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

[505] banner and the South under an opposing banner foreseen¹ by Mr. Garrison in 1843—with the issue sure, whether prudence or desperation ruled the counsels of the Slave Power—at length came to pass. ‘For the first time in our history,’ said Wendell Phillips, ‘the slave has chosen² a President of the United States. . . . Lincoln is in place, Garrison in power.’

The Governor of South Carolina, after the October handwriting on the wall, had called an extra session of³ the Legislature to provide for a disunion convention in case of Lincoln's election, and meanwhile to arm the militia, and to accept, organize, and drill volunteers. This action, with the signs of adhesion on the part of other⁴ States, threw the whole country into a vortex of agitation —the South arming against the Republican Administration not more than against its own fears (fed by a thousand idle rumors) of slave insurrections; the pro-slavery and halting Republican North in panic striving to stave off the inevitable by making every concession to the⁵ Slave Power, beginning with the surrender of the Personal Liberty laws, and by pursuing abolitionists with mob violence. In Boston, the ‘respectable’ progeny of the⁶ ‘respectable’ rioters of 1835 took possession of a meeting in Tremont Temple, commemorating John Brown's execution by its date, and discussing the trite question, ‘How can American slavery be abolished?’—a meeting,⁷ needless to say, not called by Garrisonian abolitionists. Turned out of doors by the Mayor, it adjourned for the evening to the Belknap-Street (colored) Church, where the spirit of violence was still more rampant, at least at the close, when Mrs. Chapman was thought to have saved⁸ Mr. Phillips's life by her companionship, and when he himself had to be escorted home by a body-guard. The orator's scarifying review of these proceedings, from⁹ Theodore Parker's pulpit, on Sunday, December 16,—his topic being ‘Mobs and Education,’—brought him a second (daylight) assault as he issued from the Music Hall, and made his return home a street fight. On the same day,