Meanwhile the relations between the editor of the Liberator and the managers of the national organization were becoming decidedly strained.  For it seemed to them that Garrison had changed the anti-slavery character of his paper by the course which he had taken in regard to the new ideas which were finding their way into its columns to the manifest harm of the main principle of immediate emancipation.  This incipient estrangement between the pioneer and the executive committee of the national society was greatly aggravated by an occurrence, which, at the time, was elevated to an importance that it did not deserve.  This occurrence was what is known in anti-slavery annals as the “Clerical Appeal.”  Five clergymen, who were obviously unfriendly to Garrison, and distrustful of the religious and social heresies which they either saw or fancied that they saw in the Liberator, and withal jealous lest the severities of the paper against particular pro-slavery ministers should diminish the influence and sacred character of their order, published, in August of 1837, in the New England Spectator an acrid arraignment of editor and paper, upon five several charges, designed to bring Garrisonism to the block and speedy death.  This document was followed by two other appeals by way of supplement and rejoinder from the same source, an “Andover Appeal” from kindred spirits and a bitter, personal letter from one of the “seventy agents,” all of them having a common motive and purpose, viz., sectarian distrust and dislike of Garrison, and desire to reduce his anti-slavery influence to a nullity.

In his diseased and suffering bodily condition, Garrison naturally enough fell into the error of exaggerating the gravity of these attacks upon himself.  Insignificant in an historical sense, they really were an episode, an unpleasant one to be sure for the time being, but no more.  To Garrison, however, they appeared in a wholly different light.  It seemed a rebellion on a pretty grand scale, which called for all his strength, all the batteries of the friends of freedom, all his terrible and unsparing severities of speech to quell it.  All his artillery he posted promptly in positions commanding the camp of the mutineers, and began to pour, as only he could, broadside after broadside into the works of the wretched little camp of rebels.  He could hardly have expended more energy and ammunition in attacking a strategical point of Southern slavery, than was expended in punishing a handful of deserters and insurgents.  But, alas! he was not satisfied to draw upon his own resources for crushing the clerical sedition, he demanded reinforcements from the central authorities in New York as well.  And then began a contention between him and the Executive Committee of the National Society, which issued only in ill.