The most active partisan of the slave-holders was the politician who knew they had votes in Congress and in the electoral college for all the whites in the South and also for three-fifths of the coloured people. The views of the Democratic party about the tariff, the bank, and State rights had made it in 1832 victorious everywhere south of Maryland and Kentucky; and its preponderance in the cotton States, as well as in Virginia, enabled it long to resist the growing disaffection at the North. The Whigs went far enough in the same course for their own destruction; and the principle of individual liberty found few champions. VII. Politicians and merchants worked together in getting up the series of mobs against abolitionists, which began in 1833, under the lead of a Methodist bishop in New York, and kept breaking out in that city, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Boston, and less important places, until they culminated in the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. After that year, they were neither frequent nor violent. The worst crime of the rioters was murdering a clergyman named Lovejoy in 1837 for trying to save his printing-press. Most of the Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian preachers and editors were now doing what they could to suppress the agitation; but the riots called out no indignation like that which had poured forth from all the churches in 1828 against Sunday mails. There was little freedom of speech for unpopular opinions in America in 1835, when Channing declared that the mob against Garrison had made abolitionism "the cause of Freedom." There were many readers, even in the South, for the little book in which he insisted that "Slavery ought to be discussed." He protested against depriving the slave of his right to improve and respect himself, and vindicated "the sacredness of individual man." He was the first to appeal from the Fugitive Slave Law to that "everlasting and immutable rule of right revealed in conscience." And few other clergymen gave such help to John Quincy Adams, who was then asserting the right of petition and of discussion in Congress. Memorials with a hundred and fifty thousand signatures had been presented against the annexation of Texas, and in favour of emancipation in the District of Columbia, when it was voted by all the Southern Representatives, as well as by the Northern Democrats, in January, 1837, that all petitions relating to slavery "shall be laid on the table and no action taken thereon." The ex-President, who was then a Representative from Massachusetts, protested indignantly, as did other Whigs, and they continued to plead for the constitutional rights of the North until 1844, when the gag-rule was abolished. On July 4, 1837, Adams told the people that "Freedom of speech is the only safety-valve which, under the high pressure of slavery, can preserve your political boiler from a fearful explosion." The number of names, including many