course of passionate denunciation.  He apologized for having ever “assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition.”  He chose for his motto:  “Immediate and unconditional emancipation!” He promised his readers that he would be “harsh as truth and uncompromising as justice”; that he would not “think or speak or write with moderation.”  Then he flung out his defiant call:  “I am in earnest—­I will not equivocate—­I will not excuse—­I will not retreat a single inch—­and I will be heard....

     ‘Such is the vow I take, so help me God.’”

Though Garrison complained that “the apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal,” he soon learned how alive the masses were to the meaning of his propaganda.  Abolition orators were stoned in the street and hissed from the platform.  Their meeting places were often attacked and sometimes burned to the ground.  Garrison himself was assaulted in the streets of Boston, finding refuge from the angry mob behind prison bars.  Lovejoy, a publisher in Alton, Illinois, for his willingness to give abolition a fair hearing, was brutally murdered; his printing press was broken to pieces as a warning to all those who disturbed the nation’s peace of mind.  The South, doubly frightened by a slave revolt in 1831 which ended in the murder of a number of men, women, and children, closed all discussion of slavery in that section.  “Now,” exclaimed Calhoun, “it is a question which admits of neither concession nor compromise.”

As the opposition hardened, the anti-slavery agitation gathered in force and intensity.  Whittier blew his blast from the New England hills: 

    “No slave-hunt in our borders—­no pirate on our strand;
     No fetters in the Bay State—­no slave upon our land.”

Lowell, looking upon the espousal of a great cause as the noblest aim of his art, ridiculed and excoriated bondage in the South.  Those abolitionists, not gifted as speakers or writers, signed petitions against slavery and poured them in upon Congress.  The flood of them was so continuous that the House of Representatives, forgetting its traditions, adopted in 1836 a “gag rule” which prevented the reading of appeals and consigned them to the waste basket.  Not until the Whigs were in power nearly ten years later was John Quincy Adams able, after a relentless campaign, to carry a motion rescinding the rule.

How deep was the impression made upon the country by this agitation for immediate and unconditional emancipation cannot be measured.  If the popular vote for those candidates who opposed not slavery, but its extension to the territories, be taken as a standard, it was slight indeed.  In 1844, the Free Soil candidate, Birney, polled 62,000 votes out of over a million and a half; the Free Soil vote of the next campaign went beyond a quarter of a million, but the increase was due to the strength of the leader, Martin Van Buren; four years afterward it receded