Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

‘ [305] hearts and voices’ for slavery and Union. Boston itself was in a fever of excitement caused by the presence of¹ Georgia agents bent on recapturing William and Ellen² Craft, who had to be hurried off to England. Mr.³ Thompson might have rubbed his eyes and asked himself if he had really been absent for fifteen years. What would be his reception now as an abolitionist, as a foreigner? Peleg Sprague had in 1835 malevolently bade him go⁴ back and brave the wrath of English respectability by denouncing the wrongs of India. Would his heroic labors meantime in the service of the Rajah of Sattara,⁵ and his present intention to lecture in America on British⁶ India, appease Boston respectability?—or his part in abolishing the Corn Laws, or his actual employment by⁷ the National Reform Association for enlarging the political rights and improving the condition of the working classes?⁸ Otis was dead and Sprague dumb; but all⁹ the moral callousness of their class, and all their legal idolatry of the Constitution, was typified in Benjamin¹⁰ R. Curtis, rising in December, 1850, to address another Union-saving meeting in the Cradle of Liberty, and¹¹ pronouncing fugitive slaves ‘foreigners to us [in Massachusetts],’ with ‘no right to be here,’ and to be repelled on the same ground that foreign paupers and criminals were excluded.

Thompson's welcome, clearly, was to come, now as before, from the abolitionists alone. The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society had extended theirs in January,¹²