WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON From a mezzotint engraving by John Sartain (1836), after a painting by M. C. Torrey (1835). WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON BY JOHN JAY CHAPMAN FRONTISPIECE Second Edition Revised and Enlarged BOSTON THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS CHRONOLOGY 1805. Born, December 10, at Newburyport, Mass. 1818. Apprenticed printer in Newburyport Herald office. 1826. Buys Essex Courant and founds Free Press. 1828. Edits National Philanthropist. Meets Benjamin Lundy. 1829. Edits Burlington (Vt.) Journal of the Times. Park St. Church address on Colonization. 1830. Associate editor of Genius of Universal Emancipation. Sued by Francis Todd for libel in Baltimore. Convicted and jailed. 1831. Issues first number of Liberator. Indicted in North Carolina. 1832. Founds New England Anti-Slavery Society. Issues Thoughts on Colonization. First visit to England. 1834. Marries Helen Eliza Benson. 1835. Marked for assassination. 1836. Mobbed in Boston. 1838. Speaks at Pennsylvania Hall, Phila. 1839. First speech in Faneuil Hall. 1840. Second visit to British Isles. 1842. Reads Irish address in Faneuil Hall. Mobbed at Syracuse. 1843. Calls the Constitution "a covenant with death," etc. President of American Anti-Slavery Society. 1844. Offers disunion resolutions at Faneuil Hall. 1846. Third visit to British Isles. vii CHRONOLOGY 1847. Mobbed at Harrisburg, Pa. 1848. Leads Anti-Sabbath Convention. 1850. At Anniversary of American Anti-Slavery Society (the Rynders Mob), New York City. At first Woman s Rights Convention in Mass. 1851. Selections from his Writings published. 1853. Mobbed at Bible Convention in Cincinnati. 1854. Burns the Constitution of the U. S. 1855. Calls the Union "a house divided against itself." 1857. Meets John Brown. 1859. Reviews Brown s Virginia Raid. 1862. Cooper Union Lecture on Abolitionists and the War. 1864. Defends Lincoln against W. Phillips. 1865. Visits South Carolina. Valedictory of the Liberator. 1867. Fourth visit to England and first to France. 1868. Regular contributor to New York Inde pendent. 1876. Mrs. Garrison dies. 1879. Dies, May 24. vm PREFACE FOR SECOND EDITION 1921 I ONCE knew a man who wrote a brilliant biography of Abraham Lincoln. He himself belonged to the Civil War epochj and while writing the book in about the year 1895, he be came so absorbed and excited by that war as he studied it, and lived it over again, that he could not sleep at night. He paced the room, lost in thought, awed by his subject. It was a contemporary of this biographer who told me that, while the Civil War was in progress, the enthusiastic historian had taken no interest in it; it did n t seem to attract his attention. This anecdote shows how much easier it is to see a hero in the past than in the present. The historian is a book- trained man; records and documents speak to him; dead things live again. But he cannot get his mind into focus upon anything so near as the present. He is distracted by the present, but supported by the past; for in the past he is not alone. As he studies it, the whole literature of his chosen period holds up his hands : hundreds of minds rush to his aid, while all religion and philos ophy stand at his elbow. PREFACE It is easy to explain why Garrison has never been adopted as a popular hero in America. He gave a purge to his countrymen, and the bitter taste of it remained in our mouths ever after. Moreover, the odium of Slavery, which he branded on America s brow, seemed to survive in the very name of Garrison, and we would willingly have forgotten the man. After the Civil War there was not, apparently, time for our scholars to think about him. Certain it is that the educated American has known little about him, and shies and mutters at his name. And yet equally certain is it that the history of the United States between 1800 and 1860 will some day be rewritten with this man as its central figure. How soon will that day come, and what will be the signs of its dawning? The laws of mind and nature are not likely to be reversed to save the feelings and prejudices of the American people, a people who are not given to historic speculation and who have been mentally en feebled by success. It is not for Garrison that I am concerned, but for a people that praises the prophets, builds altars to courage, enshrines the idea of the Individual Soul ; but a people, it would seem, who cannot see a real man when he appears, because he makes them uncomfortable. Garrison made his compa- PREFACE triots uncomfortable ; even to read about him made them uncomfortable but yesterday. In reprinting this little book, the thought crosses my mind that perhaps the shock and anguish of the Great War, which so humanized our nation, may have left us with a keener, more religious, and more dramatic understand ing of our Anti-slavery period than we pos sessed prior to 1 9 1 4 . Certainly when this book appeared in 1913, the average American seem ed to hear the name of Garrison with distaste, and to regard a book about him as superfluous. While I was writing it, one of my best friends, and a very learned gentleman, said to me, "A book about William Lloyd Garrison? Heave a brick at him for me"! and the popular feeling in America of that day seemed to sup port the remark. But the times have changed. The flames of the Great War have passed through us. The successive shocks of that experience struck upon our people till we re sounded in unison like a great bell; and there is not a soul among us that has not been shaken to its depths. The heroic echoes of the terrible struggle have died away and left all the nations dizzy and defocalized, worn out by effort and emo tion, and, apparently, more cynical and bent on petty aims than they were before the xi PREFACE ordeal. But this tidal revulsion is in the way of Nature. She acts by waves and inunda tions, by recessions, mud-flats, and desolation. It appears just now as if all the tin cans and dead dogs