against the criticism of the Garrisonians, it was certain that the
innovators must submit for a time to a general proscription. Thus the
Garrisonians were ostracised socially, and became the Ishmalites of
politics. Their meetings were broken up by mobs, their halls were
destroyed, their schools were attacked by all the machinery of society
and legislation, their printing presses were silenced by force or fraud,
and their lecturers came to feel that they had not done their work with
efficiency if a meeting passed without the throwing of stones or eggs at
the building or the 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