“Some time afterward,” he wrote, “it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors.”

With this bare bodkin Harrison Gray Otis thought to puncture the Southern panic.  But the slaveholders had correcter notions of the nature and tendency of the Abolition enterprise than had the Boston mayor.  They had a strange, an obstinate presentiment of disaster from the first instant that the Liberator loomed upon their horizon.  It was a battery whose guns, unless silenced, would play havoc with Southern interests and the slave system; ergo, the paper must be suppressed; ergo, its editor must be silenced or destroyed.  And so when Otis, from his serene height, assured them of his “belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people,” they continued to listen to their fears, and to cry the louder for the suppression of the “incendiary newspaper published in Boston.”

The editor of that paper never flinched before the storm of malignity which was gathering about his head.  He pursued the even tenor of his way, laboring at the case more than fourteen hours every day, except Sundays, upon the paper, renewing, week after week, his assaults upon the citadel of the great iniquity, giving no quarter to slave-holding sinners, but carrying aloft the banner of IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL EMANCIPATION.  Otis had looked to numbers and respectability as his political barometer and cue; but when, after diligent search with official microscopes, he failed to observe the presence of either in connection with this “new fanaticism,” wise man that he was, he turned over and renewed his slumbers on the edge of a volcano whose ominous rumbling the Southern heart had heard and interpreted aright.  He was too near to catch the true import of the detonations of those subterranean forces which were sounding, week after week, in the columns of the Liberator.  They seemed trivial, harmless, contemptible, like the toy artillery of children bombarding Fort Independence.  Garrison’s moral earnestness and enthusiasm seemed to the Boston mayor like the impotent rage of a man nursing memories of personal injuries suffered at the South.

If there was panic in the South, there was none in the office of the Liberator.  Unterrified by the commotion which his composing-stick was producing near and far, he laughed to scorn the abuse and threats of his enemies.  When the news of the reward of the State of Georgia “for the abduction of his person” reached him, he did not quail, great as was his peril, but boldly replied: 

“Of one thing we are sure:  all Southern threats and rewards will be insufficient to deter us from pursuing the work of emancipation.  As citizens of the United States we know our rights and dare maintain them.  We have committed no crime, but are expending our health, comfort, and means for the salvation of our country, and for the interests and security of infatuated slaveholders, as well as for the relief of the poor slaves.”