Benton with his customary optimism from a Southern standpoint, rejoiced in the year 1836 that the people of the Northern States had “chased off the foreign emissaries, silenced the gabbling tongues of female dupes, and dispersed the assemblies, whether fanatical, visionary, or incendiary, of all that congregated to preach against evils that afflicted others, not them, and to propose remedies to aggravate the disease which they pretended to cure.”  Calhoun’s pessimism was clearer eyed.  The great nullifier perceived at once the insuppressible nature of the Abolition movement and early predicted that the spirit then abroad in the North would not “die away of itself without a shock or convulsion.”  Yes, it was as he had prophesied, the anti-slavery reform was, at the very moment of Benton’s groundless jubilation, rising and spreading with astonishing progress through the free States.  It was gaining footholds in the pulpit, the school, and the press.  It was a stalwart sower, scattering broadcast as he walked over the fields of the then coming generation truths and antipathies of social principles, which were to make peace impossible between the slave-holding and the non-slave-holding halves of the Union.

In the year 1836 the anti-slavery leaven or residuum for instance, was sufficiently potent to preserve the statutes of the free States, free from repressive laws directed against the Abolitionists.  This was much but there was undoubtedly another phase of the agitation, a phase which struck the shallow eye of Benton, and led him into false conclusions.  It was not clear sailing for the reform.  It was truly a period of stress and storm.  Sometimes the reform was in a trough of the sea of public opinion, sometimes on the crest of a billow, and then again on the bosom of a giant ground swell.  In Boston in this selfsame year which witnessed Benton’s exultation over the fall of Abolitionism, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society was not able to obtain the use of hall or church for its annual meeting, and was in consequence forced into insufficient accommodations at its rooms on Washington street.  The succeeding year the society was obliged, from inability to obtain the use of either hall or church in the city, to occupy for its annual meeting the loft over the stable connected with the Marlborough Hotel.  It is a long way from this rude meeting-house to the hall of the House of Representatives, but in this storm and stress period the distance was traversed in a few brief hours.  The society applied in its exigency for the use of the hall for an evening meeting, and the application was granted by the members.  It was a jeu d’esprit of Henry B. Stanton, “That when Boston votes we go into a stable, but when the State votes we go into the State House.”  It was even so, for the incident served to reveal what was true everywhere through the free States that the anti-slavery reform was making fastest progress among people away from the great centres of population.  It found ready access to the simple American folk in villages, in the smaller towns, and in the rural districts of New England and the North.  And already from these independent and uncorrupted sons and daughters of freedom had started the deep ground swell which was to lift the level of Northern public opinion on the question of slavery.