378 THE LIBERTY FANATICS. 



of no compromise ; they cared little for the country itself 

 so long as it was stained. They denounced the consti- 

 tution as a covenant with death, and an agreement 

 with hell. No union with slaveholders ! they cried. 

 No union with midnight robbers and assassins ! 

 Hitherto the war between the two great sections of 

 the country had been confined to politicians. The 

 Southerners had sent their boys to Northern colleges 

 and schools. Attended by a retinue of slaves they had 

 passed the summer at Saratoga or Newport, and some- 

 times the winter at New York. But now their sons 

 were insulted, their slaves decoyed from them by these 

 new fanatics ; and the South went North no more. 

 Abolition societies were everywhere formed, and envoys 

 were sent into the slave states to distribute abolition 

 tracts and to publish abolition journals, and to excite, 

 if they could, a St Domingo insurrection. The North- 

 erners were shocked at these proceedings and protested 

 angrily against them. But soon there was a revulsion 

 of feeling in their minds. The wild beast temper arose 

 in the South, and went forth lynching all it met. 

 Northerners were flogged and even killed. Negroes 

 were burnt alive. And so the meetings of abolitionists 

 were no longer interrupted at the North; mayors and 

 select-men no longer refused them the use of public 

 halls. The sentiment of abolition was however not 

 yet widely spread. There were few Northerners who 

 preferred to give up the Union rather than live 

 under a piebald constitution, or who considered it just 

 to break a solemn compact in obedience to an abstract 

 law. But there now rose a strong and resolute party 

 who declared that slavery might stay where it was, but 

 that it must go no farther. The South must be con- 

 tent with what it had. Not another yard of slave soil 



