spoke of the sin—for all true reforms are bottomed on
religion, and while they seem adverse to many interests,
yet represent the idea of the Eternal. He found a few
others, a very few, and began the anti-slavery movement.
The "platform" of the new party was not an interest, but an idea—that "All men are created equal, and endowed
by their Creator with certain unaKlinable rights." Every
truth is also a fact; this was a fact of human consciousness, and a truth of necessity.
The time has not come to write the history of the abolitionists,—other deeds must come before words ; but we cannot forbear quoting the testimony of one witness, as to the state of anti-slavery feeling in New England in 1831. It is the late Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, a former mayor of Boston, who speaks in his recent letter.
"The first information received by me, of a disposition to agitate this subject in our State, was from the Governors of Virginia and Georgia, severally remonstrating against an incendiary newspaper, published in Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations, inciting to insurrection and its horrid results. It appeared, on inquiry, that no member of the city government [of Boston] had ever heard of the publication. Some time afterwards it was reported to me by the city officers, that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colours. This information … I communicated to the above-named governors, with an assurance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people."
Such was the state of things in 1831. Anti-slavery had "an obscure hole" for its head-quarters; the one agitator, who had filled the two doughty Grovernors of Virginia and Georgia with uncomfortable forebodings, had a "negro boy" "for his only visible auxiliary," and none of the respectable men of Boston had heard of the hole, of the agitator, of the negro boy, or even of the agitation. One thing must be true: either the man and the boy were pretty vigorous, or else there was a great truth in that obscure hole; for, in spite of the governors and the mayors, spite of the many able men in the South and the North, spite, also, of the wealth and respectability of the whole land, it is a plain case that the abolitionists have shaken the nation, and their idea is the idea of the time; and the party which shall warmly welcome that is destined before long to override all the other parties.
