We find the same disregard of law when we come to the Abolitionists and the antislavery agitation. The episodes in connection with this, such as the murder of Lovejoy in Illinois, the mobs threatening Garrison at Utica, Boston, and elsewhere, the destruction of printing plants and newspaper offices, are almost too well known to call for repetition. Even Connecticut, “the land of steady habits,” was not immune. In Philadelphia a pro-slavery mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, dedicated to Free Speech. We could multiply instances indefinitely, but need only say that violence was the order of the day. Lincoln complained that law and order had broken down, that “wild and furious passions” were substituted for “the sober judgments of the courts,” that “outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times” and that they were “common to the whole country.” The passage of the new Fugitive Slave law brought more[Pg 113] lawlessness. Calhoun had rightly stated in the Senate that it was “impossible to execute any law of Congress until the people of the states shall cöoperate”—a clear statement that Prohibitionists would have done well to remember. Everywhere in the North the law was not merely disobeyed but bloodily denounced. In New York, for example, it was declared that “instant death ... without judge or jury” should await anyone who attempted to enforce it. The New York Tribune declared that it would be better to blow up the Capitol at Washington than to allow the law to be passed in it. Throughout the states, in the decade preceding the Civil War, there was an utter disregard of law in the sense that people obeyed such national laws as they chose to and used violence to defeat those they were opposed to. In the North the Fugitive Slave law was the one specially attacked. In the South the mails were interfered with and free speech was suppressed. A Northern antislavery man could not enter the Southern states without danger to his life. Sums of five thousand dollars and upward were offered for the kidnapping of prominent speakers on the subject of slavery. In Kansas the struggle between those who wished to have the state enter the Union as free and those who wished it slave resulted in such constant violence as to give the state the name of “bleeding Kansas,” though Professor Channing finds that probably only two hundred people were killed—killed, it must be remembered, however, in time of peace. To detail all the acts of violence throughout the country in the decades before the war would be impossible here. The total effect, however, would be to picture a nation in which passion had usurped the place of law. The riots which occurred after war was declared may be[Pg 114] partially discarded for our purpose, though they probably would not have occurred in a country in which the people had an ingrained sense of law. The worst one in New York, in 1863, lasted four days and resulted in the destruction of