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

[434] in the House.¹ The State law prohibiting mixed marriages narrowly escaped being repealed, and the first step was taken towards protecting the colored seamen of² Massachusetts against outrageous oppression in Southern ports. In party politics, Henry Clay had, as we have seen, lost his nomination at the hands of the anti-slavery³ Whigs; and while Harrison, it is true, had received the support of the same wing in the Convention and at the polls, at least the evil was not conceivably greater than would have been Van Buren's reelection.

The Third Party, meantime, had been defeated in its endeavor to capture the national anti-slavery organization, although successful with some of the State and⁴ many of the local societies which the spirit of New Organization had invaded. It had likewise cut a sorry figure in the election. From the point of view of the Philadelphia Declaration of Sentiments it was a foreordained failure. Though one of the products, it was not the heir of the movement begun in 1833, to which its inception was well-nigh fatal. Its rise marks the end of the expansion of the purely moral organization of the anti-slavery sentiment of the country. Never afterwards were there so many societies, or so large a membership, or such a powerful pulsation in the enterprise. Though the fourteenth resolution adopted by the Liberty⁵ Party at Albany professed not to undervalue or forget moral instrumentalities, and urged the maintenance of these by abolitionists, it was overridden by the ninth resolution, which declared that the only hope of peaceful abolition lay in the ballot—i. e., in separate political organization. In like manner, the pretence, in the preamble, of direct descent from the American Anti-Slavery Society⁶ was nullified by the omission of any allusion to the doctrine of immediatism. And whereas Mr. Garrison,