The moral landscape and geography of the community had sensibly
changed at its close. The full extent of the alteration wrought could
not at once be seen, nor was it at once felt. But that there were deep
and abiding changes made by it in the court of public opinion in Boston
and Massachusetts on the subject of slavery there is little doubt. It
disgusted and alarmed many individuals who had hitherto acted in unison
with the social, business, and political elements, which were at the
bottom of the riot. Francis Jackson, for instance, had been one of the
fifteen hundred signers of the call for the great Faneuil Hall meeting
of the 21st of August. But on the afternoon of the 21st of October he
threw his house open to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, after
its meeting had been broken up by the mob. It seemed to him then that it
was no longer a mere struggle for the freedom of the slave, but for the
right of free speech and free discussion as well. Dr. Henry I. Bowditch,
a young man, in 1835, eminent professor and physician subsequently,
dates from that afternoon of mob violence his conversion to
Abolitionism. In that selfsame hour seeds of resistance to slavery were
sown in two minds of the first order in the city and State. Wendell
Phillips was a spectator in the streets that day, and the father of
Charles Sumner, the sheriff at the time, fought bravely to save Garrison
from falling into the hands of the mob.
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