with the hope that the South would, in some yet unsuspected manner,
be brought to the Northern policy. This had been supplemented, to some
extent, by the colonization society for colonizing negroes on the west
coast of Africa; which had two aspects: at the South it was the means of
ridding the country of the free negro population; at the North it was a
means of mitigating, perhaps of gradually abolishing, slavery. Garrison,
through his newspaper, the Liberator, called for "immediate abolition"
of slavery, for the conversion of anti-slavery sentiment into
anti-slavery purpose. This was followed by the organization of his
adherents into the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and the
active dissemination of the immediate abolition principle by tracts,
newspapers, and lecturers.

The anti-slavery struggle thus begun, never ceased until, in 1865, the
Liberator ceased to be published, with the final abolition of slavery.
In its inception and in all its development the movement was a distinct
product of the democratic spirit. It would not have been possible in
1790, or in 1810, or in 1820. The man came with the hour; and every new
mile of railroad or telegraph, every new district open to population,
every new influence toward the growth of democracy, broadened the
power as well as the field of the abolition movement. It was but the
deepening, the application to an enslaved race of laborers, of the work
which Jeffersonian democracy had done, to remove the infinitely less
grievous restraints upon the white laborer thirty year before. It could
never have been begun until individualism at the North had advanced
so far that there was a reserve force of mind--ready to reject all the
influences of heredity and custom upon thought. Outside of religion
there was no force so strong at the North as the reverence for the
Constitution; it was significant of the growth of individualism, as well
as of the anti-slavery sentiment, that Garrison could safely begin his