With this energetic organization the anti-slavery movement now gained rapidly in strength, but its political work for many years was confined to a fruitless interrogation of candidates and to sending hundreds of petitions and memorials to Congress. Anti-slavery pamphlets and papers were also sent broadcast North and South. On seeing _The Liberator_, with its extreme views, and on reading the anti-slavery pamphlets, the South was enraged beyond all bounds. A North Carolina Grand Jury indicted Garrison, and Georgia offered a large reward for his arrest and conviction. On July 29, 1835, all anti-slavery papers were taken from the postoffice at Charleston, S. C., by a mob and destroyed. The following year Mr. Calhoun, in the Senate, demanded the suppression of the right of petition on any matter connected with slavery, and in 1838 the House adopted the infamous Atherton Gag-Rule, "Every Petition, Memorial, Resolution, Proposition or Paper touching or relating in any way or to any extent whatever to slavery or the abolition thereof, shall, on presentation and without further action thereon, be laid upon the table without being debated, printed or referred." This remarkable rule was adopted year after year in the House until 1844, when it was repealed through the efforts of John Quincy Adams, who for ten years fought nobly for the Right of Petition, although he was not entirely in sympathy with the Abolitionists. During this period the sentiment against the Abolitionists was very strong in the North. In many places mobs seized upon and destroyed their papers and printing presses, and broke up their meetings and mobbed the speakers. James G. Birney's paper, _The Philanthropist_, was twice mobbed in Cincinnati. On November 7, 1837, the Abolition cause was baptized in blood by the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, who was shot while defending his paper and press from the attack of a pro-slavery mob at Alton, Illinois. The following month Wendell Phillips delivered his first abolition speech against the aggressions of the Slave Power and the murder of Lovejoy. The continued despotism of the Slave Power, its attempts to muzzle the freedom of speech and press, to deny the Right of Petition, to obstruct the mails, and to obtain an Extradition Law for the trial of citizens in slave States on charges of circulating anti-slavery documents, and the use of violence against all who dared raise their voices against the slavery dogmas, aroused the abolition societies to more radical action, and a group of Abolitionists now formed, determined on political action. This was one of the causes of the disruption of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the withdrawal of Garrison and his followers, who refused to take part in any election held under the pro-slavery Constitution.