After this brave beginning, the wild-cat-like spirit continued, these ferocious demonstrations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire.  The slavery agitation had increased apace.  It had broken out in Congress on the presentation of anti-slavery petitions.  The fire thus kindled spread through the country.  Southern excitement became intense, amounted almost to panic.  The activity of the anti-slavery press, the stream of anti-slavery publications, which had, indeed, increased with singular rapidity, was exaggerated by the Southern imagination, struck it with a sort of terror.  There were meetings held in many parts of the South, tremendous scenes enacted there.  In Charleston, South Carolina, the post-office was broken open by an aristocratic mob, under the lead of the famous Robert Y. Hayne, and a bonfire made of the Abolition mail-matter which it contained.  As this Southern excitement advanced, a passionate fear for the stability of the Union arose in the heart of the North.  Abolition and the Abolitionists had produced these sectional disturbances.  Abolition and the Abolitionists were, therefore, enemies of the “glorious Union.”  Northern excitement kept pace with Southern excitement until, in the summer of 1835, a reign of terror was widely established over both sections.  To Garrison, from his Liberator outlook, all seemed “Consternation and perplexity, for perilous times have come.”  They had, indeed, come in New York, as witness this from the pen of Lydia Maria Child, who was at the time (August 15) in Brooklyn.  Says she: 

“I have not ventured into the city, nor does one of us dare to go to church to-day, so great is the excitement here.  You can form no conception of it.  ’Tis like the time of the French Revolution, when no man dared trust his neighbor.  Private assassins from New Orleans are lurking at the corners of the streets to stab Arthur Tappan, and very large sums are offered for any one who will convey Mr. Thompson into the slave States....  There are several thousand Southerners now in the city, and I am afraid there are not seven hundred among them who have the slightest fear of God before their eyes.  Mr. Wright [Elizur] was yesterday barricading his doors and windows with strong bars and planks an inch thick.  Violence in some form seems to be generally expected.”

Great meetings to put the Abolitionists down afforded vents during this memorable year to the pent-up excitement of the free States.  New York had had its great meeting, and had put the Abolitionists down with pro-slavery resolutions and torrents of pro-slavery eloquence.  Boston, too, had to have her great meeting and her cataracts of pro-slavery oratory to reassure the South of the sympathy and support of “the great body of the people of the Northern States.”  The toils seemed everywhere closing around the Abolitionists.  The huge head of the asp of public opinion, the press