even carried into Congress. A bill to
prohibit the transportation of abolition documents by the Post-Office
department was introduced, taken far enough to put leading men of both
parties on the record, and then dropped. Petitions for the abolition
of slavery in the District of Columbia were met by rules requiring the
reference of such petitions without reading or action; but this only
increased the number of petitions, by providing a new grievance to
be petitioned against, and in 1842 the "gag rule" was rescinded.
Thence-forth the pro-slavery members of Congress could do nothing, and
could only become more exasperated under a system of passive resistance.

Even at the North, indifferent or politically hostile as it had hitherto
shown itself to the expansion of slavery, the new doctrines were
received with an outburst of anger which seems to have been primarily a
revulsion against their unheard of individualism. If nothing, which
had been the object of unquestioning popular reverence, from the
Constitution down or up to the church organizations, was to be sacred
against the criticism of the Garrisonians, it was certain that the
innovators must submit for a time to a general proscription. Thus the
Garrisonians were ostracised socially, and became the Ishmalites of
politics. Their meetings were broken up by mobs, their halls were
destroyed, their schools were attacked by all the machinery of society
and legislation, their printing presses were silenced by force or fraud,
and their lecturers came to feel that they had not done their work with
efficiency if a meeting passed without the throwing of stones or eggs at
the building or the orators. It was, of course, inevitable that such
a process should bring strong minds to the aid of the Garrisonians,
at first from sympathy with persecuted individualism, and finally from
sympathy with the cause itself; and in this way Garrisonianism was in
a great measure relieved from open mob violence about 1840, though
it never escaped it altogether until abolition meetings ceased to
be necessary. One of the first and greatest reinforcements was the
appearance of Wendell Phillips, whose speech at Faneuil Hall in 1839
was one of the first tokens of a serious break in the hitherto almost
unanimous public opinion against Garrisonianism. Lovejoy, a Western
anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place to
another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and w