in the snare of slavery, and was in Church and State helpless in the vast spider-like web of wrong.  The more the reformer pondered the problem, the more hopeless did success look under a Constitution which united right and wrong, freedom and slavery.  As his reflections deepened, the conviction forced its way into his mind that the Union was the strong tower of the slave-power, which could never be destroyed until the fortress which protected it was first utterly demolished.  In the spring of 1842 the pioneer was prepared to strike into this new path to effect his purpose.

“We must dissolve all connection with those murderers of fathers,” he wrote his brother-in-law, “and murderers of mothers, and murderers of liberty, and traffickers of human flesh, and blasphemers against the Almighty at the South.  What have we in common with them?  What have we gained?  What have we not lost by our alliance with them?  Are not their principles, their pursuits, their policies, their interests, their designs, their feelings, utterly diverse from ours?  Why, then, be subject to their dominion?  Why not have the Union dissolved in form as it is in fact, especially if the form gives ample protection to the slave system, by securing for it all the physical force of the North?  It is not treason against the cause of liberty to cry, “Down with every slave-holding Union!” Therefore, I raise that cry.  And O that I had a voice louder than a thousand thunders, that it might shake the land and electrify the dead—­the dead in sin, I mean—­those slain by the hand of slavery.”

A few weeks later the first peal of this thunder broke upon the startled ears of the country through the columns of the Liberator.  The May meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society was drawing near, and the reformer, now entirely ready to enter upon an agitation looking to the dissolution of the Union, suggested “the duty of making the REPEAL OF THE UNION between the North and the South the grand rallying point until it be accomplished, or slavery cease to pollute our soil.  We are for throwing all the means, energies, actions, purposes, and appliances of the genuine friends of liberty and republicanism into this one channel,” he goes on to announce, “and for measuring the humanity, patriotism, and piety of every man by this one standard.  This question can no longer be avoided, and a right decision of it will settle the controversy between freedom and slavery.”  The stern message of Isaiah to the Jews, beginning, “Hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this people.  Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with DEATH and with HELL are we at agreement,” seemed to the American Isaiah to describe exactly the character of the National Constitution.  “Slavery is a combination of DEATH and HELL,” he declares, with righteous wrath, “and with it the North have made a covenant, and are at agreement.  As an element of the Government it is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent.  As a component part of the Union, it is necessarily a national interest.  Divorced from Northern protection, it dies; with that protection it enlarges its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and extends its ravages.”