, 1836, after a fierce struggle in the House, it was decided to
lay upon the table without debate all petitions which dealt with
slavery. The right of petition was thus formally denied, since a hearing
is the one thing prayed for in such documents. John Quincy Adams
declared that the rights of his constituents, as guaranteed in the
Constitution, were thus abrogated. On the other hand, Calhoun declared
in the Senate, with equal truth, that the constitutional rights of his
constituents would be jeopardized if the petitions were received and
debated. Great excitement prevailed throughout the country, for the
contending sections were too strong for any easy-going compromise to be
possible. Keen observers then visiting Washington wrote home that the
great Republic would go to pieces if either side won.

In the summer of 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered at Alton,
Illinois, where he was trying to publish, against the wishes of the
people, an anti-slavery weekly like Garrison's. And in Boston the
following December a young aristocrat, a Harvard graduate and a
promising lawyer, arose before a large audience, before whom the
Attorney-General of the State had just been defending the Alton people
against attack, and declared that the "earth should have yawned and
swallowed up" the author of such treasonable words. It was Wendell
Phillips, and from that day till the close of the bitter sectional
struggle, he was the greatest champion of immediate abolition, the
fervent orator who was ready to destroy the Union in order to destroy
slavery. Four years after Phillips began his public career, Frederick
Douglass, escaping from a slave plantation in Maryland, came into
contact with Garrison, who at once commissioned him an orator of
abolition, and the brilliant mulatto soon developed powers that gave
rise to jealous heartburnings among the leading agitators. Lewis Tappan,
Gerrit Smith, the Misses Grimke, born in South Carolina, and a host of
other enthusiastic democrats and idealists professed the new faith.
Contemptuous of Church and State, of union and nationality, these
apostles of the new cause laid the foundations of the great sectional
party which was later to bear the name Republican, thus appealing to
the memories of Jefferson and his followers of 1800.

It was this hostility of the sections, always dangerous, but exceedingly
so in 1836, when Texas was asking admission as a slave State, that
caused so many of the best men of