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

The newspapers of every day bring to our view the account¹ of some new case in which a printing-press has been seized and thrown into the river; a public meeting broken up; a citizen tarred and feathered, scourged,—too often, I add with horror, put to a violent death by a lawless mob, for no other cause or crime than the free discussion of the subject of slavery. Nor are these accounts mere rumors, coming to us from a distance, of outrages committed upon the outskirts of civilization. We have seen, within the bosom of our own metropolis, an assembly of ladies who had met for conversation on the subject of slavery, broken up by a mob of persons pretending to the character of gentlemen. We have seen, on that occasion, a citizen who had rendered himself obnoxious only by a free discussion of that subject, barely escaping with his life from the fury of this mob, and actually committed to prison by the municipal authorities as the only place of security. Finally, we have seen a public meeting held by our most respected citizens at Faneuil Hall, not for the purpose of condemning such outrages, but for the purpose of condemning the free discussion which had given occasion to them.

Mr. Hallett, in his Daily Advocate, flatly declared that the blood of Lovejoy was on the hands of the promoters of the Faneuil Hall meeting. Seth J. Thomas, a prominent lawyer of Boston, invited by a committee consisting of Francis Jackson, Edmund Quincy, and Ellis Gray Loring, to speak at the Lovejoy indignation meeting about to be held in the same hall, responded:

The liberty of the press has been wantonly assailed, and² the citizens of Alton are not alone guilty of the outrage. The spirit of intolerance and of lawless bigotry has pervaded the land, and Massachusetts has felt and still feels its influence. The attack upon Mr. Lovejoy was no more wanton or unjustifiable than that made a few years since upon Mr. Garrison. In both cases, the principle involved is the same, and the only difference is in the degree of violence inflicted. The conduct, too, of the Mayor of Alton on the one occasion was but a little more reprehensible than that of the Mayor of Boston on the other.³ Mr. Krum convicts himself of pusillanimity, and a⁴ total unfitness for the office which he held, by his own statement;