was benefited by the meetings and speeches of Garrisonian Abolitionists.  What was true of the Liberty party was equally true of Free Soil and Free Democracy.  Although the little band remained small, it was potent in swelling, year after year, the anti-slavery membership of all the parties, Whig and Democratic, as well as of those already mentioned.  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” might fairly be classed among the large indirect results produced by Garrison.  “But,” as Phillips justly remarked, “‘Uncle Tom’ would never have been written had not Garrison developed the facts; and never would have succeeded had he not created readers and purchasers.”  Garrisonism had become an influence, a power that made for liberty and against slavery in the United States.  It had become such also in Great Britain.  George Thompson, writing the pioneer of the marvelous sale of “Uncle Tom” in England, and of the unprecedented demand for anti-slavery literature, traced their source to his friend:  “Behold the fruit of your labors,” he exclaimed, “and rejoice.”

Mr. Garrison’s pungent characterization of the “Union” at the dinner of the Free Democracy as “but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power,” found almost instant illustration of its truth in the startling demand of that power for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise.  In 1850 the South lost California, but it received at the time an advantage of far-reaching consequence, viz., the admission of the principle of federal non-intervention upon the subject of slavery in the national Territories into the bill organizing Territorial Governments for New Mexico and Utah.  The train which was to blow down the slave wall of 1820 and open to slave immigration the northern half of the Louisiana Territory, was laid in the compromise measures of 1850.

Calhoun, strongly dissatisfied as he was with the Missouri settlement, recoiled from countenancing any agitation on the part of the South looking to its repeal on the ground that such action was calculated to disturb “the peace and harmony of the Union.”  But four years after the death of the great nullifier, his disciples and followers dared to consummate a crime, the consequences of which he shrank from inviting.  The political conditions four years had indeed modified in one important particular at least.  In Calhoun’s lifetime, there was no Northern leader bold enough to undertake to engineer an act of abrogation through Congress.  If the North were willing, possessed sufficient magnanimity, to surrender, in the interest of brotherly love between the sections, the benefits which inured to it under the Missouri Compromise, neither Calhoun nor the South would have declined the proffered sacrifice.  The selection of Stephen A. Douglas in 1854 as the leader of the movement for repeal put a new face on the business, which was thereby made to appear to proceed from the free, not from the slave States.  This was adroit, the fixing upon the losing section the initiative and the responsibility of the act of abrogation.