“ For general talk about the evils of slavery they cared little, but this assertion that every slave was entitled to instant freedom filled them with alarm and roused them to anger, for they saw that, if the conscience of the nation were to respond to the proposition, the system must inevitably fall. The Genius, now that it had become a vehicle for this dangerous doctrine, was a paper to be feared and intensely hated. Baltimore was then one of the centres of the domestic slave trade, and upon this traffic Garrison heaped the strongest denunciations. ”

“ Slavery must be overthrown, if not by peaceful means, then in blood. The first society organized under Garrison’s auspices, and in accordance with his principles, was the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which adopted its constitution in January 1832. In the spring of this year Garrison issued his Thoughts on African Colonization, in which he showed by ample citations from official documents that the American Colonization Society was organized in the interest of slavery, and that in offering itself to the people of the North as a practical remedy for that system it was guilty of deception. ”

“ But the paper founded under such inauspicious circumstances exerted a mighty influence, and lived to record not only President Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation, but the adoption of an amendment to the constitution of the United States for ever prohibiting slavery. It was the beginning and the nucleus of an agitation that eventually pervaded and filled every part of the country. Other newspapers were afterwards established upon the same principles; anti-slavery societies, founded upon the doctrine of immediate emancipation, sprang up on every hand ”