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Hubbard Harris, were induced to make public renunciation of their Masonic obligations. This greatly enraged the Masons, and Jacob Trussell and Elijah Blaisdell said “they might just as well have renounced everything else, for although members of the lodge, neither of them could explain what they had renounced.”
Mr. Kimball was naturally sympathetic. When Garrison appeared as the champion of the enslaved race, Kimball with Rogers, joined him and were ever after identified with the movement. They were greatly instrumental in building “Noyes Academy” and in changing its original features so as to admit colored pupils. They had a right to do this; but the public opinion of those days was as much enslaved as the negroes, and was fierce and brutal in its instincts as the hyena. The beautiful fabric which those unselfish men had erected and whose dedidation to freedom of thought ought to have made it sacred, was rudely thrown down, and the grand object for which it was so carefully nursed into being, disappeared forever in one day. The mob, which on the 10th of August, 1835, defied law, violated private rights and destroyed the germs of what would have become one of the most flourishing institutions of learning in the country, was simply the creature of public opinion, remorseless and cruel, which pervaded the land through all its widespread territory. It was not a Canaan mob, for with all their evil passions then fired up, there was a lack of courage in the men of Canaan to perform such deeds. They gave Ichabod Bartlett five dollars to tell them if they had any legal rights to destroy the “nigger school.” He did tell them that every man standing by and consenting thereto made himself liable to the penalties of the law—provided public opinion should ever allow a jury to find them guilty. This contingency was so remote that it placed no restraint upon the mob. This digression is made because Mr. Kimball was acting as the agent of such men as Samuel E. Sewall, Samuel H. Cox, Arthur Tappan, David L. Child, Benjamin Lundy, and the great body of Abolitionists of the country, who cherished the hope that this free academy might be instrumental in developing the capacities of the negro, and in some degree mitigating the social rigors that environed his race. The ferocity of the mob spirit