That he might give the Southern bugaboo its _quietus_, he directed one of his deputies to inquire into a publication, of which "no member of the city government, nor any person," of his honor's acquaintance, "had ever heard." The result of this inquiry Mayor Otis reported to the Southern functionaries.
"Some time afterward," he wrote, "it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors." With this bare bodkin Harrison Gray Otis thought to puncture the Southern panic.

But the slaveholders had correcter notions of the nature and tendency of the Abolition enterprise than had the Boston mayor.

They had a strange, an obstinate presentiment of disaster from the first instant that the _Liberator_ loomed upon their horizon.

It was a battery whose guns, unless silenced, would play havoc with Southern interests and the slave system; _ergo_, the paper must be suppressed; _ergo_, its editor must be silenced or destroyed.

And so when Otis, from his serene height, assured them of his "belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people," they continued to listen to their fears, and to cry the louder for the suppression of the "incendiary newspaper published in Boston." The editor of that paper never flinched before the storm of malignity which was gathering about his head.