of the Liberator, had he by accident, force, or fraud have fallen into the clutches of its laws.  The Georgia reward of five thousand dollars was as Mr. Garrison put it, “a bribe to kidnappers.”  The Southern method of dealing with the agitation within the slave States was violent and effective.  There could be no agitation after the agitators were abolished.  And the Southern method was to abolish the agitators.

The suppression of Abolitionism within the slave States was no difficult matter, but its suppression at the North was a problem of a wholly different nature, as the South was not long in finding out.  It would not understand why its violent treatment of the disease within its jurisdiction could not be prescribed as a remedy by the non-slave-holding half of the Union within its borders.  And so the South began to call loudly and fiercely for the suppression of a movement calculated to incite the slaves to insubordination and rebellion.  This demand of the South had its influence at the North.  Such newspapers as the National Intelligencer, and the Boston Courier suggested amendments to the laws whereby the publication of incendiary writings in the free States might be prohibited.  The latter journal allowed that under the criminal code of Massachusetts “every man has a right to advocate Abolition, or conspiracy, or murder; for he may do all these without breaking our laws, although in any Southern State public justice and public safety would require his punishment.”  “But,” the editor goes on to remark, “if we have no laws upon the subject, it is because the exigency was not anticipated....  Penal statutes against treasonable and seditious publications are necessary in all communities.  We have them for our own protection; if they should include provisions for the protection of our neighbors it would be no additional encroachment upon the liberty of the press.”  The Governors of Virginia and Georgia remonstrated with Harrison Gray Otis, who was Mayor of Boston in the memorable year of 1831, “against an incendiary newspaper published in Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations, inciting to insurrection and its horrid results.”  As a lawyer Mayor Otis, however, “perceived the intrinsic, if not insuperable obstacles to legislative enactments made to prevent crimes from being consummated beyond the local jurisdiction.”  But the South was not seeking a legal opinion as to what it could or could not do.  It demanded, legal or illegal, that Garrison and the Liberator be suppressed.  To the Boston mayor the excitement over the editor and his paper seemed like much ado about nothing.  The cause appeared to his supercilious mind altogether inadequate to the effect.  And so he set to work to reduce the panic by exposing the vulgarity and insignificance of the object, which produced it.  That he might give the Southern bugaboo its quietus, he directed one of his deputies to inquire into a publication, of which “no member of the city government, nor any person,” of his honor’s acquaintance, “had ever heard.”  The result of this inquiry Mayor Otis reported to the Southern functionaries.