Meetings were broken up, negro quarters attacked, property destroyed, murders committed.
Fair-minded men became abolitionists on account of the crusade against the rights of white men quite as much as from their interest in the rights of negroes.

Salmon P.Chase of Ohio was led to espouse the cause by observing the attacks upon the freedom of the press in Cincinnati.
Gerrit Smith witnessed the breaking up of an anti-slavery meeting in Utica, New York, and thereafter consecrated his time, his talents, and his great wealth to the cause of liberty.

Wendell Phillips saw Garrison in the hands of a Boston mob, and that experience determined him to make common cause with the martyr.

And the murder of Lovejoy in 1837 made many active abolitionists.
It is difficult to imagine a more inoffensive practice than giving to negro girls the rudiments of an education.

Yet a school for this purpose, taught by Miss Prudence Crandall in Canterbury, Connecticut, was broken up by persistent persecution, a special act of the Legislature being passed for the purpose, forbidding the teaching of negroes from outside the State without the consent of the town authorities.