The first most serious opposition from any minister I myself directly encountered was in the pleasant town of Taunton. I went thither on the 15th of April, 1835, and had a very successful meeting in the Town Hall, which was filled full with respectable persons of both sexes. So much interest in the subject was awakened that a large number on the spot signified their readiness to co-operate with those who were laboring to procure the abolition of American slavery. To my surprise, the most prominent minister in the town, a learned and liberal theologian, and a gentleman of unexceptionable private character, took the utmost pains to prevent the formation of an auxiliary antislavery society there. He declared that “the slaves were the property of their masters,” that “we of the North had no more right to disturb this _domestic arrangement_ of our Southern brethren, and prevent the prosecution of their industrial operations, than the planters had to interfere with our manufactures and commerce.” He dealt out to the Abolitionists no small number of opprobrious epithets; charged us with being the cause of the New York mobs of October, 1834, and insisted that, if we “were permitted to prosecute our measures, it would inevitably dissolve the Union and cause a civil war.” This was the substance of the _verbal_ opposition that we met with everywhere throughout the Northern, Middle, and Western States; strengthened by the arguments of the civilians and statesmen, intended to show that the enslavement of the colored population of certain States was settled by the _founders_ of our Republic, who made several compromises in relation to it, and gave sundry guarantees to the slaveholders which must be held sacred. Many timid persons everywhere, by such assertions and appeals, were deterred from yielding to the convictions which the self-evident truths, urged by the Abolitionists, awakened. Still the cause of the oppressed made visible progress in all parts of the non-slaveholding States. Alarmed by this, the barons of the South, as Mr. Adams significantly styled them, stirred up their dependants and partisans to demand something more of their Northern brethren than denunciation and opprobrium against the Abolitionists. “They must be put down by law or _without law_, as the necessity of the case might require.” And the determination to do _just this_ was at length come to by “the gentlemen of property and standing” throughout the North, as the New York merchant, mentioned on the foregoing 127th page informed me.