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

[45] of every naturalized Irishman to resist and repudiate it with indignation, as emanating from a foreign source. All the Irish Repeal associations—at the South¹ particularly—took the same line, with explicit devotion to the existing ‘institutions’ of their adopted country, however much they might deprecate slavery in the abstract. In short, the Address was no more successful than we can suppose a similar one, headed by Parnell in these days, would be, urging the Irish to abjure the ‘spoils system’ and to cling to the civil-service reformers. At a second, widely advertised exhibition of the Address in Boston in April, with Bradburn ‘trying the experiment’ and Phillips assisting, hardly any Irish were visible even to the² eye of faith. The instinct of this, the lowest class of the white population at the North, taught it that to acknowledge the brotherhood of the negro was to take away the sole social superiority that remained to it, to say nothing of the forfeiture of its political opportunity through the Democratic Party. When the summer heat had brought the customary tendency to popular turbulence in this country, the Irish rabble of Philadelphia made their inarticulate, but perfectly intelligible, reply to the Address, by³ murderous rioting, directed in the first instance against a peaceable colored First of August procession, and ending with the burning of a ‘Beneficial Hall’ built for moral purposes by one of the more prosperous of the persecuted —a close parallel to the destruction of Pennsylvania⁴ Hall.⁵

The meeting in Faneuil Hall (for we must return to it) had for its main object to urge abolition in the District⁶ of Columbia. As it fell to Mr. Garrison to preside, so to him was intrusted the drawing up of the resolutions.