Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill Mary Elizabeth Preston The antislavery conflict in the United States had four distinct stages, or periods. First came the period of moral agitation, in which Lundy, Garrison, and Phillips were most conspicuous. Then, about 1840, the question entered practical politics, and the new cause brought out great statesmen like Seward, Chase, and Sumner. Then came the revolutionary period, the struggle for Kansas, in which John Brown was the central figure; and finally the Civil War, with President Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation. With the first of these periods Mr. Stearns had no direct connection. To his practical mind the idea of abolishing slavery in America by moral persuasion seemed like a delusion. He perceived what Garrison and his friends did not, that the emancipation of the negroes in the British West Indies was a wholly different affair from what it would be in the United States. The British West Indies are isolated dependencies under the control of a distant government, and the slaveholders in those colonies had no voice in the jurisdiction that was exercised over them. Mr. Stearns was indignant enough at the mobbing of Garrison, but he saw that this was a natural consequence of the antislavery pamphlets which had been mailed to prominent slaveholders. Yet Garrison's positionof abstract right was the most unassailable he could have chosen, and made the most profound and lasting impression on the public mind. It is wonderful what efficacy abstract theories and Utopian ideas sometimes possess in the evolution of history. Mr. Stearns, however, with his keen sense of justice, believed that every man had a right to the fruits of his labor. It is probable that the murder of Lovejoy had more influence with him than the incisive arguments of Garrison or the poetic ...