n-resistant doctrine, it seemed that all the energy and belligerency
of the man went into the most tremendous verbal expressions. They were
like adamantine projectiles flung with the savage strength of a catapult
against the walls of slavery. The big sinners, like Webster and Clay, he
singled out for condign punishment, were objects of his utmost
severities of speech. It was thus that he essayed to breach the iron
dungeon in which the national iniquity had shut the national conscience.
Saturated was the reformer's mind with the thought of the Bible, its
solemn and awful imagery, its fiery and prophetic abhorrence and
denunciations of national sins, all of which furnished him an unfailing
magazine whence were drawn the bolts which he launched against the giant
sin and the giant sinners of his time. And so Clay had not only "one
foot in the grave," but was "just ready to have both body and soul cast
into hell."

While physical resistance of the Slave Law was wholly out of the
question with Garrison, he, nevertheless, refused to condemn the men
with whom it was otherwise. Here he was anything but a fanatic. All that
he required was that each should be consistent with his principles. If
those principles bade him resist the enforcement of the Black Bill, the
apostle of non-resistance was sorry enough, but in this emergency,
though he possessed the gentleness of the dove, he also practised the
wisdom of the serpent. That truth moves with men upon lower as well as
higher planes he well knew. It is always partial and many-colored,
refracted as it is through the prisms of human passion and prejudice. If
it appear unto some minds in the red bar of strife and blood, so be it.
Each must follow the light which it is given him to discern, whether the
blue of love or the red of war. Great coadjutors, like Wendell Phillips,
Theodore Parker, and Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, were for forcible resistance
to the execution of the law. So were the colored people. Preparations to
this end went on vigorously in Boston under the direction of the
Vigilance Committee. The Crafts escaped the clutches of the
slave-hunters, so did Shadrach escape them, but Sims and Burns fell into
them and were returned to bondage.

From this time on Wendell Phillips became in Boston and in the North
more distinctly the leader of the Abolition sentiment. The period of
pure moral agitation ended with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.
That act opened a new era in the