They bullied him, they raged like so many wild animals against him, they attempted to crush him with votes of censure and expulsion all to no purpose.

Then they applied the gag: "That all petitions, memorials, and papers touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring slaves, in any State, or district, or territory of the United States, be laid on the table without being debated, printed, read, or referred, and that no action be taken thereon." Mr.Adam's denunciation of this action as a violation of the Constitution, of the right of the people to petition, and of the right to freedom of speech in Congress, found wide echo through the North.

The violence, intolerence, and tyranny of the South were disgusting many of the most intelligent and influential minds in the non-slave-holding States, and driving them into more or less close affiliation with the anti-slavery movement.
And so it was wherever one turned there were conflict and uproar.
Everywhere contrary ideas, interests, institutions, tendencies, were colliding with inextinguishable rage.

All the opposites and irreconcilables in a people's life had risen and clashed together in a death struggle for mastery.

Freedom and slavery, civilization and barbarism had found an Armageddon in the moral consciousness of the Republic.