For the movement against slavery was now rising,
with all the advance of a tidal wave and a mighty storm.

The public excitement was greatly increased by the Fugitive Slave
legislation of 1850 and 1854. Many Northern men who were opposed to
slavery in the North condoned slavery in the South. Just as Demetrius
urged that by the making of images of Diana "we have our gain," so timid
capital in the North bowed like a suitor at the feet of the imperial
South, and advised silence, remembering that through the money of
Southern planters it had its livelihood. Wendell Phillips went up and
down the land stirring up opinion against the law. He spoke three
hundred times in one year and two hundred and seventy-five times in
another year. Phillips rose upon the opposition like a war eagle
against an advancing storm. Brave men defied the law, organized the
Underground Railroad, and in every way possible defeated the purpose of
the Fugitive Slave Law. So in 1854 when Senator Douglas engineered
through Congress the famous Kansas-Nebraska Bill, repealing the Missouri
Compromise, the North refused to accept what was so palpably pro-slavery
legislation. This was revolutionary. Instantly the North divided into
two camps. The one question of the hour was "Shall a fugitive slave be
furnished with weapons with which to defend his person, and has he the
right of self-defense?" The whole land became a debating society, and
heaved with excitement, like the heaving of an earthquake. The merchant
pointed to his ledger, and urged caution. But liberty was stronger than
the ledger, and the heaving emotion burst through the statutes and rent
the laws asunder. Soon the Fugitive Slave Law, had become a dead letter.
The South had gone one step too far. Abolition stood suddenly in a new
light; "More abolitionists had been made by this single piece of hostile
legislation," said Greeley, "than Garrison and Phillips could have made
in half a century."

For thirty years Wendell Phillips was the crowned king of the lecture
platform. It was the golden age of the lyceum. Men had more leisure than
to-day. Our era of the drama, music, and travel pictures had not yet
come. The winter nights were long, books few, magazines had not yet
developed, and the people were hungry for instruction and eloquence.
Wendell Phillips achieved the astonishing feat of speaking three hundred
times a year. Eloquence is born of a great theme like the woes and
wrongs of three million