orators.  It was, of course, inevitable that such a process should bring strong minds to the aid of the Garrisonians, at first from sympathy with persecuted individualism, and finally from sympathy with the cause itself; and in this way Garrisonianism was in a great measure relieved from open mob violence about 1840, though it never escaped it altogether until abolition meetings ceased to be necessary.  One of the first and greatest reinforcements was the appearance of Wendell Phillips, whose speech at Faneuil Hall in 1839 was one of the first tokens of a serious break in the hitherto almost unanimous public opinion against Garrisonianism.  Lovejoy, a Western anti-slavery preacher and editor, who had been driven from one place to another in Missouri and Illinois, had finally settled at Alton, and was there shot to death while defending his printing press against a mob.  At a public meeting in Faneuil Hall, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts, James T. Austin, expressing what was doubtless the general sentiment of the time as to such individual insurrection against pronounced public opinion, compared the Alton mob to the Boston “tea-party,” and declared that Lovejoy, “presumptuous and imprudent,” had “died as the fool dieth.”  Phillips, an almost unknown man, took the stand, and answered in the speech which opens this volume.  A more powerful reinforcement could hardly have been looked for; the cause which could find such a defender was henceforth to be feared rather than despised.  To the day of his death he was, fully as much as Garrison, the incarnation of the anti-slavery spirit.  For this reason his address on the Philosophy of the Abolition Movement, in 1853, has been assigned a place as representing fully the abolition side of the question, just before it was overshadowed by the rise of the Republican party, which opposed only the extension of slavery to the territories.

The history of the sudden development of the anti-slavery struggle in 1847 and the following years, is largely given in the speeches which have been selected to illustrate it.  The admission of Texas to the Union in 1845, and the war with Mexico which followed it, resulted in the acquisition of a vast amount of new territory by the United States.  From the first suggestion of such an acquisition, the Wilmot proviso (so-called from David Wilmot, of Pennsylvania, who introduced it in Congress), that slavery should be prohibited in the new territory, was persistently offered as an amendment to every bill appropriating money for the purchase of territory from Mexico.  It was passed by the House of Representatives, but was balked in the Senate; and the purchase was finally made without any proviso.  When the territory came to be organized, the old question came up again:  the Wilmot proviso was offered as an amendment.  As the territory was now in the possession of the United States, and as it had been acquired in a war whose support had been much more cordial at the South