Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

[38] argument to obscure the moral obligation. He frankly acknowledged that he preferred the dissolution of the Union to the recognition, express or implied, of slavery in any form. It is rather difficult to understand at this distant day why the people of the North were so anxious for union with States whose inhabitants visited upon them indiscriminately the most opprobrious epithets, and I am inclined to believe that the Southerners must have had more respect for the outspoken anathemas of Garrison than for the truckling subserviency of time-serving politicians and tradesmen. The nonresistant was more of a man than his fellow citizens who saw nothing wrong in war. “No Union with slave-holders” became his motto, and in 1844 he began to print it weekly at the head of the columns of the Liberator. The Constitution was now for him a “covenant with death and hell.” The annexation of Texas in the teeth of the most solemn obligations, for the sole purpose of extending slavery over a territory in which it had been abolished, strengthened the feeling of hostility to the government among the Abolitionists, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law was almost more than they could bear. The South was steadily pursuing a policy which was bound to swell the Abolition ranks and to rouse the enmity of many