The spirit of persecution followed them into the free States.

Birney could not publish his paper in Kentucky, nor even at Cincinnati, save at the risk of his life.
Elijah Lovejoy was not allowed to publish his paper in Missouri, and, when he persisted in publishing it in Illinois, he was brutally murdered.

Even in Boston it required men of courage and determination to meet and organize an anti-slavery society in 1832, though only a few years earlier Benjamin Lundy had traveled freely through the South itself delivering anti-slavery lectures and organizing scores of such societies.

The New York Anti-Slavery Society was secretly organized in 1832 in spite of the opposition of a determined mob.

Mob violence was everywhere rife.