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Ohio, of Lovejoy and his press in Illinois, the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia and countless other acts of violence show that the Abolitionists did right to be alarmed.
As a matter of fact they were seriously frightened.
Though Garrison and the ladies put on as bold a front as they could, they did not feel like shaking hands with their old friend Mayor Lyman and regarding that mob as a joke.
There was, after all, a real and terrific force at the back of the mob. It was the mob of the Richmond Whig, of the Faneuil Hall Pro-Slavery meeting.
The Southern fire had moved North, and seemed to encircle the Anti-slavery agitators.
The “gentlemen of property and standing” --to use the pompous newspaper phrase of the day — who led the mob, were actuated by one of the major passions of humanity-defense of property.
For in a big sense, in a metaphorical sense, the South was right; and all this Abolition movement was a servile uprising.
The slave heart and soul had somehow come into communion with the Anti-slavery heart and soul, and together they were generating an earthquake beneath the slaver's feet.
This whole religious message is mirrored in
Boston, the. Atlantic Monthly. Press, 1921.
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