Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. III.djvu/243

 CHESTER ALAN ARTHUR 199 Mr. Smith s home in Peterborough, and there com pleted the organization. On the same day in Bos ton a women s anti-slavery society, while its pres ident was at prayer, was dispersed by a mob, and William Lloyd Garrison was dragged through the streets with a rope around his body, threatened with tar and feathers, and for his protection lodged in jail by the mayor. From these early associations Arthur naturally formed sentiments of hostility to slavery, and he first gave them public expression in the Lemmon slave case. In 1852 Jonathan Lemmon, a Virginia slave holder, determined to take eight of the slaves of his wife, Juliet one man, two women, and five chil dren to Texas, and brought them by steamer from Norfolk to New York, intending to re-ship them from New York to Texas. On the petition of Louis Napoleon, a free colored man, on November 6, a writ of habeas corpus was issued by Judge Elijah Paine, of the superior court of New York city, and after arguments by Mr. Culver and John Jay for the slaves, and H. D. Lapaugh and Henry L. Clinton for the slave-holder, Judge Paine, on November 13, released the slaves on the ground that they had been made free by being brought by their master into a free state. The decision created great excitement at the south, and the legislature of Virginia directed its attorney-general to appeal to the higher courts of New York. The legislature