of the land was everywhere busy, day and night, smearing with a thick and virulent saliva of lies the brave little band and its leader.  Anti-slavery publications, calculated to inflame the minds of the slaves against their masters, and intended to instigate the slaves to servile insurrections, had been distributed broadcast through the South by the emissaries of anti-slavery societies.  The Abolitionists advocated the emancipation of the slaves in the South by Congress, intermarriages between the two races, the dissolution of the Union, etc.  All of which outrageous misrepresentations were designed to render the movement utterly odious to the public, and the public so much the more furious for its suppression.

It was in the midst of such intense and widespread excitement that Boston called its meeting to abolish the Abolitionists.  It was the month of August, and the heat of men’s passions was as great as the heat of the August sun.  The moral atmosphere of the city was so charged with inflammable gases that the slightest spark would have sufficed to produce an explosion.  The Abolitionists felt this and carried themselves the while with unusual circumspection.  They deemed it prudent to publish an address to neutralize the falsehoods with which they were assailed by their enemies.  The address drawn up by Garrison for the purpose was thought “too fiery for the present time,” by his more cautious followers and was rejected.  The Liberator office had already been threatened in consequence of a fiery article by the editor, denouncing the use of Faneuil Hall for the approaching pro-slavery meeting.  It seemed to the unawed and indignant champion of liberty that it were “better that the winds should scatter it in fragments over the whole earth—­better that an earthquake should engulf it—­than that it should be used for so unhallowed and detestable a purpose!” The anti-abolition feeling of the town had become so bitter and intense that Henry E. Benson, then clerk in the anti-slavery office, writing on the 19th of the month, believed that there were persons in Boston, who would assassinate George Thompson in broad daylight, and doubted whether Garrison or Samuel J. May would be safe in Faneuil Hall on the day of the meeting, and what seemed still more significant of the inflamed state of the public mind, was the confidence with which he predicted that a mob would follow the meeting.  The wild-cat-like spirit was in the air—­in the seething heart of the populace.

The meeting was held August 21st, in the old cradle of liberty.  To its call alone fifteen hundred names were appended.  It was a Boston audience both as to character and numbers, an altogether imposing affair, over whom the mayor of the city presided and before whom two of the most consummate orators of the commonwealth fulmined against the Abolitionists.  One of their hearers, a young attorney of twenty-four, who listened to Peleg Sprague and Harrison Gray Otis