Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[281] had also drawn hostile attention to himself by a letter¹ to the mass convention of abolitionists held at Syracuse, N. Y., on January 15, of which the closing sentence read: ‘I am for the abolition of slavery, therefore for the dissolution of the Union.’ Later, he drafted for himself and others a protest against the summary disposal of disunion² petitions by the Massachusetts Legislature, alleging:

（3.) That while your petitioners are subjected, by the³ Constitution and laws of the United States, and therefore of this Commonwealth, to heavy fines for obeying the law of God, and refusing to deliver up the fugitive slave, or giving him aid and protection, they feel that they have a right to be heard in asking to be relieved from such immoral obligations.

（4.) That while citizens of this Commonwealth, on visiting Southern States, are seized, thrust into prison, condemned to work with felons in the chain-gang, and frequently sold on the auction-block as slaves; and while the governments, both of the United States and of the Southern States, have refused, or made it penal, to attempt a remedy; and while this Commonwealth has given up all effort to vindicate the rights of its citizens as hopeless and impracticable, under the present Union —it is manifestly the duty of the Commonwealth, as a Sovereign State, to devise some other measure for the redress and prevention of so grievous a wrong, which your petitioners are profoundly convinced can be reached only by a secession from the present Union.

Ante, p. 131.

On the sixth of May, Mr. Garrison set out for New⁴ York to attend the anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The air was full of coming violence, of which a truly Satanic Scotchman, James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, was the prime invoker. He began on April 30 by charging the religious and⁵ philanthropic societies, indiscriminately, that held regular annual meetings in New York, and which were ‘all of one side of thinking in regard to slavery,’ with having brought the country to ‘the brink of a dissolution of the Union—a separation of these States—and, perhaps, a long and bloody civil war.’ He urged ‘the merchants, men of business, and men of property, in this city,’ to