There is no other way of fixing in laws
the changes in public sentiment wrought during this period of agitation.
The idea of political action was therefore a perfectly natural growth
from the moral movement against slavery. The only reasonable objection
to it would be one which went to show that it had arrived out of due
course, that its appearance at any given time was marked by prematurity
in respect of the reasons, so to speak, of the reform. For every
movement against a great social wrong as was the anti-slavery movement
must have its John-the-Baptist stage, its period of popular awakening to
the nature and enormity of sin and the duty of immediate repentance.
The anti-slavery enterprise was at the time of the controversy between
the New York and the Boston Boards in this first stage of its growth. It
had not yet progressed naturally out of it into its next phase of
political agitation. True there were tendencies more or less strong to
enter the second stage of its development, but they seem irregular,
personal, and forced. The time had not come for the adoption of the
principle of associated political action against slavery. But the deep
underlying motive of the advocates of the third-party idea was none the
less a grand one, viz., "to have a free Northern nucleus," as Elizur
Wright put it, "a standard flung to the breeze--something around which
to rally." Garrison probed to the quick the question in a passage of an
address to the Abolitionists, which is here given: "Abolitionists! you
are now feared and respected by all political parties, not because of
the number of votes you can throw, so much as in view of the moral
integrity and sacred regard to principle which you have exhibited to the
country.
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