American Eloquence, Volume II | Page 4

A bill to prohibit the
transportation of abolition documents by the Post-Office department
was introduced, taken far enough to put leading men of both parties on
the record, and then dropped. Petitions for the abolition of slavery in
the District of Columbia were met by rules requiring the reference of
such petitions without reading or action; but this only increased the

number of petitions, by providing a new grievance to be petitioned
against, and in 1842 the "gag rule" was rescinded. Thence-forth the
pro-slavery members of Congress could do nothing, and could only
become more exasperated under a system of passive resistance.
Even at the North, indifferent or politically hostile as it had hitherto
shown itself to the expansion of slavery, the new doctrines were
received with an outburst of anger which seems to have been primarily
a revulsion against their unheard of individualism. If nothing, which
had been the object of unquestioning popular reverence, from the
Constitution down or up to the church organizations, was to be sacred
against the criticism of the Garrisonians, it was certain that the
innovators must submit for a time to a general proscription. Thus the
Garrisonians were ostracised socially, and became the Ishmalites of
politics. Their meetings were broken up by mobs, their halls were
destroyed, their schools were attacked by all the machinery of society
and legislation, their printing presses were silenced by force or fraud,
and their lecturers came to feel that they had not done their work with
efficiency if a meeting passed without the throwing of stones or eggs at
the building or the orators. It was, of course, inevitable that such a
process should bring strong minds to the aid of the Garrisonians, at first
from sympathy with persecuted individualism, and finally from
sympathy with the cause itself; and in this way Garrisonianism was in a
great measure relieved from open mob violence about 1840, though it
never escaped it altogether until abolition meetings ceased to be
necessary. One of the first and greatest reinforcements was the
appearance of Wendell Phillips, whose speech at Faneuil Hall in 1839
was one of the first tokens of a serious break in the hitherto almost
unanimous public opinion against Garrisonianism. Lovejoy, a Western
anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place
to another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and was
there shot to death while defending his printing press against a mob. At
a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Attorney-General of
Massachusetts, James T. Austin, expressing what was doubtless the
general sentiment of the time as to such individual insurrection against
pronounced public opinion, compared the Alton mob to the Boston
"tea-party," and declared that Lovejoy, "presumptuous and imprudent,"
had "died as the fool dieth." Phillips, an almost unknown man, took the

stand, and answered in the speech which opens this volume. A more
powerful reinforcement could hardly have been looked for; the cause
which could find such a defender was henceforth to be feared rather
than despised. To the day of his death he was, fully as much as
Garrison, the incarnation of the anti-slavery spirit. For this reason his
address on the Philosophy of the Abolition Movement, in 1853, has
been assigned a place as representing fully the abolition side of the
question, just before it was overshadowed by the rise of the Republican
party, which opposed only the extension of slavery to the territories.
The history of the sudden development of the anti-slavery struggle in
1847 and the following years, is largely given in the speeches which
have been selected to illustrate it. The admission of Texas to the Union
in 1845, and the war with Mexico which followed it, resulted in the
acquisition of a vast amount of new territory by the United States.
From the first suggestion of such an acquisition, the Wilmot proviso
(so-called from David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, who introduced it in
Congress), that slavery should be prohibited in the new territory, was
persistently offered as an amendment to every bill appropriating money
for the purchase of territory from Mexico. It was passed by the House
of Representatives, but was balked in the Senate; and the purchase was
finally made without any proviso. When the territory came to be
organized, the old question came up again: the Wilmot proviso was
offered as an amendment. As the territory was now in the possession of
the United States, and as it had been acquired in a war whose support
had been much more cordial at the South than at the North, the attempt
to add the Wilmot proviso to the territorial organization raised the
Southern opposition to an intensity which it had not known before. Fuel
was added to the flame by the application of California, whose
population had been