Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

On October 2, Mr. Garrison writes to G. W. Benson:

I have not got regulated yet, since my return from ¹ rusticating in the country, and I already begin to sigh for the quietude and (selfish ease will out) irresponsibleness of Friendship's Valley. . . . Boston is beginning to sink into apathy. The reaction has come rapidly, but we are trying to get the² steam up again. We have held two public meetings, which were well attended, and all went off quietly.

And still the South awaited the sign that the North— that Boston—would not put her off with empty words.

The ‘vagabond’ Thompson, as the Boston Transcript³ called him—the ‘wandering insurrectionist’—first began after the Faneuil Hall meeting to experience the deadly hostility invoked against him there. From his peaceful labors in the ‘Old Colony’ and its vicinity, at⁴ the close of 1834, he had passed in January to Andover, where he had the ear of the theological and academical students; to Concord, Mass.; to various parts of Essex County, where the meeting-houses of Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians and Friends were opened to him. In the intervals of these excursions he spoke frequently in Boston. In February, accompanied by the Rev. Amos A. Phelps and by Henry Benson, he visited southern New Hampshire and Portland, Maine, still enjoying the hospitality of the churches and promoting new antislavery organizations. Thence he proceeded in the same month to New York, where he spoke for the first time since his arrival in America, in the Rev. Dr. Lansing's church, without molestation or disorder of any kind; in March, to Philadelphia, giving an address in the Reformed Presbyterian Church, after an introduction by David Paul Brown. Repairing to Boston for lectures and debates in the Anti-Slavery Rooms, he returned to New York in company with Mr. Garrison. In April he was again in Boston, using the only church open to him (the Methodist Church in Bennett Street) for a Fast-Day and other discourses, and a third time in New York, forming en route a female anti-slavery society in the