wspapers as
the _National Intelligencer,_ and the Boston _Courier_ suggested
amendments to the laws whereby the publication of incendiary writings in
the free States might be prohibited. The latter journal allowed that
under the criminal code of Massachusetts "every man has a right to
advocate Abolition, or conspiracy, or murder; for he may do all these
without breaking our laws, although in any Southern State public justice
and public safety would require his punishment." "But," the editor goes
on to remark, "if we have no laws upon the subject, it is because the
exigency was not anticipated.... Penal statutes against treasonable and
seditious publications are necessary in all communities. We have them
for our own protection; if they should include provisions for the
protection of our neighbors it would be no additional encroachment upon
the liberty of the press." The Governors of Virginia and Georgia
remonstrated with Harrison Gray Otis, who was Mayor of Boston in the
memorable year of 1831, "against an incendiary newspaper published in
Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations,
inciting to insurrection and its horrid results." As a lawyer Mayor
Otis, however, "perceived the intrinsic, if not insuperable obstacles to
legislative enactments made to prevent crimes from being consummated
beyond the local jurisdiction." But the South was not seeking a legal
opinion as to what it could or could not do. It demanded, legal or
illegal, that Garrison and the _Liberator_ be suppressed. To the Boston
mayor the excitement over the editor and his paper seemed like much ado
about nothing. The cause appeared to his supercilious mind altogether
inadequate to the effect. And so he set to work to reduce the panic by
exposing the vulgarity and insignificance of the object, which produced
it. That he might give the Southern bugaboo its _quietus_, he directed
one of his deputies to inquire into a publication, of which "no member
of the city government, nor any person," of his honor's acquaintance,
"had ever heard." The result of this inquiry Mayor Otis reported to the
Southern functionaries.

"Some time afterward," he wrote, "it was reported to me by the city
officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his
office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and
his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors."

With this bare bodkin Harrison Gray Otis thoug