Rev. W.H.  Furness, of Philadelphia, who was a member of the convention and also one of the speakers, has preserved for us the contrasts of the occasion.  “The close of Mr. Garrison’s address,” says he, “brought down Rynders again, who vociferated and harangued at one time on the platform, and then pushing down into the aisles, like a madman followed by his keepers.  Through the whole, nothing could be more patient and serene than the bearing of Mr. Garrison.  I have always revered Mr. Garrison for his devoted, uncompromising fidelity to his great cause.  Today I was touched to the heart by his calm and gentle manners.  There was no agitation, no scorn, no heat, but the quietness of a man engaged in simple duties.”

The madman and his keepers were quite vanquished on the first day of the convention by the wit, repartee, and eloquence of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Furness, and Rev. Samuel R. Ward, whom Wendell Phillips described as so black that “when he shut his eyes you could not see him.”  But it was otherwise on the second day when public opinion was “regulated,” and free discussion overthrown by Captain Rynders and his villainous gang, who were resolved, with the authors of the compromise, that the Union as it was should be preserved.

But, notwithstanding the high authority and achievements of this noble band of patriots and brothers, Garrison’s detestation of the Union but increased, and his cry for its dissolution grew deeper and louder.  And no wonder.  For never had the compact between freedom and slavery seemed more hateful than after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill.  The state of panic which it created among the colored people in the free States will form, if ever written down, one of the most heartrending chapters in human history.  Hundreds and thousands fled from their homes into the jaws of a Canadian winter to escape the jaws of the slave-hounds, whose fierce baying began presently to fill the land from Massachusetts to Ohio.  It made no difference whether these miserable people had been always free or were fugitives from slavery, the terror spread among them all the same.  The aged and the young turned their backs upon their homes and hurried precipitately into a strange country.  Fathers with wives and children dependant upon them for their daily bread, were forced by the dread of being captured and returned to bondage to abandon their homes and loved ones, sometimes without so much as a touch of their hands or a tone of their voices in token of farewell.  Perhaps on his way to work in the morning some husband or son has caught a glimpse among the faces on the street of one face, the remembrance of which to the day of death, he can never lose, a face he had known in some far away Southern town or plantation, and with which are connected in the poor fellow’s brain the most frightful sufferings and associations.  Crazed at the sight, with no thought of home, of the labors which are awaiting him, oblivious of everything but the abject terror