Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

Mayor Lyman may have been sincere, in offering, at the foot of the staircase in the City Hall, to lay down his life in maintenance of law and order. But the occasion and the opportunity for such a sacrifice were presented at an earlier stage of the trouble. To the mob's cry for Thompson, instead of answering in a feeble voice, ‘He is not here,’ the Mayor should have thundered, ‘And if he were here, he should remain and speak, as is his right.’ A dead body as the cost of that proclamation would have been worth many exculpatory volumes. The despised sign whose destruction he estimated in dollars and cents instead of in principles, was also a fit pretext for a magistrate's dying at his post. Finally, if the case had not, by these laches, grown too desperate, Mr. Garrison's right to remain in the building and be protected there furnished still another. But Mayor Lyman seems to have been profuse in declarations which, to use Mr. Garrison's words, in the sequel proved ‘mere ¹ declamation.’²

Law offices in abundance overlooked the scene of the mob; the legislators, in special session at the State House, —John G. Whittier among them,—hastened down to become spectators. Law was everywhere, but justice was fallen in the streets. Here and there a not hostile face was visible, like George B. Emerson's, whom Mrs. Chapman called to witness as she passed him in the throng. Wendell Phillips, commencing practice in his native city, and not versed, perhaps, in the riot statutes, wondered why his regiment was not called out. Henry I. Bowditch, who had only heard of Garrison, felt his gorge rise at the spectacle, and, meeting an alderman,³ vented his indignation at the ‘worse than contemptible ’