From this time on Wendell Phillips became in Boston and in the North more distinctly the leader of the Abolition sentiment.  The period of pure moral agitation ended with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.  That act opened a new era in the movement, an era in which non-resistance had no place, an era in which a resort to physical force in settlement of sectional differences, the whole trend of things were making inevitable.  Fighting, the Anglo-Saxon method, as Theodore Parker characterized it, of making a final settlement of just such controversies as was the slavery question, was in the air, had become without any general consciousness of it at the time appearing in the popular mind, a foregone conclusion, from the moment that the South wrested from the National Government the right to defy and override the moral sentiment of free State communities.  With this advance of the anti-slavery agitation a stage nearer the end, when fighting would supersede all other methods, the fighters gravitated naturally to the front of the conflict, and the apostle of non-resistance fell somewhat into the background of the great movement started by him.

Garrison had begun, indeed, to recognize that there were other ways besides his way of abolishing slavery—­had begun to see that these with his led to Rome, to the ultimate extinction of the evil, to which anti-slavery unionists and disunionists were alike devoted.  His innate sagacity and strong sense of justice lifted the reformer to larger toleration of mind.  At a dinner given in Boston in May, 1853, by the Free Democracy to John P. Hale, he was not only present to testify his appreciation of the courage and services of Mr. Hale to the common cause, but while there was able to speak thus tolerantly—­tolerantly for him certainly—­of a Union dear to the company about the table yet hateful beyond measure to himself:  “Sir, you will pardon me,” spoke the arch anti-slavery disunionist, “for the reference.  I have heard something here about our Union, about the value of the Union, and the importance of preserving the Union, Gentlemen, if you have been so fortunate as to find a Union worth preserving, I heartily congratulate you.  Cling to it with all your souls!” For himself, he has not been so fortunate.  With a price set on his head in one of the Southern States, and outlawed in all of them, he begs to be pardoned if found lacking in loyalty to the existing Union, which to him, alas:  “is but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power.  We have no common country as yet.  God grant we may have.  We shall have it when the jubilee comes—­and not till then,” he declared, mindful of the convictions of others, yet bravely true to his own.  The seeds of liberty, of hatred of the slave-power, planted by Garrison were springing up in a splendid crop through the North.  Much of the political anti-slavery of the times were the fruit of his endeavor.  Wendell Phillips has pointed out how the Liberty party