But, on the surface, it was so entirely a struggle for the
balance of power between the two sections, that it has not seemed worth
while to introduce any of the few reported speeches of the time. The
topic is more fully and fairly discussed in the subsequent debates on
the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
In 1830 William Lloyd Garrison, a Boston printer, opened the real
anti-slavery struggle. Up to this time the anti-slavery sentiment, North
and South, had been content with the notion of "gradual abolition,"
with the hope that the South would, in some yet unsuspected manner,
be brought to the Northern policy. This had been supplemented, to some
extent, by the colonization society for colonizing negroes on the west
coast of Africa; which had two aspects: at the South it was the means of
ridding the country of the free negro population; at the North it was a
means of mitigating, perhaps of gradually abolishing, slavery. Garrison,
through his newspaper, the Liberator, called for "immediate abolition"
of slavery, for the conversion of anti-slavery sentiment into
anti-slavery purpose.
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