Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/81

Rh “heard the wail of the captive;” then William Lloyd Garrison, a young printer and editor from Massachusetts, who was moved by Lundy's words, and put into his work the fierce energy of a fiery spirit revolting against a great wrong. With these came a host of men equally devoted. They taught that not only the slave-holders, but the people of the Free States too, — in fact, all the citizens of this Republic, — were responsible for the “crime of slavery;” and Garrison went so far as to insist that, not the colonization of free negroes, nor the gradual emancipation of the slaves, but the unconditional and immediate abolition of slavery was the duty enjoined by moral law upon all righteous men.

Such was the faith professed by the abolitionists who in 1831 began to organize the New England Anti-slavery Society, and started a movement which presently spread over the Free States. Their principles and aims were most clearly put forth by the National Anti-slavery Convention held at Philadelphia in December, 1833. It declared that the American people were bound to “repent at once,” to let the slaves go free, and to admit them to an equality of rights with all others; that there was, in point of principle, no difference between slave-holding and man-stealing; that no compensation should be given to slave-holders emancipating their slaves, because what they claimed as property was really not property, and because, if any compensation were to be given at all, it belonged justly to the slaves. They admitted that Congress had no con-