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[2] Law, leading Republican papers, like the Boston Journal and Transcript, and the Springfield Republican,—alarmed at once by the very success of the party in the national election, and by the rapid movement of the South towards1 secession,—earnestly advocated the repeal of the law. They were reenforced by an address to the people of the2 State signed by the weightiest members of the legal profession, as Judge Lemuel Shaw, ex-Judge Benjamin R. Curtis, Joel Parker, Sidney Bartlett, Theophilus Parsons, and by equally shining lights in the world of scholarship and letters, as George Ticknor, Jared Sparks, and the Rev. James Walker, President of Harvard College, by George Peabody, the Rev. George Putnam, ex-Governors Henry J. Gardner and Emory Washburn, and some thirty others, representing all parties. These citizens were moved (in the immoral jargon of that day) by a ‘sense of responsibility to God for the preservation and transmission of the priceless blessings of civil liberty and public order which his providence has bestowed upon us.’ They would repeal the Personal Liberty Law from their ‘love of right,’ ‘their sense of the sacredness of compacts.’ To their aid came George Ashmun, who had presided over the Chicago3 Convention that nominated Lincoln, and, in the last act of his truckling official life, Gov. N. P. Banks. But his successor John A. Andrew, triumphantly elected in spite of4 his having presided over a meeting in aid of John Brown's5 family, gave immediate notice in his message to the Legislature that reaction in deference to the Slave Power would6 find no supporter in him.

Foiled in this direction, the ‘respectable’ classes fell to mobbing again, being made desperate by the quick adhesion of the Gulf States, during January, to South Carolina in rebellion. Their fury was directed afresh against Wendell Phillips, whose lineage made him a sort of renegade in their eyes, and whose invectives were unendurable when directed against themselves. Scenes similar to those witnessed on December 16 attended his 7 Music-Hall discourse in Mr. Parker's pulpit, on ‘The Lesson of8

1 Lib. 30.186, 189, 190.

2 Lib. 30.205.

3 Lib. 31.5.

4 Lib. 30.178.

5 Nov. 19, 1859; Lib. 30.141.

6 Lib. 31.6.

7 Ante, 3.505.

8 Lib. 31.14.

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