[
18]
Chapter 2: the Boston mob
Woe unto you I for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, and your fathers killed them.
St. Luke, XI:47.
In 1831
Garrison founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society at
Boston, and began to lecture in its behalf.
This was followed by the formation of a great number of such bodies, state and local, including the national society founded at
Philadelphia in 1833.
For some years associations were established at the rate of more than one a day, and a single society sometimes numbered its members by the thousand.
Garrison's talents for public speaking stood him in good stead in promoting the formation of these bodies.
He was not an orator, but the force, earnestness and logic of his addresses almost always carried his audiences with him. The first great contest in which
Garrison had to engage was between the “immediatists” and the American Colonization Society, an institution whose chief function was to put the conscience of the people at rest under the delusion that the