of humanity were exposed to view. Nevertheless, the tides will surge in once more. The devastated regions will be reclaimed and reanimated in spots, of course, and irregu larly as is Nature s wont. The great, heroic impulse of that war is not really lost. It lies invisibly planted in our hearts, and especially in the hearts of the younger generation, who will never know from how many old shibbo leths and cramping views they have been lib erated by having taken part in something that was universal. Our own past will assume fresh aspects in our eyes. Americans will come to see their own history in a more normal ^perspective than they did formerly. The fog 1 of self-consciousness that has hung above our I Anti-slavery period will be dissipated in the l minds of our historians, and we shall see Garri- l son as one of our greatest heroes a man born I to a task as large as his country s destiny, who i turned the tide of his age, and left an imprint j of his mind and character upon us, as certain and as visible as the imprint left upon us by | Washington himself. T T r v J J *" JANUARY 1921. xii CAL1FORK: WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON I INTRODUCTION THE periods of history that are most inter esting are those which have been lighted up by spiritual bonfires. As we read about such epochs we seem to feel the fires re kindling in our bosoms. Through the iden tity of those historic flames with our own, we become aware of our portion in the past, and of our mission in the present. The names of the actors, to be sure, are changed; the names of the forces at work vary con tinually. Yet the substance of the story is ever the same ; the fable deals with ourselves. And therefore that fable stirs the intimate embers in us. Here, within us, are those smothered and banked furnaces which the stride of History has left behind it the only now living part, the only real part and absolute remnant of the divine pageant. There are some periods of great confla- WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON gration where a whole epoch is lighted up with one greafc flame of idea, which takes perhaps a few decades to arise, blaze, and fall; during which time it shows all men in its glare. Willy-nilly they can be and are seen by this light and by no other. Willy- nilly their chief interest for the future lies in their relation to this idea. In spite of themselves they are thrilling, illustrative figures, seen in lurid and logical distortion, abstracts and epitomes of human life. Nay, they stand forever as creatures that have been caught and held, cracked open, thrown living upon a screen, burned alive perhaps by a searching and terrible bonfire and recorded in the act as the citizens of Pompeii were recorded by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It happened that a period of this kind f passed over the United States between the years 1830 and 1865. There is nothing to be found in that epoch which does not draw its significance, its interest, its permanent power from the slavery question. There is no man whose life falls within that epoch whose character was not controlled by that question, or whose portrait can be seen by any other light than the light of that fire. Subtract that light and you have darkness; INTRODUCTION you cannot see the man at all. In the biog raphies of certain distinguished conserva tives of that time you may often observe the softening of the portrait by the omission of unpleasant records, the omission by the biographers of those test judgments and test ordeals with which the times were well supplied. By these omissions the man van ishes from the page of his own book. The page grows suddenly blank. You check yourself and wonder who it was that you were reading about. Now the reason of this disappearance of the leading character from your mind is that the biographer has drawn someone who could not have existed. The man must have answered aye or nay to the question which the times were put ting. And, in fact, he did so answer. By this answer he could have been seen. With out it he does not exist. I confess that I had rather stand out for posterity in a hideous silhouette, as having been wrong on every question of my time, than be erased into a cipher by my biog rapher. But biographers do not feel in this way toward their heroes. Each one feels that he has undertaken to do his best by his patron. Therefore they stand the man un der a north light in a photographer s attic, 3 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON suggest his attitude, and thus take the pic ture; whereas, in real life, the man was standing on the balcony of a burning build ing which the next moment collapsed, and in it he was crushed beyond the semblance of humanity. The Civil War, -that war with its years of interminable length, its battles of such successive and monstrous carnage, its dragged-out reiterations of hor ror and agony, and its even worse tortures of hope deferred, hope all but extinct, that war of which it is impossible to read even a summary without becoming so worn out by distress that you forget everything that went before in the country s history and emerge, as it were, a new man at the close of your perusal ; that war was no ac cident. It was involved in every syllable which every inhabitant of America uttered or neglected to utter in regard to the slavery question between 1830 and 1860. The gathering and coming on of that war, its vaporous distillation from the breath of every man, its slow, inevitable formation in the sky, its retreats and apparent dispersals, its renewed visibilities all of them gov erned by some inscrutable logic and its final descent in lightning and deluge ; these matters make the history of the interval be- 4 INTRODUCTION tween 1830 and 1865. That history is all one galvanic throb, one course of human passion, one Nemesis, one deliverance. And with the assassination of Lincoln in 1865 there falls from on high the great, uni fying stroke that leaves the tragedy