In the Legislature of Illinois, where
the public sentiment was all for upholding the institution and violently
against every movement for its abolition or restriction, upon the passage
of resolutions to that effect he had the courage with one companion to
put on record his protest, "believing that the institution of slavery is
founded both in injustice and bad policy." No great demonstration of
courage, you will say; but that was at a time when Garrison, for his
abolition utterances, had been dragged by an angry mob through the
streets of Boston with a rope around his body, and in the very year that
Lovejoy in the same State of Illinois was slain by rioters while
defending his press, from which he had printed antislavery appeals.
In Congress he brought in a bill for gradual abolition in the District of
Columbia, with compensation to the owners, for until they raised
treasonable hands against the life of the nation he always maintained
that the property of the slaveholders, into which they had come by two
centuries of descent, without fault on their part, ought not to be taken
away from them without just compensation.
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