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

[389] proceedings, in which the women were of right conspicuous. Few of the clergy were visible, and no dignitaries. On the next evening (Saturday), he witnessed the¹ performance of Uncle Tom's Cabin at the National Theatre. On Sunday morning, he listened to a sermon delivered to a² great audience in Metropolitan Hall by Miss Antoinette³ L. Brown.⁴ In the afternoon, he spoke in the same place⁵ before the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, and attended without addressing the evening meeting, towards the close of which, during the speeches of Lucy Stone, who ‘never acquitted herself better,’ and Lucretia Mott, the rowdyism led by the redoubtable Rynders became so rampant that the session was cut short. But ‘we are all in fine spirits,’ wrote Mr. Garrison to his wife. The⁶ programme for Monday was a meeting at the Tabernacle in⁷ aid of the Women's State Temperance Society; for⁸ Tuesday and Wednesday, a Woman's Rights Convention in⁹ the Tabernacle, parallel with the bastard World's¹⁰ Temperance Convention at Metropolitan Hall.

The woman's rights movement, an outgrowth of the anti-slavery agitation, now first began to succeed to the obloquy, malevolence, and vulgar indignities which the earlier reform had drawn upon itself. All this had been foreshadowed in the anti-slavery experience of the¹¹ Grimkes and of Abby Kelley Foster; but the organization of women in behalf of political equality, and the multiplication of them as speakers on public platforms, the ‘intrusion’ of them into the pulpit (as in the case of Miss Brown), renewed and intensified the persecution, in which, as formerly, the clergy took a leading part. The Bible was explicitly adduced to discredit the innovation, and the lowest ridicule was deemed justifiable as an aid to Scriptural anathema. The wearing of the Bloomer costume by some of the advocates of the cause furnished a ready occasion for this sort of opposition. The same journals, religious and secular, that nursed the mob spirit