Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

[41] he held up the Constitution of the United States, and declaring it to be the source and parent of the other atrocities, he committed it too to the flames. “So perish all compromises with tyranny, and let all the people say, Amen.” And the audience again responded from their hearts, “Amen!” In 1857 he went so far as to take part in a State convention, called to urge the separation of the free from the slave States.

It must not be supposed that throughout these years the Abolitionists were less persecuted than formerly by their enemies. If public sentiment in some quarters was becoming more favorable to them, that very fact aroused the base passions of their opponents. In 1850 James Gordon Bennett, in the Herald, deliberately stirred up a mob to put down the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society at New York. He described the speakers as “William H. Furness, of Philadelphia, white-man, from Anglo-Saxon blood; Frederick Douglass, of Rochester, black-man, from African blood; William Lloyd Garrison, of Boston, mulattoman, mixed race; Wendell Phillips, of Boston, white-man, merely from blood.” He added that “Garrison surpasses Robespierre and his associates,” and borrowing his language apparently from a future generation, calls the members of the society “Abolitionists, ”