se his
voice against any union with Slaveholders. On the Fourth of July
following the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the reformer at
Framingham, Mass., gave a fresh and startling sign of his hatred of the
Union by burning publicly the Constitution of the United States. Before
doing so however, he consigned to the flames a copy of the _Fugitive
Slave Law_, next the decision of Judge Loring remanding Anthony Burns to
slavery, also the charge of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis to the Grand Jury
touching the assault upon the court-house for the rescue of Burns. Then
holding up the United States Constitution, he branded it as the source
and parent of all the other atrocities--a covenant with death and an
agreement with hell--and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming,
"So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say,
Amen!" This dramatic act and the "tremendous shout" which "went up to
heaven in ratification of the deed" from the assembled multitude, what
were they but the prophecy of a fiercer fire already burning in the
land, soon to blaze about the pillars of the Union, of a more tremendous
shout soon to burst with the wrath of a divided people over that

"perfidious bark
Built i' th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark."

CHAPTER XIX.

FACE TO FACE.

Face to face at last were freedom and slavery. The final struggle
between them for mastery had come. Narrow, indeed, was the issue that
divided the combatants, slavery extension on the one side, and slavery
restriction on the other, not total and immediate emancipation, but it
was none the less vital and supreme to the two enemies. Back of the
Southern demand for "More slave soil" stood a solid South, back of the
Northern position, "No more slave soil" was rallying a fast uniting
North. The political revolution, produced by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill,
advanced apace through the free States from Maine to Michigan. A
flood-tide of Northern resistance had suddenly risen against the
slave-power.

Higher than anywhere else rose this flood-tide in Massachusetts. The
judge who remanded Anthony Burns to slavery was removed from office, and
a Personal Liberty Law, with provisions as bold as they were thorough,
enacted for the protection of fugitive slaves. Mr. Garrison sat beside
the President of the State Senate when that body voted to remove Judge
Loring from his office. Such was Massachusetts's answer to the
abrogation of the Missour