At the same time that he was making active, personal acquaintance with the free colored people, he was making actual personal acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery also.  “The distinct application of a whip, and the shrieks of anguish” of the slave, his residence in Baltimore had taught him was “nothing uncommon” in that city.  Such an instance had come to him while in the street where the office of the Genius was located.  It was what was occurring at almost all hours of the day and in almost all parts of the town.  He had not been in Baltimore a month when he saw a specimen of the brutality of slavery on the person of a negro, who had been mercilessly flogged.  On his back were thirty-seven gashes made with a cowskin, while on his head were many bruises besides.  It was a Sunday morning, fresh from his terrible punishment, that the poor fellow had found the editors of the Genius, who, with the compassion of brothers, took him in, dressed his wounds, and cared for him for two days.  Such an experience was no new horror to Lundy, but it was doubtless Garrison’s first lesson in that line, and it sank many fathoms deep into his heart.

Maryland was one of the slave-breeding States and Baltimore a slave emporium.  There was enacted the whole business of slavery as a commercial enterprise.  Here the human chattels were brought and here warehoused in jails and other places of storage and detention.  Here they were put up at public auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder, and from here they were shipped to New Orleans, the great distributing center for such merchandise.  He heard what Lundy had years before heard, the wail of captive mothers and fathers, wives, husbands and children, torn from each other; like Lundy, “he felt their pang of distress; and the iron entered his soul.”  He could not hold his peace in the midst of such abominations, but boldly exposed and denounced them.  His indignation grew hot when he saw that Northern vessels were largely engaged in the coastwise slave-trade; and when, to his amazement, he learned that the ship Francis, owned by Francis Todd, a Newburyport merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves, his indignation burst into blaze.  He blazoned the act and the name of Francis Todd in the Genius, and did verily what he had resolved to do, viz., “to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this nefarious business,” the captain as well as the owner of the ill-freighted ship.  He did literally point at these men the finger of scorn.  Every device known to the printer’s art for concentrating the reader’s attention upon particular words and sentences, Garrison made skillful use of in his articles—­from the deep damnation of the heavy black capitals in which he printed the name Francis Todd, to the small caps in which appeared the words, “sentenced to solitary confinement for life,” and which he flanked with two terrible indices.  But the articles did