To kindle all those differences, all that mass of combustible feelings and forces into a general conflagration a spark only was wanted.

And out of the glowing humanity of one man the spark was suddenly struck.
It is curious to note that in the year 1829, the very year in which William Lloyd Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began the editorship of _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_, the American Convention, or national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of slavery, fell into desuetude.

It was as if Providence was clearing the debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage of the nation, put into old bottles.

The Hour for a new movement against slavery had come, and with its arrival the Man to hail it had also come.
Other men had spoken and written against slavery, and labored for the freedom of the slave before Garrison had thought upon the subject at all.

Washington and Jefferson, Franklin, Jay, and Hamilton had been Abolitionists before he was born, but theirs was a divided interest.