sublime. No poet ever invented such a scheme of curse, so all-involving, so remotely rising in an obscure past and holding an entire nation in its mysterious bondage a scheme based on natural law, led forward and unfolded from mood to mood, from climax to climax, and plunging at the close into the depths of a fathomless pity. The action of the drama is upon such a scale that a quarter of the earth has to be devoted to it. Yet the argu ment is so trite that it will hardly bear state ment. Perhaps the true way to view the whole matter is to regard it as the throwing off by healthy morality of a little piece of left-over wickedness that bad heritage of antiquity, domestic slavery. The logical and awful steps by which the process went for ward merely exhibit familiar, moral, and poetic truth. What else could they exhibit ? We are ungrateful to the intellects of the past; or rather, like children we take it for granted that somebody must supply us with our supper and our ideas ; and, for the most 5 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON part, it is difficult to discover the extent of our indebtedness, whether, for example, to Charlemagne or to the scholars who have re vealed him. Yet everything we know and live by is due to the mind of someone in the past: its formulation, at any rate, was the act of a man. These same illuminations of history that we have been speaking of were due to the enlightenment of individual minds. Our Revolution of 1776 was made interesting by its state papers, and to-day our knowl edge of that time is a knowledge of the minds of Washington, Franklin, and the other patriots. Now the light by which we to-day see the Anti-slavery period was first shed on it by one man William Lloyd Garrison. That slavery was wrong, every one knew in his heart. The point seen by Garrison was the practical point that the slavery issue was the only thing worth thinking about, and that all else must be postponed till slavery was abolished. He saw this by a God-given act of vision in 1829; and it was true. The history of the spread of this idea of Garrison s is the his tory of the United States during the thirty years after it loomed in his mind. From the day Garrison established the Lib- 6 INTRODUCTION erator he was the strongest man in America. He was affected in his thought by no one. What he was thinking, all men were des tined to think. How had he found that clew and skeleton-key to his age, which put him in possession of such terrible power? What he hurled in the air went everywhere and smote all men. Tide and tempest served him. His power of arousing uncontrol lable disgust was a gift, like magic; and he seems to sail upon it as a demon upon the wind. Not Andrew Jackson, nor John Quincy Adams, nor Webster, nor Clay, nor Benton, nor Calhoun, who dance like shadows about his machine, but William Lloyd Garrison becomes the central figure in American life. If one could see a mystical presentation of the epoch, one would see Garrison as a Titan, turning a giant grindstone or elec trical power-wheel, from which radiated vi brations in larger and in ever larger, more communicative circles and spheres of agita tion, till there was not a man, woman, or child in America who was not a-tremble. We know, of course, that the source of these radiations was not in Garrison. They came from the infinite and passed out into the infinite. Had there been no Garrison 7 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON they would somehow have arrived and at some time would have prevailed. But his torically speaking they did actually pass through Garrison: he vitalized and perma nently changed this nation as much as one man ever did the same for any nation in the history of the world. II THE BACKGROUND LET us consider the first fifty years of our national history. There was never a mo ment during this time when the slavery is sue was not a sleeping serpent. That issue lay coiled up under the table during the de liberations of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It was, owing to the invention of the cotton gin, more than half awake at the time of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 ; and slavery was continued in the Louisiana Ter ritory by the terms of the treaty. There after slavery was always in everyone s mind, though not always on his tongue. A slave state and a free state were, as a matter of practice, always admitted in pairs. Thus, Vermont and Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, Louisiana and Indiana, Mississippi and Illinois, had each been offset against the other. This was to preserve the balance of power. The whole country, however, was in a state of unstable equilibrium and 9 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON the era of good feeling oscillated upon the top of a craggy peak. At last, in 1818-20, came two years of fierce, open struggle over slavery in the ad mission of Missouri, which state was formed from part of the Louisiana Pur chase. Southern threats of disunion clashed with Northern taunts of defiance in the House of Representatives. In the outcome, the Missouri Compromise admitted Missouri with slavery; and prohibited slavery in that part of the Louisiana Purchase which lay north of the latitude of 36 30 , except in the portion included in Missouri. This corn- promise became, in the public mind, as sacred as the Constitution itself; so that when, in 1854, the Compromise was repealed, the whole North felt that the bottom had dropped out of their government. The North believed itself to be betrayed. The savage feeling which led up to war developed rapidly at the North after this time. The war came as the final outcome of a great malady. But we must return to 1820. During the decade that followed the Mis souri Compromise everyone in America fell sick. It was not a sickness that kept men in bed. They went about their business the lawyer to court, the lady to pay calls, the 10 THE BACKGROUND merchant to his wharf. The amusements, and the