Even before the rise of Garrison, Robert James Turnbull of South Carolina, under the name of “Brutus,” wrote a virulent attack on anti-slavery; and Representative Drayton of the same state, speaking in Congress in 1828, said, “Much as we love our country, we would rather see our cities in flames, our plains drenched in blood—­rather endure all the calamities of civil war, than parley for an instant upon the right of any power, than our own to interfere with the regulation of our slaves."[4] More and more this was to be the real sentiment of the South, and in the face of this kind of eloquence and passion mere academic discussion was powerless.

[Footnote 1:  Adams:  The Neglected Period of Anti-Slavery, 1808-1831, 250-251.]

[Footnote 2:  Ibid., 110.]

[Footnote 3:  William Birney:  James G. Birney and His Times, 85-86.]

[Footnote 4:  Register of Debates, 4,975, cited by Adams, 112-3.]

The Liberator was begun January 1, 1831.  The next year Garrison was the leading spirit in the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society; and in December, 1833, in Philadelphia, the American Anti-Slavery Society was organized.  In large measure these organizations were an outgrowth of the great liberal and humanitarian spirit that by 1830 had become manifest in both Europe and America.  Hugo and Mazzini, Byron and Macaulay had all now appeared upon the scene, and romanticism was regnant.  James Montgomery and William Faber wrote their hymns, and Reginald Heber went as a missionary bishop to India.  Forty years afterwards the French Revolution was bearing fruit.  France herself had a new revolution in 1830, and in this same year the kingdom of Belgium was born.  In England there was the remarkable reign of William IV, which within the short space of seven years summed up in legislation reforms that had been agitated for decades.  In 1832 came the great Reform Bill, in 1833 the abolition of slavery in English dominions, and in 1834 a revision of factory legislation and the poor law.  Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Barrett Browning began to be heard, and in 1834 came to America George Thompson, a powerful and refined speaker who had had much to do with the English agitation against slavery.  The young republic of the United States, lusty and self-confident, was seething with new thought.  In New England the humanitarian movement that so largely began with the Unitarianism of Channing “ran through its later phase in transcendentalism, and spent its last strength in the anti-slavery agitation and the enthusiasms of the Civil War."[1] The movement was contemporary with the preaching of many novel gospels in religion, in sociology, in science, education, and medicine.  New sects were formed, like the Universalists, the Spiritualists, the Second Adventists, the Mormons, and the Shakers, some of which believed in trances and miracles, others in the quick coming of Christ, and still others in the reorganization of society;