Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

This was all the harder to bear because the Southampton insurrection had not produced for the Colonization Society precisely the fruits which it anticipated. The year opened (amid the gratifying enactment of panic legislation in both sections concerning the colored population, bond and free) with its annual meeting in Washington, at which letters were read from Marshall and Madison, and speeches made by Edward Everett— ‘the same benevolent gentleman who, a few years since,¹ declared on the floor of Congress that, in the event of a negro rebellion at the South, he would promptly put on his knapsack and shoulder his musket to put the slaves down’; and by the Rev. Leonard Bacon, of New Haven, whose theme was ‘the strictly benevolent character of the Society,’ and who had already elsewhere publicly pledged the Vermont and Connecticut militia to the same noble mission which Mr. Everett assumed for himself.² Clarkson, now almost blind, was reported to have listened with³ enthusiastic delight to the details of the Society's operations as related by Elliott Cresson, its Quaker travelling agent in England. In April, a memorial purporting to come from its British membership, and supported and forwarded by the same Cresson, asking national aid for the Society, was presented in the House of ⁴ Representatives; but in this the Society overreached itself. Polk, of Tennessee, denounced it as the first foreign effort to⁵ intermeddle with the subject of slavery in Congress, and as an act of impertinence; and its reading was opposed by all the Southern members except General Blair, of South Carolina, who professed entire indifference. ‘A disposition to tamper with the slave question had been ’