undamental right. The spirit of persecution
followed them into the free States. Birney could not publish his paper
in Kentucky, nor even at Cincinnati, save at the risk of his life.
Elijah Lovejoy was not allowed to publish his paper in Missouri,
and, when he persisted in publishing it in Illinois, he was brutally
murdered. Even in Boston it required men of courage and determination
to meet and organize an anti-slavery society in 1832, though only a
few years earlier Benjamin Lundy had traveled freely through the South
itself delivering anti-slavery lectures and organizing scores of such
societies. The New York Anti-Slavery Society was secretly organized in
1832 in spite of the opposition of a determined mob. Mob violence was
everywhere rife. Meetings were broken up, negro quarters attacked,
property destroyed, murders committed.

Fair-minded men became abolitionists on account of the crusade against
the rights of white men quite as much as from their interest in the
rights of negroes. Salmon P. Chase of Ohio was led to espouse the cause
by observing the attacks upon the freedom of the press in Cincinnati.
Gerrit Smith witnessed the breaking up of an anti-slavery meeting in
Utica, New York, and thereafter consecrated his time, his talents, and
his great wealth to the cause of liberty. Wendell Phillips saw Garrison
in the hands of a Boston mob, and that experience determined him to make
common cause with the martyr. And the murder of Lovejoy in 1837 made
many active abolitionists.

It is difficult to imagine a more inoffensive practice than giving
to negro girls the rudiments of an education. Yet a school for this
purpose, taught by Miss Prudence Crandall in Canterbury, Connecticut,
was broken up by persistent persecution, a special act of the
Legislature being passed for the purpose, forbidding the teaching
of negroes from outside the State without the consent of the town
authorities. Under this act Miss Crandall was arrested, convicted, and
imprisoned.

Having eliminated free discussion from the South, the Southern States
sought to accomplish the same object in the North. In pursuance of a
resolution of the Legislature, the Governor of Georgia offered a reward
of five thousand dollars to any one who should arrest, bring to trial,
and prosecute to conviction under the laws of Georgia the editor of
the Liberator. R. G. Williams, publishing agent for the American
Anti-Slavery Society, was indicted by a grand jury of Tu