work with the declaration that the Constitution itself was "a league
with death and a covenant with hell."

The Garrisonian programme would undoubtedly have been considered highly
objectionable by the South, even under to comparatively colorless
slavery policy of 1790. Under the conditions to which cotton culture had
advanced in 1830, it seemed to the South nothing less than a proposal to
destroy, root and branch, the whole industry of that section, and it was
received with corresponding indignation. Garrisonian abolitionists were
taken and regarded as public enemies, and rewards were even offered for
their capture. The germ of abolitionism in the Border States found a new
and aggressive public sentiment arrayed against it; and an attempt
to introduce gradual abolition in Virginia in 1832-33 was hopelessly
defeated. The new question was even carried into Congress. A bill to
prohibit the transportation of abolition documents by the Post-Office
department was introduced, taken far enough to put leading men of both
parties on the record, and then dropped. Petitions for the abolition
of slavery in the District of Columbia were met by rules requiring the
reference of such petitions without reading or action; but this only
increased the number of petitions, by providing a new grievance to
be petitioned against, and in 1842 the "gag rule" was rescinded.
Thence-forth the pro-slavery members of Congress could do nothing, and
could only become more exasperated under a system of passive resistance.

Even at the North, indifferent or politically hostile as it had hitherto
shown itself to the expansion of slavery, the new doctrines were
received with an outburst of anger which seems to have been primarily a
revulsion against their unheard of individualism. If nothing, which
had been the object of unquestioning popular reverence, from the
Constitution down or up to the church organizations, was to be sacred