Maryland was one of the slave-breeding States and Baltimore a slave
emporium. There was enacted the whole business of slavery as a
commercial enterprise. Here the human chattels were brought and here
warehoused in jails and other places of storage and detention. Here they
were put up at public auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder,
and from here they were shipped to New Orleans, the great distributing
center for such merchandise. He heard what Lundy had years before heard,
the wail of captive mothers and fathers, wives, husbands and children,
torn from each other; like Lundy, "he felt their pang of distress; and
the iron entered his soul." He could not hold his peace in the midst of
such abominations, but boldly exposed and denounced them. His
indignation grew hot when he saw that Northern vessels were largely
engaged in the coastwise slave-trade; and when, to his amazement, he
learned that the ship _Francis_, owned by Francis Todd, a Newburyport
merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves,
his indignation burst into blaze. He blazoned the act and the name of
Francis Todd in the _Genius_, and did verily what he had resolved to do,
viz., "to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this
nefarious business," the captain as well as the owner of the
ill-freighted ship. He did literally point at these men the finger of
scorn. Every device known to the printer's art for concentrating the
reader's attention upon particular words and sentences, Garrison made
skillful use of in his articles--from the deep damnation of the heavy
black capitals in which he printed the name Francis Todd, to the small
caps in which appeared the words, "sentenced to solitary confinement for
life," and which he flanked with two terrible indices. But the articles
did not need such embellishment. They were red hot branding irons
without them. One can almost smell the odor of burning flesh as he reads
the words: "It is no worse to fit out piratical cruisers or to engage in