William Lloyd Garrison, the AbolitionistGrimké, Archibald Henry
History
William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist
Grimké, Archibald Henry
Garrison, William Lloyd, 1805-1879
The results of the storm became immediately manifest in several ways.
Such a commotion did not leave things in precisely the state in which
they were on the morning of the memorable day on which it struck the
city. The moral landscape and geography of the community had sensibly
changed at its close. The full extent of the alteration wrought could
not at once be seen, nor was it at once felt. But that there were deep
and abiding changes made by it in the court of public opinion in Boston
and Massachusetts on the subject of slavery there is little doubt. It
disgusted and alarmed many individuals who had hitherto acted in unison
with the social, business, and political elements, which were at the
bottom of the riot. Francis Jackson, for instance, had been one of the
fifteen hundred signers of the call for the great Faneuil Hall meeting
of the 21st of August. But on the afternoon of the 21st of October he
threw his house open to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, after
its meeting had been broken up by the mob. It seemed to him then that it
was no longer a mere struggle for the freedom of the slave, but for the
right of free speech and free discussion as well. Dr. Henry I. Bowditch,
a young man, in 1835, eminent professor and physician subsequently,
dates from that afternoon of mob violence his conversion to
Abolitionism. In that selfsame hour seeds of resistance to slavery were
sown in two minds of the first order in the city and State. Wendell
Phillips was a spectator in the streets that day, and the father of
Charles Sumner, the sheriff at the time, fought bravely to save Garrison
from falling into the hands of the mob. The great riot gave those young
men their first summons to enter the service of freedom. It was not long
afterward probably that they both began to read the _Liberator_. From
that event many intelligent and conservative people associated slavery
with lynch law and outrage upon the rights of free speech and popular
assembly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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