fanaticism and the Jacobinical designs of the Garrisonian fanatics, ergo, the importance of suppressing the incendiaries.  Down with Thompson!  Garrison must be destroyed!  The Union—­it must and shall be preserved!  All these the public excitement, which had risen everywhere to a tempest, had come more and more to mean.  A tremendous crisis had come in the life of Garrison, and a great peril, eagle-like, with the stirred-up hate of a nation, was swooping upon him.

CHAPTER XI.

MISCHIEF LET LOOSE.

A wild-cat-like creature was abroad.  To it the Abolitionists were to be thrown.  It was to destroy Garrison, make an end of Thompson, and suppress between its enormous jaws the grandest moral movement of the century.  Besides doing up this modest little programme, the beast, O wonderful to say, was also to crown its performances by “saving” the Union.  Rejoicing in the possession of such a conservative institution, the politicians, the press, and public opinion uncaged the monster, while from secure seats they watched the frightful scenes of fury and destruction enacted by it in the national arena.

These scenes began in the summer of 1834, and in the city of New York.  They were ushered in by the breaking up of an anti-slavery celebration on the Fourth of July by the clack and roar of several hundred young rowdies, gathered for the purpose.  Their success but whetted the appetite of the spirit of mischief for other ventures against the Abolitionists.  As a consequence New York was in a more or less disturbed state from the fourth to the ninth of the month.  The press of the city, with but a single exception (The Evening Post) meanwhile goaded the populace on by false and inflammatory representations touching the negroes and their friends, to the rioting which began in earnest on the evening of the ninth.  That night a mob attacked Lewis Tappan’s house on Rose street, breaking in the door, smashing blinds and windows, and playing havoc generally with the furniture.  On the following evening the rioters assailed the store of Arthur Tappan, on Pearl street, demolishing almost every pane of glass in the front of the building.  On the same evening the mob paid its respects to Rev. Dr. Cox, by breaking windows both at his house and at his church.  The negro quarters in the neighborhood of Five Points, and their houses in other parts of the city, were raided on the night of the 11th, and much damage done by the lawless hordes which for nearly a week wreaked their wrath upon the property of the negroes and their anti-slavery friends.