ht to puncture the
Southern panic. But the slaveholders had correcter notions of the nature
and tendency of the Abolition enterprise than had the Boston mayor. They
had a strange, an obstinate presentiment of disaster from the first
instant that the _Liberator_ loomed upon their horizon. It was a battery
whose guns, unless silenced, would play havoc with Southern interests
and the slave system; _ergo_, the paper must be suppressed; _ergo_, its
editor must be silenced or destroyed. And so when Otis, from his serene
height, assured them of his "belief that the new fanaticism had not
made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes
of our people," they continued to listen to their fears, and to cry the
louder for the suppression of the "incendiary newspaper published in
Boston."

The editor of that paper never flinched before the storm of malignity
which was gathering about his head. He pursued the even tenor of his
way, laboring at the case more than fourteen hours every day, except
Sundays, upon the paper, renewing, week after week, his assaults upon
the citadel of the great iniquity, giving no quarter to slave-holding
sinners, but carrying aloft the banner of IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL
EMANCIPATION. Otis had looked to numbers and respectability as his
political barometer and cue; but when, after diligent search with
official microscopes, he failed to observe the presence of either in
connection with this "new fanaticism," wise man that he was, he turned
over and renewed his slumbers on the edge of a volcano whose ominous
rumbling the Southern heart had heard and interpreted aright. He was too
near to catch the true import of the detonations of those subterranean
forces which were sounding, week after week, in the columns of the
_Liberator_. They seemed trivial, harmless, contemptible, like the toy
artillery of children bombarding Fort Independence. Garrison's moral
earnestness and enthusiasm seemed to the Boston mayor like the impotent
rage of a man nursing memories of personal injuries suffered at the
South.

If there was panic in the South, there was none in the office of the
_Liberator_. Unterrified by the commotion which his composing-stick was
producing near and far, he laughed to scorn the abuse and threats of his
enemies. When the news of the reward of the State of Georgia "for the
abduction of his person" reached him, he did not quail, great as was his
peril, but boldly replied:

"Of o