William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were the foremost leaders
of this great fellowship, and in no year of grace were their demands
more insistent and their assaults more aggressive than in the
troublous days immediately preceding the Civil War. Amid all appeals
for the maintenance of law and the preservation of peace might be
heard their voices like fire-bells at night, denouncing the Union and
the constitution and demanding the immediate abolition of slavery. But
by none of these things was Virginia moved to secession. As declared
by Henderson, the English military critic, "The wildest threats of the
'Black Republicans,' their loudly expressed determination in defiance
of the constitution, to abolish slavery, if necessary, by the bullet
and the sabre, shook in no degree whatever her loyalty to the
Union."[306]