religious, literary, and educational occupations of mankind went forward as usual. But they all went forward under the gradually descending fringe of a mist, an unwholesome-feeling cloud of oppres sion. No one could say why it was that his food did not nourish him quite as it used to do, nor his unspoken philosophy of life any longer cover the needs of his nature. This was especially strange, because everybody ought to have been perfectly happy. Had not the country emerged from the War of the Revolution in the shape of a new and glorious Birth of Time a sample to all mankind ? Had it not survived the dangers of the second war with Great Britain ? And what then remained for us except to go for ward victoriously and become a splendid, successful, vigorous, and benevolent people? Everything was settled that concerned the stability of our form of government. The future could surely contain nothing except joyous progress. The Americans of 1820-30 expounded the glorious nature of their own destiny. They challenged the casual visitor to deny it; and became quite noted for their insist ence upon this claim, and for their deter- ii WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON mination to secure the acknowledgement of it by all men-. At the bottom of this nervous concern there was not, as is generally supposed, merely the bumptious pride and ignorance of a new nation. There was something more complex and more honorable; there was an inner knowledge that none of these things wftf true. This knowledge was forced upon our fathers by their familiarity with their own political literature and with the Declaration of Independence in partic ular. There was a chasm between the agreeable statement that all men are created free and equal, and the horrible fact of hu man slavery. The thought of this incon gruity troubled every American. No recondite or difficult reasoning was re quired to produce the mental anguish that now began to oppress America. The only thing necessary was leisure for anguish, and this leisure first became possible at the close of the second war with Great Britain. The operation of the thought was almost en tirely unconscious, and its issue in pain al most entirely unexpressed. The articulate classes had not talked much about slavery since the days of the consti tutional compromises, and it is the aged Jef- 12 THE BACKGROUND ferson who writes from Monticello apropos of the Missouri Compromise " This momentous question, like a fire-bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the Union." Now there never was a moment in the history of the country when this fire-bell was quite silent. The educational policy of the articulate classes of society during the first fifty years of the Nation s life had been to hush the bell. Ever since the Southern members in the Constitutional Convention had showed their teeth, and threatened to withdraw if slavery were disturbed, a policy of silence had been adopted. The questions covered by the Constitution were to be regarded as con clusively settled. The bandages must never be taken off them. Any person who re views the history of the American Revolu tion can sympathize with this timidity; for it seems like a miracle that the Colonies should ever have come together so an tagonistic were their interests, and their ideals. The Colonists feared some new breach, and there ensued a non-intellectual determination that certain questions should not be re-examined: this determination 13 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON gradually grew into our great stupefying dogma which says to the private citizen, " This is our way of doing things : you-be- damned : intellect has nothing to do with the matter: it is American." This dogma, which arose out of the needs of our early days, has become the most widespread form of metaphysical faith among us. No doubt all nations harbor similar prejudices as to their own institutions; but the nations of Europe have been jostled into liberalism by their contiguity one with another; and the jostling is now being extended to us. Dur ing our early history, however, we were iso lated, and our intellectual classes took their American history a little too seriously. The state of mind of our statesmen and scholars in that epoch is well summed up in Web ster s reply to Hayne. That speech closes an epoch. It is the great paving-stone of conclusive demonstration, placed upon the mouth of a natural spring. All this while something had been left out in all the nation s political and social phi losophy something which policy forbade men to search for, and this something was beginning to move in the pit of the stomach of Americans, and to make them feel ex ceedingly and vaguely ill. In order to bind 14 THE BACKGROUND the Colonies into a more lasting union, a certain suppression of truth, a certain tram pling upon instinct had been resorted to in the Constitution. All the parties to that instrument thoroughly understood the in iquity of slavery and deplored it. All the parties were ashamed of slavery and yet felt obliged to perpetuate it. They wrapped up a twenty years protection of the African slave trade in a colorless phrase. " The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such im portations, not exceeding ten dollars for each person." Now the slave trade meant the purchase upon African coasts of negroes and ne- gresses, their branding, herding, manacling, and transportation between decks across tropical seas. The African slave trade is probably the most brutal organized crime in history. Our fathers did not dare to name it. So of the fugitive-slave law; the Constitution deals with it in the cruel, quiet way in which monstrous tyranny deals with the fictions of administrative law. "No 15 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON person held to service or labor in one state under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regula tion therein, be discharged from such serv ice or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due." In