" He could not hold his peace in the midst of
such abominations, but boldly exposed and denounced them. His
indignation grew hot when he saw that Northern vessels were largely
engaged in the coastwise slave-trade; and when, to his amazement, he
learned that the ship _Francis_, owned by Francis Todd, a Newburyport
merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves,
his indignation burst into blaze. He blazoned the act and the name of
Francis Todd in the _Genius_, and did verily what he had resolved to do,
viz., "to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this
nefarious business," the captain as well as the owner of the
ill-freighted ship. He did literally point at these men the finger of
scorn. Every device known to the printer's art for concentrating the
reader's attention upon particular words and sentences, Garrison made
skillful use of in his articles--from the deep damnation of the heavy
black capitals in which he printed the name Francis Todd, to the small
caps in which appeared the words, "sentenced to solitary confinement for
life," and which he flanked with two terrible indices. But the articles
did not need such embellishment. They were red hot branding irons
without them. One can almost smell the odor of burning flesh as he reads
the words: "It is no worse to fit out piratical cruisers or to engage in
the foreign slave-trade, than to pursue a similar trade along our coast;
and the men who have the wickedness to participate therein, for the
purpose of keeping up wealth should be ==>SENTENCED TO SOLITARY
CONFINEMENT FOR LIFE; <==_they are the enemies of their own
species--highway robbers, and murderers_; and their final doom will be,
unless they speedily repent, _to occupy the lowest depths of perdition_.
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