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mob that was going on,’ and offered his services as a volunteer to shoot the rioters down.
‘I found my city official quite cool, and he intimated that, though it was the1 duty of the Mayor to put down the riot, the city government did not very much disapprove of the mob to put down such agitators as Garrison and those like him.’2 The editor of the New England Galaxy overheard a justice of the peace remark: ‘I hope they will catch him [Garrison] and tar-and-feather him; and though I would not assist, I can tell them five dollars are ready for the man that will do it.’
The ‘respectable’ press of Boston had but one voice on Thursday concerning the occurrences of the previous day.3 The Atlas (Webster Whig) charged the 4 abolitionists with the disturbance, while coyly repelling the imputation of having itself been mainly instrumental in getting it up—an ‘Atlas mob.’
The Mercantile Journal called for the prevention of anti-slavery meetings ‘by the strong arm of the law,’ seeing that they were ‘but5 the signal for the assemblage of a mob’; and would have Garrison and Thompson arrested as ‘disturbers of the peace and manufacturers of brawls and riots,’ and made ‘to give security in a large amount for their future good behavior.’
The Transcript congratulated6 the city on the absence from the mob ‘of what is called the rabble or canaille—the vicious dregs of society who, ’
1 Boston Advertiser, Oct. 19, 1881.
2 ‘I turned from him with loathing and disgust,’ continues Dr. Bowditch, ‘and from that moment became an “ abolitionist.” The next day I subscribed for the Liberator.’ So presently did Charles Sumner( “Memoir,” 1.157), though he had not witnessed the mob, and ‘did not express such anxiety about the affair’ as did another lawyer to his informant, Ellis Ames (Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, 18.343).
3 We omit the Commercial Gazette, which was a low paper. Here we may as well record the fact—bitterly commented on by Homer in his letter to George C. Rand (ante, p. 10), when his former apprentice had become an Abolitionist—that the Gazette's supreme bid for Southern patronage failed utterly, while its local support fell away, compelling a change of owners. Homer himself, the sad victim of poverty and drink, reappears for a moment begging work in a printing-office occupying the very premises whence Mr. Garrison descended to the mob; and then, a vagrant, meets his forlorn end in the Baltimore lock — up (E. N. Moore, in the Boston Sunday Budget, Mar. 18, 1883).
4 Right and Wrong, 1836, (1) p. 57.
5 Ibid., p. 61.
6 Ibid., p. 59.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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