From the destruction of an office sign to that of a public hall seems a long stride, but in fact there was the closest possible logical connection between the Boston mob of October, 1835, and that which laid Pennsylvania Hall in ashes. In both cases the right of free speech was aimed at and temporarily suppressed. But there were other resemblances, amounting almost to identity. The attack in Philadelphia, as in Boston, involved the anti-slavery office;2 it was directed against a meeting of women; the mayor was neither eager nor able to put it down. We see again the figures of Garrison and of Burleigh; of Mary Parker, Maria Chapman, Anne Warren Weston, and others of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society who had heard the yells of the ‘gentlemen of property and standing.’ There is the same spectacle of white women paired with black, as3
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1 From the Needles's, whose mob-threatened home he quitted, on the night of the burning of the hall, with the ‘parting benediction, “Peace be with you,” ’ Mr. Garrison took refuge, by invitation, at the friendly house of Morris L. Hallowell, No. 240 North Sixth St., where the Junior Anti-Slavery Society had gathered to meet Henry C. Wright. About two o'clock the next morning (May 18) a covered carriage was driven to the door, into which he got and was spirited away. Joseph Parrish, Jr., Israel H. Johnson, and Robert Purvis bore the chief part in this deliverance. The mob violence continued for several days, and ended, as usual, by alarming the ‘respectable’ sympathizers with it ( “History of Pennsylvania Hall,” p. 141; Lib. 8.87).
2 This was the southernmost room on the Sixth-Street front, and was the object of special attention from the mob, who used its literature to feed the flames. Lundy's effects—his ‘papers, books, clothes, everything of value’ except his Mexican journal—were there stored, and became ‘a total sacrifice on the altar of Universal Emancipation’ ( “History of Pennsylvania Hall,” p. 170; “Life of Lundy,” p. 303; Lib. 8: 95). Whittier and the Pennsylvania Freeman were also among the sufferers (Underwood's “Whittier,” p. 144).
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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