renewed with tenfold intensity.  Ulysses-like the free States bound themselves, their right of free speech, and their freedom of the press on this subject, for fear of the Siren voices which came thrilling on every breeze from the South.  Quiet was the word, and quiet the leaders in Church and State sought to enforce upon the people, to the end that the vision of “States dissevered, discordant, belligerent, of a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched it may be, in fraternal blood,” might not come to pass for their “glorious Union.”

The increasing friction and heat between the sections during twenty-five years, had effected every portion of the Federal system, and created conditions favorable to a violent explosion.  Sectional differences of a political and industrial complexion, forty years had sufficed to develop.  Sectional differences of a moral and social character forty years had also sufficed to generate.  To kindle all those differences, all that mass of combustible feelings and forces into a general conflagration a spark only was wanted.  And out of the glowing humanity of one man the spark was suddenly struck.

It is curious to note that in the year 1829, the very year in which William Lloyd Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began the editorship of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, the American Convention, or national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of slavery, fell into desuetude.  It was as if Providence was clearing the debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage of the nation, put into old bottles.  The Hour for a new movement against slavery had come, and with its arrival the Man to hail it had also come.

Other men had spoken and written against slavery, and labored for the freedom of the slave before Garrison had thought upon the subject at all.  Washington and Jefferson, Franklin, Jay, and Hamilton had been Abolitionists before he was born, but theirs was a divided interest.  The establishment of a more perfect union was the paramount object of their lives.  John Wesley had denounced slavery in language quite as harsh as Garrison’s, but his, too, was a divided interest, the religious revival of the eighteenth century being his distinctive mission.  Benezet, Woolman, and Lundy were saints, who had yearned with unspeakable sympathy for the black bondmen, and were indefatigable in good works in his behalf, but they had not that stern and iron quality without which reforms cannot be launched upon the attention of mankind.  What his predecessors lacked, Garrison possessed to a marvelous degree—­the undivided interest, the supremacy of a single purpose, the stern stuff out of which the moral reformer is made, and in which he is panoplied.  They were all his, but there was another besides—­immediatism.  This element distinguished the movement against slavery, started by him, from all other movements begun before he arrived on the stage, for the emancipation of the slaves in the Union.