times
looted by the mob, and the proprietor's life was greatly endangered.
The paper, however, rapidly grew in favor and influence and thoroughly
vindicated the right of free discussion of the slavery question.
Another editor was installed when Birney, who became secretary of the
Anti-slavery Society in 1837, transferred his residence to New York
City.

Twenty-three years before Lincoln's famous utterance in which he
proclaimed the doctrine that a house divided against itself cannot
stand, and before Seward's declaration of an irrepressible conflict
between slavery and freedom, Birney had said: "There will be no
cessation of conflict until slavery shall be exterminated or liberty
destroyed. Liberty and slavery cannot live in juxtaposition." He spoke
out of the fullness of his own experience. A thoroughly trained lawyer
and statesman, well acquainted with the trend of public sentiment in
both North and South, he was fully persuaded that the new pro-slavery
crusade against liberty boded civil war. He knew that the white men in
North and South would not, without a struggle, consent to be permanently
deprived of their liberties at the behest of a few Southern planters.
Being himself of the slaveholding class, he was peculiarly fitted to
appreciate their position. To him the new issue meant war, unless
the belligerent leaders should be shown that war was hopeless. By his
moderation in speech, his candor in statement, his lack of rancor, his
carefully considered, thoroughly fair arguments, he had the rare faculty
of convincing opponents of the correctness of his own view.

There could be little sympathy between Birney and William Lloyd
Garrison, whose style of denunciation appeared to the former as an
incitement to war and an excuse for mob violence. As soon as Birney
became the accepted leader in the national society, there was
friction between his followers and those of Garrison. To denounce
the Constitution and repudiate political action were, from Birney's
standpoint, a surrender of the only hope of forestalling a dire
calamity. He had always fought slavery by the use of legal and
constitutional methods, and he continued so to fight. In this policy he
had the support of a large majority of abolitionists in New England and
elsewhere. Only a few personal friends accepted Garrison's injunction to
forswear politics and repudiate the Constitution.

The followers of Birney, failing to secure recognition for their views
in e