. As the distress of the South increased, the belief that
Federal legislation was responsible for it increased likewise. The
spread and deepening of this conviction in the Southern States
precipitated among them an ominous crisis in their attachment to the
Union. Nullification and an embittered sectionalism was the hateful
legacy bequeathed to the republic by the tariff controversy. It left the
South in a hyper-sensitive state in all matters relating to her domestic
interests. It left the North in a hyper-sensitive condition on all
matters touching the peace and stability of the Union. The silence and
oblivion policy on the subject of slavery was renewed with tenfold
intensity. Ulysses-like the free States bound themselves, their right of
free speech, and their freedom of the press on this subject, for fear of
the Siren voices which came thrilling on every breeze from the South.
Quiet was the word, and quiet the leaders in Church and State sought to
enforce upon the people, to the end that the vision of "States
dissevered, discordant, belligerent, of a land rent with civil feuds, or
drenched it may be, in fraternal blood," might not come to pass for
their "glorious Union."

The increasing friction and heat between the sections during twenty-five
years, had effected every portion of the Federal system, and created
conditions favorable to a violent explosion. Sectional differences of a
political and industrial complexion, forty years had sufficed to
develop. Sectional differences of a moral and social character forty
years had also sufficed to generate. To kindle all those differences,
all that mass of combustible feelings and forces into a general
conflagration a spark only was wanted. And out of the glowing humanity
of one man the spark was suddenly struck.

It is curious to note that in the year 1829, the very year in which
William Lloyd Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began the editorship of
_The Genius of Universal Emancipation_, the American Convention, or
national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of
slavery, fell into desuetude. It was as if Providence was clearing the
debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his
prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility
of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage
of the nation, put into old bottles. The Hour for a new movement against
slavery had come, and with its arrival the