In 1846, the Free Church of Scotland having sent emissaries to the United States to collect funds from the slaveholders, Mr. Garrison again went to England to urge the Church to return the money thus contributed, and, in company with George Thompson, Frederick Douglass, Henry C. Wright and others, agitated the question throughout Scotland. Convinced that the constitutional compact of the North with the South to guard and protect slavery was immoral and unjust, in 1843 Mr. Garrison raised the banner of No Union with Slave-Holders, and advocated the dissolution of the Union for the sake of freedom, a step which added fresh fuel to the flames of persecution and incurred the loss of many lukewarm adherents. In 1850, the apostasy of Daniel Webster and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law increased the national ferment. The same year witnessed the famous Rynder's mob, in New York, and the anti-slavery meeting at the Tabernacle, at which Mr. Garrison spoke, was violently broken up. The abolition movement had now assumed formidable proportions, dominating the national parties and dictating issues. The Whig party fell to pieces in consequence, and to it succeeded the Republican party, with Sumner, Seward, Wilson, Giddings, and other earnest men as leaders. Meanwhile Harriet Beecher Stowe, by her famous novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," had given a vivid picture of the wrongs of American slavery to the world. The "irrepressible conflict" was now rapidly tending to its crisis, and, on the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency by the Republican party, in 1860, the signal for civil war was given, and, in 1861, the struggle of arms inaugurated by the attack on Fort Sumter replaced the peaceful crusade of the abolitionists. The moral agitation of thirty years had produced its legitimate results, and when, in 1863, the President promulgated the emancipation proclamation the anti-slavery chapter was closed. The Union, which heretofore had been paramount to liberty, was now subordinated to it, and Mr. Garrison's antagonism necessarily ceased with the new amendment to the Constitution. He had been accustomed to denounce that instrument as a "covenant with death and an agreement with hell," but, as he expressed it, he had "never expected to see Death and Hell secede." Foreseeing the inevitable consequence of the war, he gave heartily his moral support to the Government in the struggle between it and the slave power. His non-resistance principles and abhorrence of war in no way diminished his interest in the great conflict, and his sympathies of necessity were with the soldiers of freedom. His eldest son, George Thompson Garrison, not sharing his father's scruples, enlisted in the Fifty-fifth Colored Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, attaining the rank of captain.