Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

[8] no further attempt to hold their meetings, but adjourned sine die, well knowing that the indignation excited by this outrage would be worth many conventions to the cause; and so, of course, it proved. But the spirit of compromise was still rampant, and the most abject propositions were urged for the conciliation of the seceding States and the maintenance of the Union with fresh guarantees for the protection of the Slave Power. In this the Republican leaders were conspicuous. In Congress, Charles Francis Adams, representing the Third Massachusetts District, proposed the admission of New Mexico as a State, with or¹ without slavery, and favored an amendment to the Constitution requiring that all subsequent amendments affecting slavery should be proposed by a slave State and ratified by all the States (instead of the customary threefourths).² Mr. Seward, speaking in the U. S. Senate,³ favored the repeal of the Personal Liberty laws, and the amendment of the Constitution so as to prohibit Congress from ever abolishing or interfering with slavery in any State. Thomas Corwin of Ohio, a Republican Representative and the chairman of the Congressional Committee of Thirty-three to devise compromise measures, not only urged the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law, but⁴ declared it to be ‘the duty of every free State in the Union to suppress’ any incendiary publications, especially of the ‘newspaper press,’ against slavery, and ‘to punish their authors.’⁵ Andrew G. Curtin, the⁶ Republican Governor of Pennsylvania, urged the Republican legislators of that State to defeat a resolution reaffirming their party's cardinal doctrine of the non-extension of