This text is part of:
[119]
Ohio, of Lovejoy and his press in Illinois, the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia and countless other acts of violence show that the Abolitionists did right to be alarmed.
As a matter of fact they were seriously frightened.
Though Garrison and the ladies put on as bold a front as they could, they did not feel like shaking hands with their old friend Mayor Lyman and regarding that mob as a joke.
There was, after all, a real and terrific force at the back of the mob. It was the mob of the Richmond Whig, of the Faneuil Hall Pro-Slavery meeting.
The Southern fire had moved North, and seemed to encircle the Anti-slavery agitators.
The “gentlemen of property and standing” --to use the pompous newspaper phrase of the day — who led the mob, were actuated by one of the major passions of humanity-defense of property.
For in a big sense, in a metaphorical sense, the South was right; and all this Abolition movement was a servile uprising.
The slave heart and soul had somehow come into communion with the Anti-slavery heart and soul, and together they were generating an earthquake beneath the slaver's feet.
This whole religious message is mirrored in
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.