From this time till 1860 the struggle between freedom and slavery was continuous. The South needed the Territories for her rapid increase of slaves. The North was opposed; but in the year 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act, devised by Stephen A. Douglas, repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which had prohibited slavery north of latitude 36° 30', the southern boundary of Kansas. Kansas at once became a battle-ground. Armed men came over from Missouri to establish slavery. Men came from New England determined that the soil should be free, if they spilled their blood to gain it. The Fugitive Slave Law, whereby slaves were returned without trial by jury, and slave-owners allowed to search the North for their slaves, made great bitterness. The brutal attack of Preston Brooks, of South Carolina, on Charles Sumner, for his speech on Kansas, and the hanging of John Brown by the State of Virginia for his invasion of Harper's Ferry with seventeen white men and five negroes, calling upon the slaves to rise and demand their liberty, brought matters to a crisis.
Garrison was opposed to war; but after the firing on Sumter, April 12, 1861, it was inevitable. For two years after Abraham Lincoln's election to the Presidency, Garrison waited impatiently for that pen-stroke which set four million human beings free. When the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Jan. 1. 1863, Garrison's life-work was accomplished. Thirty-five years of untiring, heroic struggle had not been in vain. When two years later the stars and stripes were raised again over Fort Sumter, he was invited by President Lincoln, as a guest of the government, to witness the imposing scene. When Mr. Garrison arrived in Charleston, the colored people were nearly wild with joy. Children sang and men shouted. A slave made an address of welcome, his two daughters bearing a wreath of flowers to their great benefactor. Garrison's heart was full to overflowing as he replied, "Not unto us, not unto us, but unto God be all the glory for what has been done in regard to your emancipation.... Thank God, this day, that you are free. And be resolved that, once free, you will be free forever. Liberty or death, but never slavery! While God gives me reason and strength, I shall demand for you everything I claim for the whitest of the white in this country."