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

[136] binding force? Texas once in the Union, would laws passed by the aid of her representatives be resisted? No one not an abolitionist ever advocated any measure of irreconcilability—so to call it—except Henry Wilson in the Massachusetts Senate. His proposal, to “provide by law that the moment a man held as a slave in Texas stepped upon the soil of Massachusetts, his liberty should be as sacred as his life,” Wilson's Rise and Fall of Slave Power, 1.637; Lib. 15.39, 77. and to ‘make it a high crime to molest him,’ fell dead, and was, in fact, though well meant, absurd, either as a practicable mode of opposition or as a quid pro quo, even supposing the whole North to have taken this stand along with Massachusetts. The truth was, slavery was dragging the country down an inclined plane, and there was no escape but by cutting the rope that bound the North to the South. The impracticable politicians of all parties, therefore, who struggled against the inevitable, while refusing to look facts in the face, filled the year at which we have now arrived with the emptiest of empty words.

On January 29, an Anti-Texas Convention was held in¹ Faneuil Hall.² Edmund Quincy, writing the next day to Richard Webb, said of it:

It was called by political gentlemen, mostly Whigs, not by³ abolitionists. It was very fully attended, and the galleries were crowded. Garrison was made a delegate from his ward by the⁴ influence of F. Jackson. Phillips could not be elected, to our⁵ great grief. The Convention only put forth an Address,⁶ protesting against annexation, and appointed a Committee of Correspondence; on the ground that they would not suppose