Our anti-slavery agent visited portions of Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, preaching the Abolition gospel in divers places, and to many people—­notably at such centers of population as Worcester, Providence, Bangor, and Portland, making at the latter city a signal conversion to his cause in the person of General Samuel Fessenden, distinguished then as a lawyer, and later as the father of William Pitt Fessenden.  The anti-slavery schoolmaster was abroad, and was beginning to turn New England and the North into one resounding schoolhouse, where he sat behind the desk and the nation occupied the forms.

So effective was the agitation prosecuted by the society during the first year of its existence that it was no empty declaration or boast of the Abolitionist, the new monthly periodical of the society, that “probably, through its instrumentality, more public addresses on the subject of slavery, and appeals in behalf of the contemned free people of color, have been made in New England, during the past year (1832) than were elicited for forty years prior to its organization.”

The introduction of the principle of association into the slavery agitation, and the conversion of it into an organized movement was an achievement of the first importance.  To Garrison, more than to any man, or to all others put together, belongs the authorship of this immense initiative.  He it was, who, having “announced the principle, arranged the method” of the Abolition movement.  The marshaling of the anti-slavery sentiment of New England under a common standard, in a common cause, was a master stroke of moral generalship.  This master stroke the leader followed up promptly with a second stroke not less masterly.  That second stroke was his “Thoughts on African Colonization,” published in the summer succeeding the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.

Garrison’s championship of the cause of the slave had started with strong faith in the efficacy and disinterestedness of the colonization scheme as an instrument of emancipation.  It commanded, therefore, his early support.  In his Park Street Church address he evinced himself in earnest sympathy with the friends of colonization.  But after his arrival in Baltimore a change began to exhibit itself in this regard.  He began to qualify his confidence in its utility; began to discern in it influences calculated to retard general emancipation.  As these doubts and misgivings arose within him he expressed them frankly in the Genius.  Lundy had been suspicious of the pro-slavery purposes or interests of the enterprise for many years.  He could not reconcile himself to the significant or, at least, singular fact of so many slaveholders being in the membership and the offices of the association.  Then, in addition to this lack of confidence on the part of Lundy in the scheme, Garrison became acquainted, for the first time, with the objects of the society’s philanthropy—­the