In the midst of this universal and violent agitation of the public mind the old dread of disunion returned to torment the American bourgeoisie, who through their presses, especially those of the metropolis of the Union, turned fiercely upon the Abolitionists.  While the compromise measures were the subject of excited debate before Congress, the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society fell due.  But the New York journals, the Herald in particular, had no mind to allow the meeting to take place without renewing the reign of terror of fifteen years before.  Garrison was depicted as worse than Robespierre, with an insatiable appetite for the destruction of established institutions, both human and divine.  The dissolution of the Union, the “overthrow of the churches, the Sabbath, and the Bible,” all were required to glut his malevolent passion.  “Will the men of sense allow meetings to be held in this city which are calculated to make our country the arena of blood and murder,” roared the Herald, “and render our city an object of horror to the whole South?...  Public opinion should be regulated.  These Abolitionists should not be allowed to misrepresent New York.”  In order to suppress the Abolitionists that paper did not blink at any means, however extreme or revolutionary, but declared boldly in favor of throttling free discussion.  “When free discussion does not promote the public good,” argued the editor, “it has no more right to exist than a bad government that is dangerous and oppressive to the common weal.  It should be overthrown.”  The mob thus invoked came forward on the opening of the convention to overthrow free discussion.

The storm which the New York press was at so much labor to brew, Garrison did not doubt would break over the convention.  He went to it in a truly apostolic spirit of self-sacrifice.  “Not knowing the things that shall befall me there, saving that bonds and afflictions abide with me in every city,” he wrote his wife an hour before the commencement of the convention.  His prevision of violence was quickly fulfilled.  He had called Francis Jackson to the chair during the delivery of the opening speech which fell to the pioneer to make as the president of the society.  His subject was the Religion of the Country, to which he was paying his respects in genuine Garrisonian fashion.  Belief in Jesus in the United States had no vital influence on conduct or character.  The chief religious denominations were in practice pro-slavery, they had uttered no protest against the national sin.  There was the Roman Catholic Church whose “priests and members held slaves without incurring the rebuke of the Church.”  At this point the orator was interrupted by one of those monstrous products of the slums of the American metropolis, compounded of the bully, the blackleg, and the demagogue in about equal proportions.  It was the notorious Captain Isaiah Rynders, perched with his band of blackguards in the organ loft of