The obvious moral taught that
blackguards were not so black as they were painted; but the boy
Henry had passed through as much terror as though he were Turenne
or Henri IV, and ten or twelve years afterwards when these same
boys were fighting and falling on all the battle-fields of
Virginia and Maryland, he wondered whether their education on
Boston Common had taught Savage and Marvin how to die.
If violence were a part of complete education, Boston was not
incomplete. The idea of violence was familiar to the anti-slavery
leaders as well as to their followers. Most of them suffered from
it. Mobs were always possible. Henry never happened to be
actually concerned in a mob, but he, like every other boy, was
sure to be on hand wherever a mob was expected, and whenever he
heard Garrison or Wendell Phillips speak, he looked for trouble.
Wendell Phillips on a platform was a model dangerous for youth.
Theodore Parker in his pulpit was not much safer. Worst of all,
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law in Boston -- the sight of
Court Square packed with bayonets, and his own friends obliged to
line the streets under arms as State militia, in order to return
a negro to slavery -- wrought frenzy in the brain of a
fifteen-year-old, eighteenth-century boy from Quincy, who wanted
to miss no reasonable chance of mischief.
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