an age in which the Inquisition is abso lutely dominant, its officials are almost kind. The leaden touch of hypocrisy was thus in the heart of our Constitution. Cold-heart- edness radiated from the Ark of our Covenant. We condone this because we know that many of these fathers really did believe that slavery was probably going to diminish and die out in the country. Even while protecting it they hoped for the best, and knew not what they did. But as slavery became more important instead of less important, and as the cruelty of it be came more visible, the bond of the document pressed upon the conscience of the people. We had undertaken more than we could per form. The suppression of truth, the tramp ling upon instinct, which we had accepted as a duty, was stifling us. For the first fifty years of our national life no reaction was visible. And then there ensued a fer mentation, a tumult in the heart which noth- 16 THE BACKGROUND ing could quell. This tumult began long before it showed itself. Its dialectic and logic were developed and ready for use, like the wings of the locust in the shell. The na tures of men were beginning to heave and to swell and at last, when Garrison speaks out, behold, he is in electrical communica tion with an age over-charged with passion. His thought is understood immediately. Every implication, every consequence, every remote contingency has been anticipated in the public consciousness, and there ensues .explosion after explosion: crash generates crash: storm- routes of continuous passion plow the heavens across the continent from sea to sea. In truth our whole civilization, I our social life, our religious feelings, our political ideas, had all become accommo dated to cruelty, representative of tyranny. The gigantic backbone of business-interest was a slavery backbone. We were a slave republic. For a generation, nay, for two hundred years, we had tolerated slavery; and for a generation it had been a sacred thing a man must suppress his feelings in speaking of it. Now there is nothing more injurious to the character and to the intellect than the suppression of generous emotion. It means 17 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON death: sickness to the individual, blight to the race. Compassion shining through the heart wears the very name and face of Di vine Life. It makes the limbs strong and the mind capable ; it strengthens the stomach and supports the intestines. Cramp this emotion, and you will have a half-dead man, whose children will be less well-nourished than himself. It is hard to imagine the falsetto condi tion of life in the Northern States in 1829; the lack of spontaneity and naturalness about everybody, so far as externals went, and the presence of extreme solicitude in the bottom of everybody s heart. Emerson speaks in his journal (1834) of the fine man ners of the young Southerners, brought up amidst slavery, and of the deference which Northerners, both old and young, habitually paid to the people of the South. It seems to have been regarded as a social duty at the North to shield the feelings of Southerners, and, as it were, to apologize for not owning slaves. The feelings of the Northern phi lanthropist, however, were never regarded with delicacy. On the contrary it was thought to be his duty to suppress his feel ings. Any exhibition of humane sentiment where slavery was concerned and it was 18 THE BACKGROUND always concerned was punished immedi ately. The most natural impulses, the most simple acts of human piety could be indulged in only through an initiation of fierce pain, generally followed by social ostracism. The right to draw one s breath involved a strug gle with Apollyon. " Only a few days before one of our meet ings," writes Henry I. Bowditch, one of Garrison s early recruits from the social world of Boston, " a young lady had hoped that I * would never become an Abolitionist/ and about the same time Frederick Doug lass appeared as a runaway slave. He was at the meeting in Marlboro 5 Chapel. Of course I was introduced to him, and, as I would have invited a white friend, I asked him home to dine with me in my small abode in Bedford Street. It is useless to deny that I did not like the thought of walking with him in open midday up Washington Street. I hoped I would not meet any of my ac quaintances. I had, however, hardly turned into the street before I met the young lady who had expressed her wish as above stated. I am glad now to say that I did not skulk. I looked at her straight and bowed in my most gracious manner as if I were all right/ while I saw by her look of regret that 19 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON she thought me all wrong/ It was, how ever, something like a cold sponge-bath, that Washington Street walk by the side of a black man, rather terrible at the outset, but wonderfully warming and refreshing afterwards ! I had literally jumped * in medias res/ But I did not hear until years afterwards, and a long time after Douglass had held office in Washington under Federal Government, and the slavery of his own race had been washed out in blood, what I was doing for him at the moment that as a friend I asked him to walk home with me to dinner. How little do we appreciate acts that seem trivial or something worse to us, but which to others, affected by such acts, are of in dispensable importance! Beautiful to me seems now the act, inasmuch as it helped to raise a poor, down-trodden soul into a proper self -appreciation. And how much I thank God that He led me by giving me a love of freedom, and something like a con science to act as I did then." * The strain of that walk upon Bowditch *Many years afterwards, when an assemblage of anti-slavery veterans and hosts of young colored men were honoring Frederick Douglass in a public hall in Boston, he alluded to this incident with the remark, " Dr. Bowditch I greet joyfully here, for he first treated me as if I were a man." 20 THE BACKGROUND is felt forty years later