Outside of religion
there was no force so strong at the North as the reverence for the
Constitution; it was significant of the growth of individualism, as well
as of the anti-slavery sentiment, that Garrison could safely begin his
work with the declaration that the Constitution itself was "a league
with death and a covenant with hell."
The Garrisonian programme would undoubtedly have been considered highly
objectionable by the South, even under to comparatively colorless
slavery policy of 1790. Under the conditions to which cotton culture had
advanced in 1830, it seemed to the South nothing less than a proposal to
destroy, root and branch, the whole industry of that section, and it was
received with corresponding indignation. Garrisonian abolitionists were
taken and regarded as public enemies, and rewards were even offered for
their capture. The germ of abolitionism in the Border States found a new
and aggressive public sentiment arrayed against it; and an attempt
to introduce gradual abolition in Virginia in 1832-33 was hopelessly
defeated.
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