VI. The election of the first pro-slavery President, Jackson, in 1828, discouraged the abolitionists; and Lundy was obliged to suspend his paper for lack of subscribers early next year. When he resumed it in September, he took an assistant editor, who had declared on the previous Fourth of July, in a fashionable Boston church: "I acknowledge that immediate and complete emancipation is not desirable. No rational man cherishes so wild a vision." Before Garrison set foot on slave soil, it occurred to him that every slave had a right to instant freedom, and also that no master had any right to compensation. These two ideas he advocated at once, and ever after, as obstinately as George the Third insisted on the right to tax America. Garrison, of course, was a zealous philanthropist; and he was as conscientious as Paul was in persecuting the Christians. But he seems to have been more anxious to free his own conscience than to free the slaves. Immediate emancipation had been advocated in Lundy's paper at much length, and even as early as 1825, but so mildly as to call out little opposition. Insisting on no compensation was much more irritating; and Garrison's writings show that his mind was apt to free itself in bitter words, even against such men as Whittier, Channing, Longfellow, Douglass, and Sumner. He had been but three months in Baltimore when he published a censure by name of the owner and captain of one of the many vessels which were permitted by law to carry slaves South, as "highway robbers and murderers," who "should be sentenced to solitary confinement for life," and who deserved "to occupy the lowest depths of perdition." He was found guilty of libel, and imprisoned for seven weeks because he could not pay a moderate fine. The money was given by a generous New Yorker; but Garrison's work in the South was over, and Lundy's was of little value thenceforth. The man who brought the libel suit was an influential citizen of Massachusetts; and Boston pulpits were shut against Garrison on his return. He could not pay for a hall; but one was given him without cost by the anti-clerical society, whose leader, Abner Knee-land, was imprisoned thirty days in 1834 for a brief expression of atheism which would not now be considered blasphemous.