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[384] and gave up the idea of tearing down a church because a hunted man had found shelter with the women there; and we parted in peace.1

The contemporary record of Neal's exploits (in which his potential control of the mob naturally does not appear) reads as follows:

In the course of his remarks, he gave a correct portrait of2 Garrison, whom he designated as a man who had gone through this country as far as he had dared, to promulgate his doctrines, and had also crossed the Atlantic with the same object. He stated that Garrison and his associates were willing to trample the Constitution under foot, by the influence of anti-slavery societies; and the object of the present call was to appoint an Auxiliary Society to that already established in the Eastern States by himself and a few deluded followers.

An eye-witness of the mob describes it as ‘a genuine,3 drunken, infuriated mob of blackguards of every species, some with good clothes, and the major part the very sweepings of the city.’ ‘The shouting, screaming, and cursing for Tappan and Garrison defy all belief.’ A merchant in respectable circumstances said: ‘If I had my will, or if I could catch him, Garrison should be packed up in a box with air-holes, marked “this side up,” and so shipped to Georgia.’4 The Commercial Advertiser5 confirmed this report: ‘In regard to Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the misguided young gentleman who has just returned from England, whither he has recently been for ’

1 There was a comic side to all this. ‘I suppose our citizen, J. Neal,’ writes Nathan Winslow from Portland to Mr. Garrison, Oct. 17, 1833 (Ms.), ‘feels quite happy in haranguing a mob where he can disgorge his froth without having his arguments criticised. We thought his opposition to our cause rather aided us, he is so well known in this place; but I fear it maybe different in New York. It is singular indeed that he should arraign thee as a slanderer of thy country when he was, on his return from Europe [1827], near being mobbed on the same account. Portland was filled with handbills circulated by those whose characters he had traduced, and a colored man employed to follow him from house to house. Perhaps this may be one reason of his aversion to that race.’ See, also, Lib. 4.27.

2 N. Y. Gazette, Oct. 3, 1833; Lib. 3.162.

3 Lib. 3.167.

4 This device was afterwards found useful by fugitives coming the other way.

5 Oct. 3, 1833; Lib. 3.161.

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