[WITHROW] THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY 55 
William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most famous of the aboli- 
tionists, was born in Newburyport, Mass., of New Brunswick parentage. 
In Baltimore and Washington he came in contact with slavery and 
wrote so vehemently against it that he was tried, imprisoned and 
amerced in a fine of $1,000. In 1831 he issued the first number of 
“The Liberator,” in which, for five and thirty years, he continued 
to plead the cause of the slave. He adopted as his motto “ My 
country is the world, my countrymen are all mankind,” and stoutly 
affirmed “I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat 
a single inch, and I will be heard.” These prophetic words are 
engraved upon his monument in the city of Boston, through whose 
streets he was dragged by a mob and committed to prison to save his 
life. When he visited England Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton was amazed 
to find him a white man, having taken it for granted that no one could 
plead so eloquently against slavery unless he had himself been a slave. 
He procured the aid of George Thompson, the eloquent English aboli- 
tionist, who earnestly pleaded the cause of the oppressed in the chief 
cities of the northern States and Canada.* 
A noble band of women became leaders in the anti-slavery reform 
at a time when public opinion forbade public speaking to their sex. 
Mrs. Chapman, Mrs. Child, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelley and others 
bravely bore this reproach and addressed public audiences when stones 
and brickbats crashed through the windows. For admitting free col- 
oured girls to her school at Canterbury, Conn., Miss Prudence Crandall, 
a Quaker lady, was treated with contumely and malice. She was 
boycotted, to use the phrase of a later day, even by the doctor who 
refused to visit the sick in her school, and lived as in a besieged gar- 
rison. She was thrown into a prison cell from which a murderer 
had just been taken for execution. Her school was fired and well 
nigh wrecked and was finally closed by violence. 
Wendell Phillips, a man of the bluest blood of Boston, a member 
of its Brahmin caste, son of the first mayor of that city, espoused 
the cause of the hated abolitionists. He shared their persecutions 
and witnessed their triumphs. Channing, Quincey and other heroes 
of reform soon joined the ranks. 
Intense opposition was offered the new propaganda, anti- 
abolitionist riots took place in several northern cities. In New York 
the house of Mr. Louis Tappan was sacked and the furniture burned. 
In Philadelphia the anti-slavery hall was burned as was also an asylum 
for coloured children. The Hon. J. C. Burney, solicitor of Alabama, 


1 After thirty-five years’ ceaseless effort the work to which ‘‘The Libera- 
tor’’ was devoted was accomplished, and Garrison, an invited guest, saw the 
flag of the emancipated Union raised upon the battlements of Fort Sumter. 
