of the Union.” Hence the need for an important meeting, one to consider a drastic measure, then unprecedented in American history: “The practicability, probability and expediency, of a Separation between the Free and Slave States.”

Given the manner in which the Civil War played out in American history, we can be forgiven for believing that the solution of secession was entirely a Southern one. In fact, more than four years before the first Southern state seceded from the Union, a group of New England anti-slavery reformers were pushing for the dissolution of the Union, and the secession of its Northern states, on moral grounds. And behind that movement was the editor of the Liberator, a political firebrand who is the subject of this week’s episode of The Thread —of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “They thought it was sort of counterproductive because most Americans thought of the Constitution as a sacred document.”

For Garrison, setting fire to the Constitution was to make the point that such an arrangement was a “pact with the devil” if those in the North were willing to tolerate slavery in the South to preserve the Union. When sectional infighting between the Northern and Southern states erupted over slavery in the years before the Civil War and others were counseling war, Garrison was equally bold in his proposed solution. As early as the 1840s, Garrison was a proponent of “disunion,” arguing that a house divided against itself shouldn’t even try to stand. “He developed this doctrine called ‘no union with slave