'Such is the vow I take,so help me God.'"Though Garrison complained that "the apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal,"he soon learned how alive the masses were to the meaning of his propaganda.Abolition orators were stoned in the street and hissed from the platform.Their meeting places were often attacked and sometimes burned to the ground.Garrison himself was assaulted in the streets of Boston,finding refuge from the angry mob behind prison bars.Lovejoy,a publisher in Alton,Illinois,for his willingness to give abolition a fair hearing,was brutally murdered;his printing press was broken to pieces as a warning to all those who disturbed the nation's peace of mind.The South,doubly frightened by a slave revolt in 1831which ended in the murder of a number of men,women,and children,closed all discussion of slavery in that section."Now,"exclaimed Calhoun,"it is a question which admits of neither concession nor compromise."
As the opposition hardened,the anti-slavery agitation gathered in force and intensity.Whittier blew his blast from the New England hills:
"No slave-hunt in our borders-no pirate on our strand;No fetters in the Bay State-no slave upon our land."
Lowell,looking upon the espousal of a great cause as the noblest aim of his art,ridiculed and excoriated bondage in the South.Those abolitionists,not gifted as speakers or writers,signed petitions against slavery and poured them in upon Congress.The flood of them was so continuous that the House of Representatives,forgetting its traditions,adopted in 1836a "gag rule"which prevented the reading of appeals and consigned them to the waste basket.Not until the Whigs were in power nearly ten years later was John Quincy Adams able,after a relentless campaign,to carry a motion rescinding the rule.
How deep was the impression made upon the country by this agitation for immediate and unconditional emancipation cannot be measured.If the popular vote for those candidates who opposed not slavery,but its extension to the territories,be taken as a standard,it was slight indeed.In 1844,the Free Soil candidate,Birney,polled 62,000votes out of over a million and a half;the Free Soil vote of the next campaign went beyond a quarter of a million,but the increase was due to the strength of the leader,Martin Van Buren;four years afterward it receded to 156,000,affording all the outward signs for the belief that the pleas of the abolitionist found no widespread response among thepeople.Yet the agitation undoubtedly ran deeper than the ballot box.Young statesmen of the North,in whose hands the destiny of frightful years was to lie,found their indifference to slavery broken and their consciences stirred by the unending appeal and the tireless reiteration.Charles Sumner afterward boasted that he read the Liberator two years before Wendell Phillips,the young Boston lawyer who cast aside his profession to take up the dangerous cause.
Early Southern Opposition to Slavery.-In the South,the sentiment against slavery was strong;it led some to believe that it would also come to an end there in due time.Washington disliked it and directed in his will that his own slaves should be set free after the death of his wife.Jefferson,looking into the future,condemned the system by which he also lived,saying:"Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis,a conviction in the minds of the people that their liberties are the gift of God?Are they not to be violated but with His wrath?Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just;that His justice cannot sleep forever."Nor did Southern men confine their sentiments to expressions of academic opinion.They accepted in 1787the Ordinance which excluded slavery from the Northwest territory forever and also the Missouri Compromise,which shut it out of a vast section of the Louisiana territory.
The Revolution in the Slave System.-Among the representatives of South Carolina and Georgia,however,the anti-slavery views of Washington and Jef-ferson were by no means approved;and the drift of Southern economy was de-cidedly in favor of extending and perpetuating,rather than abolishing,the sys-tem of chattel servitude.The invention of the cotton gin and textile machinery created a market for cotton which the planters,with all their skill and energy,could hardly supply.Almost every available acre was brought under cotton cul-ture as the small farmers were driven steadily from the seaboard into the up-lands or to the Northwest.
The demand for slaves to till the swiftly expanding fields was enormous.The number of bondmen rose from 700,000in Washington's day to more than three millions in 1850.At the same time slavery itself was transformed.Instead of the homestead where the same family of masters kept the same families of slaves from generation to generation,came the plantation system of the Far South and Southwest where masters were ever moving and ever extending their holdings of lands and slaves.This in turn reacted on the older South where the raising of slaves for the market became a regular and highly profitable business.