in his account of it. The profound political instinct which led him to take the walk is as noticeable as the religious nature of his impulse. It is won derful to reflect how little the significance of the act could have been understood by any casual observer of the scene. Here is a man who turns down one street rather than another, upon meeting an acquaintance. He looks like a gentleman doing an act of politeness ; while he is, in fact, a saint going through the fire for his faith, and a hero sav ing the republic. So banal are externals, so deep is reality. But our present interest in the incident lies in this that it measures the separation of Massachusetts from the ordinary standards of Europe. Frederick Douglass was almost a man of genius and he looked like a man of genius. His photo graph at the time of his escape from slav ery might be the photograph of a musician or a painter. He was the kind of man who, in a Paris or London salon, would excite anyone s passing notice, as perhaps a South American diplomat or artist. An intelligent foreign observer might have told Bowditch that the sufferings which both Bowditch and Douglass were enduring betrayed the fact that a social 21 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON revolution was under way. They were the sign of an approaching homogeneity. This universal disturbance, this universal throe is the first thing that all the people of the United States ever experienced to gether. Their former unions had been political and external : this was spiritual and internal. We are familiar with the Northern form of the uneasiness, because the Northerner could speak. He cried out ; and through his utterance came the cure. But of the pain of the Southerner, to whom all expression of feeling was denied, we know nothing. With the rise of Abolition, perished every vestige of free speech at the South. Events now converged to crush the manhood out of the slave-holding classes. A Southerner could not be gentle, unselfish, quick to speak his thought, or genuinely interested in any thing. His opinions were prepared for him before he was born; and they were light- killing illusions the precursors of mania. The enactment of very stringent and in human slave codes, and the prohibition of all education to the slaves followed in the wake of the Abolition outbreaks. The maturing of a sort of philosophy of slavery, accord ing to which slavery was seen as the cor- 22 THE BACKGROUND nerstone of religion and progress, was the work of the following decade, and the task of Calhoun. The corollaries to this philos ophy which involved an abandonment of popular education, and the cutting-off of the South from every intellectual contact with the civilization of Europe, were duly worked out during the next thirty years. By the time the war came there existed a sort of Religion of Slavedom. The Pro-slavery Northern Democrats of Buchanan s time held opinions which would have shocked the most pronounced slaveholders of 1820. During all this time Virginia and the Carolinas which constituted the Holy Land of the Slave Dispensation endured a si lent exodus and migration on the part of the more liberal spirits. Men even went to New Orleans to escape the tyranny of slave opinion at Charleston. Thus were the souls of Americans squeezed and their tempers made acid. A slightly too ready responsive ness to stimulus of any kind came to be the mark of the American, whether at the North or at the South; the difference being that the too ready response at the South was apt to be an insult, at the North an apology. This hair-trigger nervousness on the part of everybody was the result of poison in the 23 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON system. What could the manly Southern youth do? Leave all and follow Abolition? He knew of Abolition only that it was a vil lainous attack on his father s character and property. He was in the grip of a relent less, moving hurricane of distorted views, false feelings, erroneous philosophy; and he knew nothing clearly, understood nothing clearly, until he perished upon the battle fields of the Civil War, fighting like a hero. It is impossible in describing the course of the Slave Power between 1832-65 to avoid harsh language. If ever wickedness came upward in the counsels of men, it did so here. Yet there are elements in all these matters which elude our analysis. The vir tues glimmer and seem to go out; but they are never really extinguished. How much idealism, how much latent heroism must have existed in the South during all these years before the war, was seen when the war came. Villains do not choose for them selves Commanders like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. It is lost, that old so ciety, and it died almost speechless died justly and inevitably. Yet we do well to remember with what a flame of sacrifice it perished, to remember with what force, what devotion, what heroism, Humanity 24 THE BACKGROUND showed herself to be still adorned in that hour of an all-devouring atonement. The great fever came to an end with Appomattox. The delirium stopped: the plague had been expelled. The nation was not dead : the nation was at the beginning of a long convalescence. It is, however, about the earlier symptoms of the disorder that I would speak here, about the presentiments of headache and nausea, and about that dreadfullest moment in all sickness (as it seems to me), the moment when we admit that something serious is coming on. The struggle between the North and the South began over free speech about the negro, and especially about the right of benevolent people at the North to extend their benevolence to the negro, as, for in stance, in their schools, Sunday-schools, hos pitals, etc. Now the South sincerely be lieved that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had morally bound the North not to talk about slavery in private conversation, and not to treat the negro as a human being. The South had succeeded in imposing this conviction