Agents, during this period when money was scarce, were necessarily few.  But the pioneer proved a host in himself.  Resigning the editorial charge of the Liberator into the capable hands of Edmund Quincy, Garrison itinerated in the role of an anti-slavery lecturer in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, reviving everywhere the languishing interest of his disciples.  On the return of Collins in the summer of 1841, revival meetings and conventions started up with increased activity, the fruits of which were of a most cheering character.  At Nantucket, Garrison made a big catch in his anti-slavery net.  It was Frederick Douglass, young, callow, and awkward, but with his splendid and inimitable gifts flashing through all as he, for the first time in his life, addressed an audience of white people.  Garrison, with the instinct of leadership, saw at once the value of the runaway slave’s oratorical possibilities in their relations to the anti-slavery movement.  It was at his instance that Collins added Douglass to the band of anti-slavery agents.  The new agent has preserved his recollections of the pioneer’s speech on that eventful evening in Nantucket.  Says he:  “Mr. Garrison followed me, taking me as his text; and now, whether I had made an eloquent plea in behalf of freedom or not, his was one never to be forgotten.  Those who had heard him oftenest, and had known him longest, were astonished at his masterly effort.  For the time he possessed that almost fabulous inspiration, often referred to but seldom attained, in which a public meeting is transformed, as it were, into a single individuality, the orator swaying a thousand heads and hearts at once, and by the simple majesty of his all-controlling thought, converting his hearers into the express image of his own soul.  That night there were, at least, a thousand Garrisonians in Nantucket!”

Here is another picture of Garrison in the lecture-field.  It is from the pen of N.P.  Rogers, with whom he was making a week’s tour among the White Mountains, interspersing the same with anti-slavery meetings.  At Plymouth, failing to procure the use of a church for their purpose, they fell back upon the temple not made with hands.

“Semi-circular seats, backed against a line of magnificent trees to accommodate, we should judge, from two to three hundred,” Rogers narrates, “were filled, principally with women, and the men who could not find seats stood on the green sward on either hand; and, at length, when wearied with standing, seated themselves on the ground.  Garrison, mounted on a rude platform in front, lifted up his voice and spoke to them in prophet tones and surpassing eloquence, from half-past three till I saw the rays of the setting sun playing through the trees on his head....  They (the auditory) heeded it not any more than he, but remained till he ended, apparently indisposed to move, though some came from six, eight, and even twelve miles distance.”  So bravely prospered the revival agitation, under the vigorous preaching of the indomitable pioneer.