All this in New England. Finally, the English missionary was driven out of the country, being in danger, as Garrison wrote, “of assassination even in the streets of Boston.”[76] Indeed, mobs were as frequent at that period in New England as they could have been in Virginia or South Carolina had the abolitionists attempted to preach their doctrines here. William Lloyd Garrison himself was assailed and denounced, and even in the city of Boston was subjected to the bitterest and most persistent persecution. He was notified to close up the office of his paper, The Liberator, under penalty of tar and feathers. A placard was circulated, stating that a purse of one hundred dollars had been raised to reward the first man who should lay hands on the “infamous foreign scoundrel Thompson,” so that he might be brought to the tar-kettle before dark.
Finally, Garrison himself was mobbed in Boston, torn out of the house in which was the office of the Anti-Slavery Society, where he was attending a meeting of women, dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around him, and but for the cleverness of two sensible men who got him into the City Hall he would have been killed. Even there he was in such peril that he was put in the jail to keep him from the mob, which came near getting possession of him a second time.
This mob was not, as may be supposed, a mob of the creatures who usually constitute such an assemblage, but is said to have been composed of respectable and well-dressed persons. Garrison, attacking the mayor afterward, in the press, for not taking his part more firmly, declared that if it had been a mob of workingmen assaulting a meeting of merchants, no doubt he would have acted with energy, “but broadcloth and money alter the case.”[77] Indeed, he says, the mayor acknowledged that “the city government did not very much disapprove of the mob to put down such agitators as Garrison and those like him.”[78]
It is notable that the entire press of Boston, with hardly more than one or two exceptions, approved the action of the mob and censured Garrison.
This is what Garrison himself said of it:
“1. The outrage was perpetrated in Boston, the cradle of liberty, the city of Hancock and Adams, the headquarters of refinement, literature, intelligence, and religion. No comments can add to the infamy of this fact.
“2. It was perpetrated in the open daylight of heaven, and was therefore most unblushing and daring in its features.”
“3. It was dastardly beyond precedent, as it was an assault of thousands upon a small body of helpless females. Charleston and New Orleans have never acted so brutally.
“4. It was planned and executed, not by the rabble or the workingmen, but by ‘gentlemen of property and standing, from all parts of the city’—and now (October 25th) that time has been afforded for reflection, it is still either openly justified or coldly disapproved by the ‘higher classes,’ and exultation among them is general throughout the city....”
“5. It is evidently winked at by the city authorities. No efforts have been made to arrest the leading rioters....”