Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

[53] connection, at one time at least had shown his devotion to the cause of the slave, and placed all Abolitionists under lasting obligations. In 1863 a friend writing to Garrison from England says:

The working classes also have proved to be sound to the core, wherever their opinion has been tested. Witness the noble demonstration of Manchester operatives the other day, when three thousand of these noble sons of labor (many of whom were actual sufferers from the cotton famine) adopted by acclamation an address to President Lincoln sympathizing with his proclamation. A friend of mine who was present on the occasion tells me that the heartiness and enthusiasm of the workingmen was something glorious; that he heard them say to one another that they would rather remain unemployed for twenty years than get cotton from the South at the expense of the slave. Mr. Thompson has been in other parts of Lancashire, and the meetings he has addressed have been attended with the same results. Our experience in London has been equally satisfactory. It would have done you good if you had . . . attended the great meeting of the working classes which we held on the 31st of December--the eve of freedom. Mr. Thompson himself corroborated this account in a letter written a month later: On New Year's Day I addressed a crowded assembly of unemployed operatives