which had just been vacated by a murderer.  The Abolitionists came to her defense, but she was convicted, and though the higher courts quashed the proceedings on technicalities, the village shopkeepers refused to sell her food, manure was thrown into her well, her house was pelted with rotten eggs and at last demolished, and even the meeting-house in the town was closed to her.  The attempt to continue the school was then abandoned.  In 1834 an academy was built by subscription in Canaan, N.H.; it was granted a charter by the legislature, and the proprietors determined to admit all applicants having “suitable moral and intellectual recommendations, without other distinctions.”  The town-meeting “viewed with abhorrence” the attempt to establish the school, but when it was opened twenty-eight white and fourteen Negro scholars attended.  The town-meeting then ordered that the academy be forcibly removed and appointed a committee to execute the mandate.  Accordingly on August 10 three hundred men with two hundred oxen assembled, took the edifice from its place, dragged it for some distance and left it a ruin.  From 1834 to 1836, in fact, throughout the country, from east to west, swept a wave of violence.  Not less than twenty-five attempts were made to break up anti-slavery meetings.  In New York in October, 1833, there was a riot in Clinton Hall, and from July 7 to 11 of the next year a succession of riots led to the sacking of the house of Lewis Tappan and the destruction of other houses and churches.  When George Thompson arrived from England in September, 1834, his meetings were constantly disturbed, and Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston in 1835, being dragged through the streets with a rope around his body.

[Footnote 1:  Note especially “Connecticut’s Canterbury Tale; its Heroine, Prudence Crandall, and its Moral for To-Day, by John C. Kimball,” Hartford (1886).]

In general the Abolitionists were charged by the South with promoting both insurrection and the amalgamation of the races.  There was no clear proof of these charges; nevertheless, May said, “If we do not emancipate our slaves by our own moral energy, they will emancipate themselves and that by a process too horrible to contemplate";[1] and Channing said, “Allowing that amalgamation is to be anticipated, then, I maintain, we have no right to resist it.  Then it is not unnatural."[2] While the South grew hysterical at the thought, it was, as Hart remarks, a fair inquiry, which the Abolitionists did not hesitate to put—­Who was responsible for the only amalgamation that had so far taken place?  After a few years there was a cleavage among the Abolitionists.  Some of the more practical men, like Birney, Gerrit Smith, and the Tappans, who believed in fighting through governmental machinery, in 1838 broke away from the others and prepared to take a part in Federal politics.  This was the beginning of the Liberty party, which nominated Birney for the presidency in 1840 and again in 1844.  In 1848 it became merged in the Free Soil party and ultimately in the Republican party.