From beyond came movements and voices even more destructive of the
spirit of free discussion and which lent to the reactionary elements
in the state an advantage which they could never have acquired except
for this outside interference.
As far back as 1835 John Quincy Adams noted in his diary:
"Anti-slavery associations are formed in this country and in England
and they are already co-operating in concerted agency together. They
have raised funds to support and circulate inflammatory newspapers
and pamphlets gratuitously, and they send multitudes of them into
the Southern country into the midst of swarms of slaves."[255]
In the same year there assembled in Faneuil Hall what the biographers
of William Lloyd Garrison called "the social, political, religious and
intellectual elite of Boston," who, under the leadership of Theodore
Lyman, Jr., Abbott Lawrence, Peleg Sprague, and Harrison Gray Otis
adopted resolutions denouncing the Northern Abolitionists for seeking
by their inflammatory publications "to scatter among our Southern
brethren fire-brands, arrows, and death," and pledging the meeting to
support all constitutional laws for the suppression of all
publications, "the natural and direct tendency of which is to incite
the slaves of the South to revolt."[256]
Margaret Mercer, of Maryland, whose devotion to the cause of negro
emancipation was well attested by her act in manumitting her own
slaves, as well as in her life of service devoted largely to their
interests, writing to Gerrit Smith, laments the incendiary appeals of
William Lloyd Garrison and the direful forebodings which they aroused
among the Southern people especially in the imaginations of the women.
She says:
"For while the well-disposed and faithful servants of kind masters
will suffer and die with the whites in a general insurrection, the
lawless and vicious will have in their power to massacre men, women
and children in their sleep. This is my apology for feeling and
expressing the deepest indignation against the man who dares to
throw the fire-brand into the powder magazine while all are asleep
and stands himself at a distance to see the mangled victims of his
barbarous fury. I pray you, dear sir, in the strength of your
benevolence to conceive the state of families living remote from
assistance in the country. Suppose, as I have often witnessed, an
alarm of insurrection; think of the mother of a family startled from
her sleep by some unusual noise and seized with a horrid
apprehension of the scene which may await her in a few
moments."[257]