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

Before the political issue could be taken up, the Society adjourned informally, on the morning of January¹ 24, to Faneuil Hall, which had been granted by the city authorities for a meeting of citizens in favor of abolition in the District of Columbia. By this unprecedented concession all minds were at once turned to the Unionsaving meeting of August, 1835, and its consequences. There was a fresh pointing to the portraits on the wall² —by Seth Sprague, the father of Peleg, to Washington, ‘that abolitionist’; by Wendell Phillips, to the newlyplaced portrait of John Quincy Adams, the defender of the right of petition.³ Edmund Quincy referred to the Otis-Sprague desecration of the hall, and to the Garrison mob, ‘which, if not led, was at least not discouraged, by the municipal authorities.’ Mr. Garrison was received with loud and prolonged cheering, and delivered his first speech in the Cradle of Liberty. He recalled his prediction to Otis that such a meeting as this would yet be⁴ held within its walls; and, in reference to Mr. Quincy's allusion to the mob, said: ‘I feel in very good humor⁵ to-day with Boston. She has this day declared that she was wrong, and that I was right; and as she has thus made the amende honorable, I am quite disposed to forgive and forget what is past.’

From this episode we must hasten to the renewal of warfare in the annual meeting, in the afternoon session in Marlboroa Chapel, and again the next morning, when⁶ St. Clair introduced a resolution affirming it to be the ‘imperious duty of every abolitionist who could ⁷ conscientiously do so, to go to the polls’—phraseology now