322 WORKMEN AND HEROES
the West Indian, slave. The announcement that he would speak at a meeting of the Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, held in Boston, October 21st, of the same year, was the occasion of a mob composed of wealthy and respectable citizens of Boston who aimed to suppress free speech and tar and feather Mr. Thompson. He was, however, prevented from attending by his friends, but the fury of the mob fell upon Mr. Garrison, who was seized and led through the streets with a rope around his body, from which position he was rescued through the efforts of Mayor Lyman and imprisoned for safety in the Leverett Street jail. This out- rage created new friends and gave fresh impetus to the abolition movement In 1840 Mr. Garrison again visited England as a delegate of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London, in which body, however, he declined to sit, because the women who were his fellow-delegates from America were excluded. Occupied continuously with the care of The Liberator and in lecturing, Mr. Garrison led an intensely active life, not confining himself alone to the anti-slavery reform but embracing among other reforms those of temperance, non-resistance, women's rights, and religious freedom. For, while educated by his mother in the strict tenets of the Baptist faith, he early experienced a change of theological views and cast off sectarian bonds. The Liberator was used for the expression of his individual beliefs and was not the organ of any society. In 1846, the Free Church of Scotland having sent emissaries to the United States to collect funds from the slaveholders, Mr. Garrison again went to Eng- land to urge the Church to return the money thus contributed, and, in company with George Thompson, Frederick Douglass, Henry C. Wright and others, agi- tated the question throughout Scotland. Convinced that the constitutional compact of the North with the South to guard and protect slavery was immoral and unjust, in 1843 Mr. Garrison raised the banner of No Union with Slave- Holders, and advocated the dissolution of the Union for the sake of freedom, a step which added fresh fuel to the flames of persecution and incurred the loss of many lukewarm adherents. In 1850, the apostasy of Daniel Webster and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law increased the national ferment. The same year witnessed the famous Rynder's mob, in New York, and the anti-slavery meeting at the Tabernacle, at which Mr. Garrison spoke, was violently broken up. The abolition movement had now assumed formidable proportions, dominat ing the national parties and dictating issues. The Whig party fell to pieces in consequence, and to it succeeded the Republican party, with Sumner, Seward, Wilson, Giddings, and other earnest men as leaders. Meanwhile Harriet Beecher Stowe, by her famous novel, " Uncle Tom's Cabin," had given a vivid picture of the wrongs of American slavery to the world. The " irrepressible conflict " was now rapidly tending to its crisis, and, on the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency by the Republican party, in i860, the signal for civil war was given, and, in 1861, the struggle of arms inaugurated by the attack on Fort Sumter re- placed the peaceful crusade of the abolitionists.
- The moral agitation of thirty years had produced its legitimate results, and
