“I further ordered,” he writes, “one thousand copies of A. Grimke’s letter, with your introductory remarks, and your address published in the Liberator several weeks since, with your name appended, and Whittier’s poetry on the times, in a pamphlet form.  I urged all our friends to redouble their exertions.  They seemed well disposed to accept the advice, as nothing will now avail but thorough measures. Liberty or Death!”

This is a fair specimen of the indomitable, indefatigable spirit which was born of the attempt to put Abolitionism down by lawlessness and violence.  Indeed, the “Broad-Cloth Mob,” viewed in the light of the important consequences which followed it, was equal to a hundred anti-slavery meetings, or a dozen issues of the Liberator.

It is a curious and remarkable circumstance that, on the very day of the Boston mob, there occurred one in Utica, N.Y., which was followed by somewhat similar results.  An anti-slavery convention was attacked and broken up by a mob of “gentlemen of property and standing in the community,” under the active leadership of a member of Congress.  Here there was an apparent defeat for the Abolitionists, but the consequences which followed the outrage proved it a blessing in disguise.  For the cause made many gains thereby, and conspicuously among them was Gerritt Smith, ever afterward one of its most eloquent and munificent supporters.  If anti-slavery meetings made converts by tens, anti-slavery mobs made them by hundreds.  The enemies of freedom builded better than they knew or intended, and Garrison had the weightiest of reasons for feeling thankful to them for the involuntary, yet vast aid and comfort which their pro-slavery virulence and violence were bringing him and the anti-slavery movement throughout the free States.  Example:  in 1835-36, the great mob year, as many as three hundred and twenty-eight societies were organized in the North for the immediate abolition of slavery.

The mob did likewise help towards a satisfactory solution of the riddle propounded by Garrison:  “Shall the Liberator die?” The fresh access of anti-slavery strength, both in respect of zeal and numbers, begotten by it, exerted no slight influence on the longevity of the Liberator.  Poor the paper continued, and embarrassed the editor for many a month thereafter, but as an anti-slavery instrument its survival may be said from that proceeding to have become a necessity.  To allow the Liberator to die at this juncture would have been such a confession of having been put down, such an ignominious surrender to the mobocrats as the Abolitionists of Boston would have scorned to make.  “I trust,” wrote Samuel E. Sewall, “there will not be even one week’s interruption in the publication of the Liberator.” Ex uno disce omnes.  He but voiced the sentiment of the editor’s disciples and associates in the city, in the State, and in New England as well.