upon the whole North. " The patriotism of all classes," wrote Ed ward Everett, Governor of Massachusetts, in a message to his Legislature, " the patri- 25 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON otism of all classes must be invoked to ab stain from discussion, which by exasperat ing the master, can have no other effect than to render more oppressive the condition of the slave." This paralysis of dumbness and of fear touched everyone. It was not exactly fear, either, but a sort of subtle freemasonry, a secret belief that nothing must be dis turbed. The Southerners lived in sincere terror of slave uprisings and they man aged to convey a mysterious tremor to the North upon the subject. Dr. Charming was jjiat age s figure-head. He was the most eminent man in -the coun try; the moral sciences were his province. He was, therefore, constantly appealed to by all persons and parties upon the slavery question. His responses and his conduct upon such occasions give the best key to that age which we have ; and his character will be discussed as long as posterity takes an in terest in the epoch. This must be my ex cuse for recurring to Dr. Channing from time to time and for using him, at this point, to illustrate the flatness and tameness of good men in that age ; yes, to illustrate the spiritual domination of evil at the time when Garrison began his crusade. The drawing- 26 THE BACKGROUND rooms of our grandfathers times contained automata; ghosts clustered about the din ner tables. The people had forgotten what the sound of a man s voice was like. That is why they were so startled by Garrison. Even Channing, who was a true saint, and, when time was given him, a cour ageous man, is an injured being like a beautiful plant which has grown to ma turity in a dungeon. Under the pres sure of his own conscience and of certain hammering Abojitionists^ who jvere _ his friends, he wrote an analysis of slavery, and stood shoulder to shoulder with the Abolitionists on the question of free speech. It is to his everlasting honor that he did this : for he sincerely deplored the methods of the Abolitionists and was incapable of under standing their mission. By his writings on slavery and by his act in standing by the Abolitionists on the question of free speech, Channing became a broken idol to all of the South and to half of his Boston admirers. We must never confound him, as the Abo litionists were prone to do, with the contem porary flock of time-serving parsons. Channing was a man who could, and did, go through the fire for principle. But he was a man lacking in instinct, a sad man, too 27 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON reasonable to understand this crisis or know how to meet it. He was trampled upon by his congregation, and knew not how to save himself. Dr. Channing s coldness toward Abolition might be shown by his words to Daniel Webster in 1828, deprecating any agitation of the slavery question ; by his studied avoid ance of Garrison in social life; by his inabil ity, even in the Essay on Slavery, to see the importance of the Abolition movement ; or in a hundred other ways. On the other hand, Dr. Channing s services to the Anti- slavery cause could be illustrated by this same essay, and by the esteem and love which many leading Anti-slavery people al ways bore him. Let us, however, go to the bottom of the whole matter. On January i3th, 1840, Dr. Charles Fol- len, a German enthusiast and one of the few highly educated men among the Abolition ists, was burned alive in the ill-fated steamer Lexington, while on a journey from New York to Boston. Follen was a young doc tor of laws and a teacher at the University of Jena, who had been prosecuted for his liberal opinions by the reactionary govern ments of Prussia and Austria in 1824. He had fled to Switzerland and thence to the THE BACKGROUND United States. His friends in this country secured him a post as lecturer, and after wards as professor, at Harvard College; which post he lost through expressing his opinions on slavery. He afterwards took a pastorate in the Unitarian Church and lost it through the same cause. Pollen was what Goethe used to call a "Schoene Seek," beloved of all. He was an especial friend of Channing s. His tragic death was at the time considered by the Abolitionists as the severest blow which they had yet received. They sought a place to hold a commemorative meeting in his honor, and they applied to Channing for permission to use his church; which Chan ning accorded. The standing committee of the church, however, cancelled this permis sion. Channing s biographer speaks as fol lows: "Nothing in all his (Channing s) in tercourse with his people, nothing in his whole Anti-slavery experience, caused him so much pain as a refusal of the use of the church to the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, on the sad occasion when all true- hearted persons were called to mourn the awful death of Charles Pollen, and when the Rev. S. J. May had prepared a discourse 29 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON in commemoration of the rare virtues of that heroic and honored man. It was not only the insult to the memory of a beloved friend that grieved him though this could not but shock his quick and delicate feel ings; still less was it the disregard, under such touching circumstances, of his well- known wishes, that wounded him most deeply; but this manifestation of a want of high sentiment in the congregation to which, for so many years, he had officiated as pas tor, made him question the usefulness of his whole ministry. To what end had he poured out his soul, if such conduct was a practical embodiment of the principles and precepts which he had so earnestly incul cated? This event brought home to his heart the conviction that the need was very urgent of a thorough application of the Christian law of love to all existing social relations. " It is evident to the common mind that Channing should have resigned his post rather