Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

‘ [494] the several States came into the Union, and conferred upon the General Government the power to establish post-offices and post-roads?’ If Congress should uphold the right of transmission, the South would have to regard that body as a common enemy.¹

As if to symbolize the Federal impotence to maintain the freedom of the mails and the freedom of speech in its special Territory, Dr. Reuben Crandall, younger² brother of Prudence Crandall, was thrown (August 17) into a noisome jail in Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, on a charge of ‘circulating Tappan, Garrison & Co.'s papers, encouraging the negroes to insurrection,’ for which a mob would fain have lynched him.³ Finally (that there might be no lack of topics for the Boston ‘town-meeting’), on August 10, at Canaan, N. H., the building of the Noyes Academy,⁴ opened to pupils of both colors,⁵ was, in pursuance of a formal town-meeting vote that it be ‘removed,’⁶ dragged by one hundred yoke of oxen from the land belonging to the corporation and left on the common; three hundred yeomen of the county participating, and consummating their outrage with ‘resolutions’ against the ‘combination of disorganizers, led on by an Englishman sent to this country to sow seeds of discord and contention between the North and the South.’ The teacher and colored pupils were given a month in which to quit the town.

With all these astonishing evidences of the farreach-ing pretensions and authority of the Slave Power, with the disclaimers of the abolitionists spread broadcast before them, and with copies of the papers suppressed at