Mad Old Man From Massachusetts   Ironically enough, the petition
campaign was developed by peace-loving Quakers and launched in
Essex County, Massachusetts, by the Quaker poet John Greenleaf
Whittier. The abolitionists were tireless collectors. One
petition, demanding the abolition of slavery in the District of
Columbia, carried 130,200 names; another to prohibit slave trade
between the states, 23,160; a third to prohibit slavery in
United States territories, 21,200; and so on down the line. In
Massachusetts, petitions circulated in 1843 to free the slave
Latimer drew 51,862 signatures. Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch
described “the immense roll of paper” as “about the size of an
ordinary barrel.” The abolitionist leader Henry B. Stanton
estimated that in 1838-39 the American Antislavery Society
gathered two million signatures, an impressive percentage of the
total population of the United States, even allowing for some
inflation of the figures.   In fact, the stacks of petitions
were piled so high in the baseme