country_." The fact created no little astonishment in America. Slavery
became distinctly connected for the first time with abridgments of the
freedom of the press, and the right of free speech. And the cause of the
slave became involved with the Constitutional liberties of the republic.
In punishing Garrison, the Abolitionist, the rights of Garrison the
white freeman were trampled on. And white freemen in the North, who
cared nothing for Abolitionism, but a great deal for their right to
speak and write freely, resented the outrage. This fact was the most
important consequence, which flowed from the trial and imprisonment of
the young editor of _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_. "As the news
of my imprisonment became extensively known," he wrote, "and the merits
of the case understood, not a mail rolled into the city but it brought
me consolatary letters from individuals hitherto unknown to me, and
periodicals of all kinds from every section of the Union (not even
excepting the South), all uniting to give me a triumphant acquittal--all
severely reprehending the conduct of Mr. Todd--and all regarding my
trial as a mockery of justice." This unexpected result was one of those
accidents of history, which "have laws as fixed as planets have."

The prosecution and imprisonment of Garrison was without doubt designed
to terrorize him into silence on the subject of slavery. But his
persecutors had reckoned without a knowledge of their victim. Garrison
had the martyr's temperament and invincibility of purpose. His
earnestness burned the more intensely with the growth of opposition and
peril. Within "gloomy walls close pent," he warbled gay as a bird of a
freedom which tyrants could not touch, nor bolts confine:

"No chains can bind it, and no cell enclose,
Swifter than light, it flies from pole to pole,
And in a flash from earth to heaven it goes!"