Of fine presence, self-controlled, with well-bred manners; usually quiet in speech, yet capable of great vehemence when needful, Garrison was in spirit and method one to be classed as an extremist. He had clearness of perception rather than breadth of vision. With the economic aspects of slavery he never particularly concerned himself. He had no sympathy with the attitude of compromise and adjustment in which political leaders so often approach the solution of great questions; all questions were to him absolute. He unquestionably magnified his own importance and minimized the work of others; and he certainly alienated for the moment the mass of influential people in the North, while his radical views on other questions than slavery left him for many years under a cloud of suspicion and distrust. Yet it may well be doubted if a man of less concentrated and intense nature could have roused public opinion, or broken down the wall of vested interests with which the institution of slavery was surrounded. What Garrison saw, and saw with undimmed clearness, was the moral wrong of slavery; and to a mind which, like his, had been trained under the awful system of theology which New England had not yet repudiated, questions of right and wrong admitted of no compromise and predominated over every other consideration. It was well that the moral issue should be thus aggressively defined, since it was upon that issue that the battle was soon to be joined; but the constitutional position of the abolition leader was not always, in the public eye, free from doubt. A heated denunciation of the Constitution of the United States as "a covenant with death and an agreement with hell" laid Garrison open to the charge

of advocating the abolition of slavery by unconstitutional means. The charge rests upon a radical misconception of Garrison's position. Vigorous as was his denunciation of compromise, and of legislation which, though constitutional, he held to be morally wrong; willing as he eventually seemed to be that the Union should perish rather than that slavery should continue to receive national protection, he nevertheless advocated no unconstitutional programme, as he understood the Constitution, preached no disloyalty, fomented no treason. It was for Seward later to proclaim the doctrine of the "higher law," by which all constitutions and laws of human making must stand or fall, but the doctrine was Garrison's before it was Seward's. It was the work of the abolitionists to drive into the Union, with hard and unsparing blows, a wedge of moral conviction, and therewith to divide the nation, not, happily, to its permanent undoing, but to the end that the United States might be, in fact as well as in word, a "more perfect" Union.

Garrison's views were first systematically indicated in his Thoughts on African Colonization, published in 1832. In this work he attacked the American Colonization Society, organized in 1816, on the ground that it was pledged not to oppose the system of slavery, but apologized for slavery and the slaveholders; that it recognized slaves as property and increased their value by every deportation; that it was the enemy of immediate emancipation, aimed at the utter expulsion of the blacks, and denied the possibility of elevating the blacks in this country; and, finally, that it was nourished by fear and self

ishness, and deceived and misled the nation.' The mass of facts with which the indictment was sustained made the book a favorite arsenal of weapons for antislavery speakers and writers. From the attack thus begun, Garrison did not desist until, in this country and England, the whole scheme of negro deportation had been abandoned in favor of emancipation.

The same year in which the Thoughts appeared saw the formation of the New England Antislavery Society, followed in December, 1833, by the organization, at Philadelphia, of the American Antislavery Society. The constitution of the national society demanded immediate abolition by the States and the federal government, but opposed all violent or unconstitutional measures, and expressly declared against slave insurrections. The latter declaration was particularly significant in view of the charge, wholly without foundation, that the abolitionists two years before had stirred up the Nat Turner insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, in which some sixty white persons had been killed. The formation of local societies went on apace, each society becoming the centre of an active propaganda through public meetings, private discussions, and the circulation of abolition books, pamphlets, and newspapers. From England, in 1834, came George Thompson to aid in the work, and in 1840 the American and Foreign Antislavery Society was formed for international agitation. Great Britain had already, in 1833, abolished slavery throughout the empire, and a papal bull had arrayed against the institution the opposition of the Church.

1 Johnson, Garrison, 114, 115.

But the organized attack on slavery was not to go on without encountering stubborn and violent resistance. The radical utterances of Garrison cut to the quick, and before long provoked riotous response. Prudence Crandall, a Quakeress, head of a school for young ladies at Canterbury, Connecticut, admitted colored pupils, in consequence of which the State of Connecticut forbade by statute the opening of schools for colored persons without the consent of the town authorities, while Miss Crandall herself was shamefully persecuted by her neighbors, imprisoned, and her school broken up. There were riots in New York City in 1834, in Boston and Utica in 1835. In Boston a mob dragged Garrison through the streets with a rope around his waist, until the mayor lodged him in jail for safety. At Canaan, New Hampshire, the building of Noyes Academy, where white and negro pupils were received, was "removed" by vote of the town-meeting, a hundred yoke of oxen dragging the building from its foundations to the neighboring town common.1 In December, 1837, Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, editor of an antislavery religious newspaper at Alton, Illinois, was murdered by a mob. The tragedy called out, in Faneuil Hall, Boston, the first public speech of Wendell Phillips, whose burning eloquence was thenceforward a powerful aid to the abolition cause. At Bowdoin College a covert attempt on the part of the trustees to remove the professor of mathematics, suspected of abolition leanings, was frustrated only by the devotion of the students, who presented to the examining committee such unassailable proof of proficiency that the charge

Garrison's Garrison, I., 494.

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of incompetency, which the trustees had alone dared to urge, could not be sustained. In hardly any community in the North could abolition sentiments be expressed without fear of social, business, or religious ostracism, and not seldom of violence to person or property.

The first effects of the abolition movement in the South were seen in increased severity towards the slaves, and demands that the northern States suppress the agitation and, if necessary, muzzle the press. A Georgia statute of 1831 offered a reward of five thousand dollars for the apprehension and conviction, under the law of the State, of Garrison or any person circulating copies of the Liberator. The action of the abolitionists in sending their literature to the South roused intense opposition, though it was not clear that negroes who could not read were likely to be much affected by newspapers and books; and there was a demand for the exclusion of such publications from the mails. As early as October, 1831, free persons of color in Georgetown, District of Columbia, had been forbidden by statute to take the Liberator from the post-office, under pain of twenty dollars' fine or thirty days' imprisonment. In July, 1835, the mails at Charleston were rifled and a quantity of abolition documents destroyed. The postmaster at New York, acting on the suggestion of the postmaster at Charleston, refused to forward abolition matter, and was upheld in his action by the Postmaster-general, Amos Kendall. In his annual message of the following December, Jackson, evidently ignorant of the character of the literature he was denouncing, urged upon Congress "the propriety of passing such a law as will prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in