Its leader was Theodore D.Weld, who was until Wendell Phillips appeared upon the scene, the great orator of the agitation.
Dr.Beecher had no notion of raising such a ghost when he said, "Go ahead, boys, I'll go in and discuss with you." It was such an apparition of independence and righteousness as neither the power of the trustees nor the authority of the faculty was ever able to dismiss.

The virtue of a gag rule was tried to suppress Abolition among the students, but instead of suppressing Abolition, it well-nigh suppressed the seminary; for, rather than wear a gag on the obnoxious subject, the students--to between seventy and eighty, comprising nearly the whole muster-roll of the school--withdrew from an institution where the exercise of the right of free inquiry and free speech on a great moral question was denied and repressed.

The same spirit of repression arose later in the Theological School at Andover, Mass.

There the gag was effectively applied by the faculty, and all inquiry and discussion relating to slavery disappeared among the students.

But the attempt to impose silence upon the students of Phillips's Academy near-by was followed by the secession of forty or fifty of the students.
Ah! the Abolitionists had undertaken to achieve the impossible, when they undertook to enlist the pulpit in the cause of the slaves, and to purify the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery.