electric frenzy" broke forth, only this time it destroyed his printing
office. The young minister decided to leave the slave State, and crossed
to Alton, Illinois, where there was not only liberty of speech but
liberty of the printing-press. But a mob crossed over from Missouri and
destroyed his press. Determined to maintain his rights, Lovejoy then
brought another press down the Ohio River from Cincinnati. A group of
his friends carried the type from the steamboat to the warehouse, but
the next night a second mob collected, and when Lovejoy stepped from the
building he was riddled with bullets, the warehouse burned, and the
press, for the third time, flung into the Mississippi. The news of this
murder aroused the continent, filling the South with exultation, and the
North with alarm. Slavery, a subject which had long been tabooed,
suddenly became the one topic of conversation in the home, the store,
the street-car. All editors wrote about it; all Northern pulpits began
to preach on the subject. More faggots had been flung upon the fire, and
oil added to the fierce flames.

Every explosion asks for powder, but also a spark. Falling on ice, a
spark is impotent, falling on powder, an explosion is inevitable.
Wendell Phillips had already been aroused to sympathy with Garrison and
hatred of slavery, and news of the murder of Lovejoy fell upon his heart
like a spark on a powder magazine. When Boston heard that Lovejoy had
been shot by the mob in Alton, Illinois, while defending his
printing-press, the leading men of Boston came together in Faneuil Hall.
William Ellery Channing made the opening address, and asked that the
meeting go on record through an indignant protest against this assault
upon the rights of free citizens. James T. Austin, attorney-general of
the commonwealth, replied in a bitter and insulting reference to
Channing, asserting that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or mingling
in the debate of a popular assembly in Faneuil Hall, was marvellously