Their one cause of disturbance: slavery grows less secure, and they see more and more reason to believe they can neither extend it nor perpetuate it. Is this a reason for us to be alarmed? Is it not the best news, with one exception, that could possibly come to our ears?
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The post above is condensed. From the original, word for word
"Fortunately for us, the precipitation of South Carolina has produced a pause in our movements [...] The one cause of their disturbance is, that their "peculiar institution" of negro slavery is growing less and less secure, and that they see more and more reason to believe that they can neither extend it nor perpetuate it! Is this a reason for us to be alarmed? Is it not, on the contrary, the best news, with one exception, that could possibly come to our ears?"
Between the posts · the narrator, not the paper
In Boston and Rochester, the men who have worked longest for slavery's end read the first secession differently from everyone else — not as catastrophe, but as an admission.
Garrison — who had long wanted the free North out of "the Union with slaveholders" — reads South Carolina's exit as vindication, not alarm: the slaveholders panic because slavery "is growing less and less secure," which is "the best news, with one exception, that could possibly come to our ears." Written against a conservative Boston address urging Massachusetts to make concessions to save the Union. "Negro" is the period term, not a redaction. Text from the archive.org scan of the issue; its OCR is rough (column-interleaved) but each quoted sentence was string-verified.