the next year at Augusta. The fact, already noted,
that both these sundered denominations almost doubled their membership
in the next few years shows the strong sectionalism of the issue.

Nor did the public men of the North escape the ordeal of ardent
abolitionism. William H. Seward, a conservative by nature, became an
anti-slavery Whig of national influence in