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[66] labored to excite public interest in the American antislavery movement, and to maintain the active alliance and cooperation established and fostered by him in his three visits to England. Thompson himself was the chairman, and his son-in-law, Frederick W. Chesson, the secretary, of this Committee. The enlarged Society included such men as John Stuart Mill, John Bright, Richard Cobden, Lord Houghton, Samuel Lucas, William E. Forster, Peter A. Taylor, Goldwin Smith, Justin McCarthy, Thomas Hughes, James Stansfeld, Jr., Prof. J. E. Cairnes, Herbert Spencer, Prof. Francis W. Newman, Rev. Baptist Noel, and Rev. Newman Hall, most of whom rendered direct and important service; but the organizer and tireless spirit of the movement was Mr. Chesson, to whose wide acquaintance with public men, unfailing tact and address, thorough information, and extraordinary industry and executive ability, a very large measure of credit for its success was due.

The most cordial and sympathetic relations existed between the Society and Minister Adams and Secretary Moran of the American Legation. Its first task was to evoke such expressions of popular sympathy with the American Government in all parts of the kingdom as would effectually deter the English Government from listening to Napoleon's schemes of intervention in favor of the South, and permitting the escape from English ports of other piratical cruisers like the Alabama, and to counteract the plottings of Mason and other rebel1 emissaries in London. To the organizations which were the legitimate and direct outgrowth of Mr. Garrison's antislavery missions to England2 were largely due the successful

1 J. M. Mason.

2 The Union and Emancipation Society, formed in Manchester in 1863, with Thomas Bayley Potter, M. P., as its President, and Thomas H. Barker as its indefatigable Secretary, had also many of Mr. Garrison's friends and co-workers among its members, and did an immense work in encouraging and supporting the strong Union sympathies of the suffering Lancashire operatives. Mr. Potter's labors were as disinterested as they were ardent, and his munificent pecuniary support—his personal contributions aggregating £ 5000—enabled the Society, during the two years of its existence, to hold three hundred meetings and distribute nearly 600,000 pamphlets (Lib. 35: 46). He clearly recognized, and continually impressed upon the workingmen of Lancashire, the fact that the struggle raging in America was their own battle, and that on the maintenance of the great republic the progress of popular institutions all over the world largely depended (Lib. 33: 174). In Glasgow, the vigilance and energetic measures of Mr. Garrison's steadfast friends, Andrew Paton, William Smeal, and a few others, prevented the sailing from the Clyde of a Confederate war vessel that would have been more formidable than the Alabama.

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