=359. Anti-slavery Agitation.=—The tariff was not destined to remain the chief grievance of the Southerners. They were soon far more concerned with the growing agitation against slavery which was being waged by determined men and women in the North. At the head of these abolitionists, as they were styled, stood William Lloyd Garrison, who in 1831 established his anti-slavery paper, _The Liberator_, in Boston. Up to this time many leading Southerners, including Washington and Jefferson, had deplored the existence of slavery without seeing how to get rid of it. Now, feeling outraged by the attacks made upon their section, and fearing other slave insurrections like one incited by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, they began to defend their institution as a property right secured to them by law, and a profitable one in view of the increased demand for cotton. Efforts for emancipation, such as those made by representatives of the mountain districts of Virginia, in a convention held in that state in 1829–1830, were abandoned. A pro-slavery literature was produced, which treated slavery not as an evil to be abated, but as a benefit to be spread. Stricter penal laws were enacted with regard to the blacks, and the abolitionists were denounced and threatened. The latter received at first similar treatment in the North, where they were frequently mobbed. They continued to make proselytes, however, and by 1836 had put the nation in a turmoil, as a result of their petitions to Congress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. [Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS.]