moral grounds.  We stand united,—­what care we for the ravings of fanatics outside our borders, so long as our institution is a blessing to us, planted on the rock of Christianity, and endorsed by the best men among us!” The theologians took up the cause, both North and South, and made their pulpits ring with appeals to Scripture.  “Were not,” they said, “the negroes descendants of Ham, and had not these descendants been cursed by the Almighty, and given over to the control of the children of Shem and Japhet,—­not, indeed, to be trodden down like beasts, but to be elevated and softened by them, and made useful in the toils which white men could not endure?” Ultra-Calvinists united with politicians in building up a public sentiment in favor of slavery as the best possible condition for the ignorant, sensuous, and superstitious races who, when put under the training and guardianship of a civilized and Christian people, had escaped the harder lot which their fathers endured in the deserts and the swamps of Africa.

The agitation at the North had been gradually but constantly increasing.  In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison started “The Liberator;” in 1832 the New England Antislavery Society was founded in Boston; in 1833 New York had a corresponding society, and Joshua Leavitt established “The Emancipator.”  Books, tracts, and other publications began to be circulated.  By lectures, newspapers, meetings, and all manner of means the propagandism was carried on.  On the other hand, the most violent opposition had been manifested throughout the North to these so-called “fanatics.”  No language was too opprobrious to apply to them.  The churches and ministry were either dumb on the subject, or defended slavery from the Scriptures.  Mobs broke up antislavery meetings, and in some cases proceeded even to the extreme of attack and murder,—­as in the case of Lovejoy of Illinois.  The approach of the political campaign of 1836, when Van Buren was running as the successor of Jackson, involved the Democratic party as the ally of the South for political purposes, and “Harmony and Union” were the offsets to the cry for “Emancipation.”

By 1835 the excitement was at its height, and especially along the line of the moral and religious argumentation, where the proslavery men met talk with talk.  What could the Abolitionists do now with their Northern societies to show that slavery was a wrong and a sin?  Their weapons fell harmless on the bucklers of warriors who supposed themselves fighting under the protection of Almighty power in order to elevate and Christianize a doomed race.  Victory seemed to be snatched from victors, and in the moral contest the Southern planters and their Northern supporters swelled the air with triumphant shouts.  They were impregnable in their new defences, since they claimed to be in the right.  Both parties had now alike appealed to reason and Scripture, and where were the judges who could settle conflicting opinions?  The Abolitionists, somewhat