ew and dangerous departure was not overlooked. The report
and bill of 1835 relating to the use of the mails was only a chapter
in execution of the new plan.

The observing friends of the Union did not overlook or misunderstand
the movement. They at once took alarm. Mr. Clay, in May, 1833,
wrote a letter to Mr. Madison expressing his apprehensions of the
new danger, which brought from him a prompt response.

Mr. Madison in his letter said:

"It is painful to see the unceasing efforts to alarm the South by
imputations against the North of unconstitutional designs on the
subject of the slaves. You are right. I have no doubt that no
such intermeddling disposition exists in the body of our Northern
brethren. Their good faith is sufficiently guaranteed by the interest
they have as merchants, ship-owners, and as manufacturers, in
preserving a union with the slave-holding states. On the other
hand, what madness in the South to look for greater safety in
_disunion_."(54)

What Clay and Madison saw in 1833 as the real starting-point for
ultimate secession proved true to history. From that time dates
the machinations which led, through the steps that successively
followed, to actual dissolution of the Union in 1860-61; then to
coercion--War; then to the eradication of slavery. It was Southern
madness that hastened the destruction of American slavery. "Whom
the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

The excuse for even this much significance given to "nullification"
is, that in less than thirty years, under a new name--"state-rights"
--it worked secession--disunion, and lit up the whole country with
the flames and frenzy of internal war that did not die down for
four years more; and then only when slavery was consumed.

The great abolition movement commenced in earnest, January 1, 1831.
Wm. Lloyd Garrison published, at Boston, the _Liberator_, with the
motto--"_Our countrymen are all mankind_." Benjamin Lundy, and
perhaps others, had preceded Garrison, but not until after the
Webster-Hayne debate did the abolition movement spread. Thenceforth
it took deeper root in the human conscience, and it had advocates
of determined spirit throughout the North, led on fearlessly, not
alone by Garrison, but by Rev. Dr. Channing, Rev. James Freeman
Clarke, and, later, by Rev. Samuel May (Syracuse, N. Y.), Gerritt
Smith, the poet Whittier, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Horace
Mann, Charles Sumner, Joshua R. Giddings,