expense to have these men released, and on reaching Liverpool he appealed to the Board of Trade.  The British minister now sent a more vigorous protest, Adams referred the same to Wirt, the Attorney General, and Wirt was forced to declare South Carolina’s act unconstitutional and void.  His opinion with a copy of the British protest Adams sent to the Governor of the state, who immediately transmitted the same to the legislature.  Each branch of the legislature passed resolutions which the other would not accept, but neither voted to repeal the law.  In fact, it remained technically in force until the Civil War.  In 1844 Massachusetts sent Samuel Hoar as a commissioner to Charleston to make a test case of a Negro who had been deprived of his rights.  Hoar cited Article II, Section 2, of the National Constitution ("The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states"), intending ultimately to bring a case before the United States Supreme Court.  When he appeared, however, the South Carolina legislature voted that “this agent comes here not as a citizen of the United States, but as an emissary of a foreign Government hostile to our domestic institutions and with the sole purpose of subverting our internal police.”  Hoar was at length notified that his life was in danger and he was forced to leave the state.  Meanwhile Southern sentiment against the American Colonization Society had crystallized, and the excitement raised by David Walker’s Appeal was exceeded only by that occasioned by Nat Turner’s insurrection.

[Footnote 1:  Note McMaster, V, 200-204.]

When, then, the Abolitionists began their campaign the country was already ripe for a struggle, and in the North as well as the South there was plenty of sentiment unfavorable to the Negro.  In July, 1831, when an attempt was made to start a manual training school for Negro youth in New Haven, the citizens at a public meeting declared that “the founding of colleges for educating colored people is an unwarrantable and dangerous interference with the internal concerns of other states, and ought to be discouraged”; and they ultimately forced the project to be abandoned.  At Canterbury in the same state Prudence Crandall, a young Quaker woman twenty-nine years of age, was brought face to face with the problem when she admitted a Negro girl, Sarah Harris, to her school.[1] When she was boycotted she announced that she would receive Negro girls only if no others would attend, and she advertised accordingly in the Liberator.  She was subjected to various indignities and efforts were made to arrest her pupils as vagrants.  As she was still undaunted, her opponents, on May 24, 1833, procured a special act of the legislature forbidding, under severe penalties, the instruction of any Negro from outside the state without the consent of the town authorities.  Under this act Miss Crandall was arrested and imprisoned, being confined to a cell