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1829-35] Walker's Appeal. The Liberator. 387 The excitement produced by Walker's Appeal had not subsided when the danger of writings of this sort was brought home to the slave-owners by a rising of slaves in Virginia an outbreak known as "Nat Turner's Insurrection." It was quickly put down ; and every negro concerned in it, together with many who were not, was hanged, shot, mutilated, or beheaded. The insurrection was at once attributed to negro preachers and " incendiary publications " such as Walker's pamphlet and the Liberator, a newspaper recently started at Boston by William Lloyd Garrison. To attack the Liberator now became habitual in all Slave- holding States. The corporation of one city forbade any free negro to take a copy of it from the post-office. A vigilance committee in another offered $1500 for the detection and conviction of any white person found circulating copies. The governors of Georgia and Virginia called on the mayor of Boston to suppress it ; and the legislature of Georgia offered $5000 to any person who should secure the arrest and conviction of Garrison under the laws of the State. Undeterred by these attacks, Garrison gathered about him a little band of Abolitionists, and towards the close of 1831 founded at Boston the New England Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1833, at Philadelphia, the American Anti-Slavery Society. The mission of the Society was to labour for the abolition of slavery and the immediate emancipation of the slaves, and to carry on this work by organising societies, sending out orators, and enlisting the pulpit and the press, and by the circulation of anti-slavery books, pamphlets, newspapers, and pictures. The slave-holders, on their part, made loud demands that the Northern States should suppress the Abolitionists by force. They insisted that Abolitionist orators should be imprisoned, their presses stopped, the circulation of their tracts prevented. Nor was the North heedless of their demands. Mobs broke up Abolitionist meetings, de- stroyed their printing-offices, and threatened their leaders with death. In Connecticut and New Hampshire schools which received negroes were sacked. In Utica, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, disgraceful attacks were made on anti-slavery meetings. In Cincinnati the presses of an anti-slavery newspaper edited by James G. Birney were destroyed. Throughout the North friends of the South held meetings and con- demned the proceedings of the Abolitionists. Yet the agitation went on with renewed energy ; and the flood of anti-slavery tracts that poured over the South became greater than ever. Then a bold step was taken, and one night the post-office at Charleston was entered by a mob, and sacks of anti-slavery literature, which had come from New York by steamer and which the postmaster refused to deliver, were burned in the public square. The Postmaster-General approved this act; and Jackson, in his annual message (December, 1835), asked for a law "prohibiting under severe penalties the circulation in the Southern States, through the mails, of incendiary publications intended to CB. xn. 25 2