Springfield 1636-1886, History of Town and City, by Mason A. Green ...

462 SPRINGFIELD, 1636-ISS6.
George Thompson, the English tibolitionist, who had not been allowed
to speak in Faneuil Hall, Boston, was announced to address the
friends of freetlom in Springfield. A series of meetings had been
planned. The local hostility to Thompson was by no means grounded
in an anti-slavery sentiment, but in a feeling that British wisdom
was not needed to settle a domestic difficulty. The town was up
in arms. Thompson was burned in effig3^ Unsigned handbills were
circulated, exclaiming, '"Is it rational, is it reasonable, is it even
plausible, that George Thompson, a member of that very British
Parliament whose laws have placed the masses of the PLnglish and
Irish people in a position of such want and oppression that they
would gladly exchange their lot for the comparative freedom of the
negro slave of the South, can be aught but a paid emissary and spy
of England ? " Hampden Hall was shut against Thompson ;
Court
square was made dismal with drums, fifes, bonfires, fire-crackers,
and a howling mob. There was, however, a Thompson meeting held
in a small liall on Sanford street the following night, and the Eng-
lishman's departure from the village was a signal for more lurid
disturbances. '' But what a sad, what a pitful spectacle it was ! " ex-
claimed Rev. George F. Simmons from his Third Congregational
pulpit the following Sunday afternoon (Feb. 23, 1851). " What a
mixture of the vulgar, the nonsensical, and the profane ! To begin
with, those burlesque figures, with which some hopeful citizens saw fit
to desecrate the Sabbath, to the scandal of the gathering congrega-
tions, that they might insult a stranger and make Springfield a laugh-
ing-stock ; for the rope that suspended them was round the neck of
all of us, and we are still dangling in ridicule before the whole
country."
The ugly feeling engendered by these troubles came to the sur-
face at the spring elections. Eliphalet Trask had figured as a
vice-president at the Thompson meeting, on Sanford street, and in
spite of the hue-and-cry Mr. Trask was the only selectman chosen
at the town-meeting, April 7, l.Snl. Two adjourned meetings were