e we at agreement," seemed to the American Isaiah to
describe exactly the character of the National Constitution. "Slavery is
a combination of DEATH and HELL," he declares, with righteous wrath,
"and with it the North have made a covenant, and are at agreement. As an
element of the Government it is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. As
a component part of the Union, it is necessarily a national interest.
Divorced from Northern protection, it dies; with that protection it
enlarges its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and extends its
ravages."

The announcement of this new radicalism caused a sensation. Many genuine
Garrisonian Abolitionists recoiled from a policy of disunion. Lydia
Maria Child and James S. Gibbon of the Executive Committee of the
National Society hastened to disavow for the society all responsibility
for the disunion sentiment of the editor of the _Liberator_. His new
departure seemed to them "foreign to the purpose for which it was
organized." Like all new ideas, it was a sword-bearer, and proved a
decided disturber of the peace. The Union-loving portion of the free
States had never taken to the Abolition movement, for the reason that it
tended to disturb the stability of their idol. But now the popular
hatred of Abolitionism was intensified by the avowal of a distinct
purpose on the part of its leader to labor for the separation of the
sections. The press of the North made the most of this design to render
altogether odious the small band of moral reformers, to reduce to a
nullity their influence upon public opinion.

Notwithstanding its rejection by James Gibbons and Lydia Maria Child the
new idea of the dissolution of the Union, as an anti-slavery object,
found instant favor with many of the leading Abolitionists, like Wendell
Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster and Abby
Kelley. At the anniversary meeting of the American Society in 1842, the
subject was mooted, and, although there was no official action taken,
yet it was apparent that a majority of the delegates were favorable to
its adoption as the sentiment of the society.

The ultimate object of Garrison was the abolition of slavery. Disunion
led directly to this goal, therefore he planted his feet in that way.
But while he shot the agitation at a distant mark, he did not mean to
miss less remote results. There was remarkable method in his madness. He
agitated the question of the dissolution of the Union "in order t