has been held, by highly respectable legal authority, an offence against the people of the Commonwealth, which may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common law." "The patriotism of all classes," he added, "must be invoked to abstain from a discussion which, by exasperating the master can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave; and which, if not abandoned, there is great reason to fear, will prove the rock on which the Union will split." In other words, the South would consent to remain in the Union only upon the condition that Northern freemen should wear a padlock upon their lips!

This portion of the Governor's message, together with the insolent resolves of the Southern Legislatures, was referred to a joint committee of the two Houses, of which Senator George Lunt of Newburyport, a doughface of the first water, was chairman; and there was only too much reason to fear that in the then state of public sentiment, Massachusetts might be disgraced by some sort of compliance with the Southern demands. Neither press nor pulpit had the least appreciation of the crisis, and it depended alone upon the Abolitionists to make such resistance as they could to this effort to destroy the sacred right of free discussion. Mr. Garrison and his friends promptly bestirred themselves, and the scheme was defeated. The conduct of the chairman of the committee toward Dr. Follen, William Goodell, and others, who appeared before them to explain and defend the Abolitionists, was so arbitary and insolent as to excite general indignation.

Mr. Lunt, in behalf of the committee, made a report, in which he spoke of the demands of the South as "of the most solemn and affecting character; as appeals to our justice as men, to our sympathies as brethren, to our patriotism as citizens; to the memory of the common

trials and perils of our ancestors and theirs; to all the better emotions of our nature; to our respect for the Constitution; to our regard for the laws; to our hope for the security of all those blessings which the Union and the Union only can preserve to us." The conduct of the Abolitionists was pronounced "not only wrong in policy, but erroneous in morals," and such as to justify the censures that the Southern Legislatures had bestowed upon them. And yet Mr. Lunt did not venture to propose a compliance with the Southern demand for penal enactments; his courage was only equal to the presentation of resolutions expressing "entire disapprobation of the doctrines avowed and the general measures pursued by such as agitate the general question of slavery." But even this vicious little mouse, which the Committee had brought forth with so much and such painful labor, was laid on the table, whence it fell into that bottomless limbo reserved for things evil. The country members, though not Abolitionists, had too much common-sense to follow the advice of the Committee.

No person known to be an Abolitionist could travel in those days at the South except at the peril of his life. If any one was suspected, in view of circumstances ever so slight, to be an enemy of slavery, he was sure to meet with some indignity. Meanwhile Southerners could travel at the North, bring their slaves with them, go where they listed, and denounce Abolitionists as incendiaries and cut-throats at every step, and no one thought of imposing any restriction upon their liberty! It was an offence against public opinion to oppose slavery, but none whatever to apologize for it or defend it outright. Dr. Reuben Crandall (a brother of Prudence Crandall, the founder of the Canterbury school for colored girls), a gentleman of the highest character, went to Washington to teach botany. On the 11th of August, 1835, he was arrested

and thrown into jail, on the charge of circulating incendiary publications, with a view to excite an insurrection of slaves. The evidence against him was, that some of his botanical specimens were wrapped in old copies of anti-slavery papers, which had probably been bought in the market as waste paper, and that he had lent an anti-slavery pamphlet to a white citizen. The passages read in court from these publications were no more inflammatory than many that may be found in the writings of Jefferson and Patrick Henry. The prosecuting attorney, however, made a desperate effort to secure his conviction, though without success. But his close confinement for a long time in a damp dungeon brought upon him a lingering consumption, which terminated his life in 1838.

Amos Dresser, a young theological student (a native of Berkshire County, Mass.), went to Nashville, Tenn., in the summer of 1835, to sell the "Cottage Bible." His crime was that he was a member of an anti-slavery society, and that he had some anti-slavery tracts in his trunk. For this he was flogged in the public square of the city, under the direction of a Vigilance Committee, composed of the most distinguished citizens, some of them prominent members of churches. He received twenty lashes on the bare back from a cowskin. On the previous Sunday he had received the bread and wine of the communion from the hands of one of the members of that Vigilance Committee! Another member of the Committee was a prominent Methodist, whose house was the resort of the preachers and bishops of his denomination.

In the latter part of 1835, Governor Gayle, of Alabama, demanded of the Governor of New York that Ransom G. Williams, publishing agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, should be delivered up for trial under the laws of Alabama (a State in which he had never set his foot), on an indictment found

against him for publishing in "The Emancipator," of New York, these two sentences:

"God commands, and all nature cries out, that men should not be held as property. The system of making men property has plunged 2,250,000 of our fellow-countrymen into the deepest physical and moral degradation, and they are every moment sinking deeper."

The land was ringing with the charge that the Abolitionists were incendiaries, and engaged in stirring up an insurrection of slaves; but the Grand Jury of Tuscaloosa, with something less than a cartload of anti-slavery publications before it, cited the above sentences as the worst, the most incendiary that they could find. Read them again, and see how false and hollow was the pretence that the Abolitionists brought themselves into difficulty by a reckless use of harsh language! It was the doctrine of the Abolitionists-the doctrine that slavery was a sin against God and an outrage upon humanity, and that immediate emancipation was therefore a duty-and not the language in which that doctrine was presented, that filled the South with madness. Dr. Channing and others thought they could express their hostility to slavery in terms so gentle and a spirit so calm, that the South would welcome their soft rebukes; but they found their mistake, and that the slaveholders, in their wrath, made no discrimination in their favor. Dr. Channing, though he criticised the Abolitionists sharply, was just as intensely hated at the South as Garrison himself, and the recipient of the same odious epithets that were hurled at him.

XIII.

Persecution of James G. Birney-Press Destroyed-The Martyrdom of Lovejoy - Meeting in Faneuil Hall - Dr. Channing — Wendell Phillips - Edmund Quincy.

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I HAVE already alluded to Mr. James G. Birney's conversion to the anti-slavery cause, to his emancipation of his slaves, and to his consecration of himself to the work of freedom. The Abolitionists built large hopes upon the accession of such a man to their ranks. They argued therefrom the feasibility of their efforts to convince slaveholders of the sinfulness of slavery and persuade them to break the chains of their slaves; and they felt sure that his example and eloquence would have great weight at the North. They soon discovered, however, the truth of the prophet's words: Truth faileth, and he that departeth from evil maketh himself a prey." The South broke out upon Mr. Birney in a storm of wrath. His gentleness, candor, and freedom from exaggeration counted for nothing. Allied by birth and marriage to a large circle of slaveholders, his name was at once cast out by them as evil, and he could find no rest for the sole of his foot in the State where he was born. The Supreme Court of Alabama made haste to expunge his name from the roll of attorneys entitled to practice at the bar; and in the University of the State, of which he had been a trustee, several literary societies, which had elected him an honorary member, passed resolutions of expulsion. In the face of all these angry ebullitions he was not dismayed. He resolved to establish a paper at Danville, Ky., and make open