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

[79] an English history of the United States that had¹ been found objectionable on this score in South Carolina. To make assurance doubly sure, General Duff Green obtained of the Legislature of that State a charter for a Southern Literary Company, to prepare school-books² suitable for a slaveholding community.

The main business of the abolitionists, besides extending their organization,—which they did at the rate of³ nearly one new society a day, including a vigorous State Society in Rhode Island, and one in Pennsylvania,—was⁴ to defeat the legislative movements directed against the right of free speech; to keep up the bombardment of Congress with petitions for emancipation in the District; to vindicate in the courts the right of slaves brought North to their liberty, and of fugitives to the ordinary safeguards of freemen on trial; and to oppose, on the one hand the admission of Arkansas as a slave State into the Union, on the other, the inevitable bent of the Government towards aiding Texas in her pro-slavery revolt against Mexico, with a view to ultimate annexation. A counter-stroke in Massachusetts to the ‘Southern documents’ was the petition to the Legislature to ⁵ remonstrate against the treatment of the State's colored seamen and other citizens in Southern ports and cities, not forgetting the still outstanding reward offered by Georgia for the apprehension of the editor of the Liberator. Judicial decisions like those in Pennsylvania and New⁶ Jersey, claiming rather than asserting for alleged fugitives the right of trial by jury; and like Judge Shaw's in the famous Med case in Boston (won by the exertions⁷ of Messrs. Sewall and Loring), which, for the first time in the history of this country, applied the common law of England to slaves taken to a free State voluntarily by their masters, and declared them free,—made a profound impression at the South. It was high time, for not a month passed without some atrocious case of kidnapping.⁸

The progress of the Texan revolt had culminated in the defeat of the Mexican forces by Houston, and the⁹