In an earlier issue, after denouncing slavery as a "damning crime," the editor said: "Therefore my efforts shall be directed to the exposure of those who practise it."
The substance of Garrison's teachings was that slavery, anywhere in the United States, was the concern of all, and that it was to be put down by making not only slavery but also the slave-holder odious. And, further, it was the slave, not the slave-owner, who was entitled to compensation.
Thus the distinctive features of the new crusade were to be warfare upon the personal character of every slave-holder and the confiscation of his property. It was, too, the beginning of that sectional war by people of the North against the existence of slavery in the South, which, as we have seen, was deprecated by Dr. Channing in his letter three years before to Mr. Webster.
The new sect began by assailing slavery in States other than their own, and very soon they were openly denouncing the Constitution of their country because under it slavery in those sections was none of their business; and of course they repudiated the Missouri Compromise absolutely, the essence of that compromise being that slavery was the business of the States in which it existed.
It was a part of their scheme to send circulars depicting the evils of slavery broadcast through the South; and they were sent especially to the free negroes of that section.
"In 1820," says Dr. Hart in his "Slavery and Abolition," "at Charleston (South Carolina), Denmark Vesey, a free negro, made an elaborate plot to rise, massacre the white population, seize the shipping in the harbor, and, if hard pressed, to sail away to the West Indies. One of the negroes gave evidence, Vesey was seized, duly tried, and with thirty-four others was hanged."[24]
This plot, so nearly successful, was fresh in the minds of Southerners when the Abolitionists began their programme, and naturally, the South at once took the alarm—an alarm that was increased by the massacre, in the Nat Turner insurrection, of sixty-one men, women, and children, which took place in Virginia seven months after the first issue of The Liberator. One of Turner's lieutenants is stated to have been a free negro. This insurrection the South attributed to The Liberator. Professor Hart says a free negro named Walker had previously sent out to the South, from Boston, a pamphlet, "the tone of which was unmistakable," and that "this pamphlet is known to have reached Virginia, and may possibly have influenced the Nat Turner insurrection."[25]
If this surmise be correct, knowledge that Walker, a free negro, had been responsible for the Turner insurrection, would have lessened neither the guilt of the Abolitionists nor the fears of the Southerners.
But in 1832 Abolition agitation and the fears of insurrection had not as yet entirely stifled the discussion of slavery in the South. A debate on slavery took place that year in the Virginia Assembly, the immediate cause of which was no doubt the Turner insurrection. The members of that body had not been elected on any issue of that character. The discussion thus precipitated shows, therefore, the state of public opinion in Virginia on slavery. Of this debate a distinguished Northern writer says:[26]
"In the year 1832 there was, nowhere in the world, a more enlightened sense of the wrong and evil of slavery than there was among the public men and people of Virginia."