Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

[483] agitation ‘was confined to a few fanatics, urged and guided by the Garrisons, the Tappans, and others, their wire-workers.’ Wise, of Virginia, declared the South would fight to the hilt against emancipation in the District unless upon a petition from slave-owners. The House, which had adopted Mr. Dickson's motion (seconded by his colleague, Mr. Fillmore) to print a memorial from Rochester, N. Y., bearing the mayor's signature, was persuaded by Wise to reconsider and lay it, like the several petitions, upon the table. The same fate attended petitions afterwards introduced by John Quincy Adams; but the slavery question had come to stay in Congress.

The Southern panic was especially caused by the activity of the admirably directed American Anti-Slavery Society. A circular from the management¹ to its ² auxiliaries, in June, urged the raising of $30,000 for the current year, to multiply agents, societies, and periodicals, and provide for the gratuitous distribution of anti-slavery publications. In the first week of each month a small folio paper called Human Rights would be issued; in the second week, the Anti-Slavery Record, ‘a small magazine with cuts’; in the third, an enlarged sheet of the Emancipator; in the fourth, the Slave's Friend, a juvenile magazine—all struck off by the thousand. Of the sum required, $14,500 had been raised at the annual meeting in May; $4,000 by the New England Convention, where Isaac Winslow handed in a thousand-dollar bill. Such a practical programme, backed by such energy and such ready funds, was well calculated to startle the South.

On July 10, a group of Southerners, chiefly ³ Mississippian and all Gulf-State, met at the American Hotel in New York, and appointed a committee to prepare an address summoning a public meeting in that city ten days later, ‘to take into consideration the alarming subject now ’