than accept this affront from his flock. Nay, Channing should have resigned twenty years earlier, and upon the first occasion when any such subjection of his own im pulses was required of him. The anecdote shows the skeleton that lurked in all the 30 THE BACKGROUND vestry rooms of that period. It shows also how partial are the philosophic illuminations of men. Dr. Channing disbelieved in the principle of association. It was one of the points in his disapproval of the Anti-slavery people that they worked through associa tions; for he had a philosophic disbelief in the theory of association. I share this dis belief with Dr. Channing; the miserable squabbles between Anti-slavery associations in which the reformers wasted their force and impaired their tempers, show very clearly the dangers inherent in association, which dangers Channing very clearly saw. Yet Channing was himself the servant of an association; and every fault in his relation to the great moral question of his time may be traced to that fact. Association, business or social, literary or artistic, religious or scientific, all as sociation is opposed to any disrupting idea. The merchants and lawyers of Boston fled Abolition as a plague ; they regarded Aboli tion as an enemy to be fought with all weap ons. Garrison was once taken to hear Dr. Channing by an acquaintance of both parties, and he sat in a pew which belonged to a con servative family, but which that family had been in the habit of throwing open to others. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON On the Tuesday following this apparition of Garrison in the sacred pew, the future use of it was withdrawn by a stiff note from the conservative family. The reason for this excess of caution was that the South disci plined Northern merchants by a withdrawal of business; and the South kept its eyes open. A rumor that Garrison had been seen in a particular pew might make the pew- owner a marked man for commercial punish ment. "Mr. May," said a New York mer chant of the first rank to the reformer, whom he summoned to an interview during the progress of an Anti-slavery meeting, " Mr. May, we are not such fools as not to know that slavery is a great evil; a great wrong. But it was consented to by the founders of our Republic. It was provided for in the Constitution of our Union. A great portion of the property of the Southerners is in vested under its sanction; and the business of the North, as well as the South, has be come adjusted to it. There are millions upon millions of dollars due from South erners to the merchants and mechanics of this city alone, the payment of which would be jeopardized by any rupture between the North and the South. We cannot afford, sir, to let you and your associates succeed 32 THE BACKGROUND in your endeavor to overthrow slavery. It is not a matter of principle with us. It is a matter of business necessity. We cannot afford to let you succeed. And I have called you out to let you know, and to let your fel low laborers know, that we do not mean to allow you to succeed. We mean, sir," said he, with increased emphasis, "we mean, sir, to put you Abolitionists down, by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must." Truly the world was not very different then from what it is to-day. If a man takes a stand against any business interest, how ever iniquitous, that interest will strike at him on the following day. Ill THE FIGURE THE essential quality of all this old society was that it was cold. In the last analysis, after the historical and constitutional ques tions have been patiently analyzed, after eco nomics and sociology have had their say, the trouble with the American of 1830 was that he had a cold heart. Cruelty, lust, busi ness interest, remoteness from European in fluence had led to the establishment of an un feeling civilization. The essential quality of Garrison is that he is hot. This must be borne in mind at every moment as the chief and real quality of Garrison. Disregard the arguments; sink every intellectual concep tion, every bit of logic and of analysis, and look upon the age: you see a cold age. Look upon Garrison : you see a hot coal of fire. He plunges through the icy at mosphere like a burning meteorite from an other planet. j. There is a second contrast. The age was {conciliatory: Garrison is aggressive. These 34 THE FIGURE two forms of the contrast between Garrison and his age lie close together and merge into each other: yet they are not entirely identical : the first concerns the emotions, the second, the intellect. Conciliation was the sin of that age. Now this anti-type, this personified enemy of his age, Garrison, must in his nature be self-reliant, self-assert ive, self-sufficient. He relates himself to no precedent. He strikes out from his inner thought. He is even swords-drawn with his own thought of yesterday. When he changes his mind he asks God to forgive him for ever having thought otherwise. His in stinct is so thoroughly opposed to any au thority except the inner light of conscience, that he makes that conscience his local, momentary conscience into a column of smoke sent by the Lord. Not Bunyan, not Luther is greater than Garrison on this side of his nature. He is not an intellectual per son. He is not a highly educated man. But he is a Will of the first magnitude, a will made perfect, because almost entirely uncon scious, almost entirely dedicated and sub dued to its mission. I quote here the whole of the first editorial of the Liberator (January ist, 1831), be cause the whole of Garrison is in it. In 35 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON reading it let us remember the shattering, repulsive power which self-assertion exer cises over smooth, cold people of good taste, whose worldly fortunes and sincere spiritual beliefs are bound up for all eternity with smoothness, coldness, and good taste. The punctuation and typesetting of the article, and the verses (not his own) at the end of it, may also be noted as indicating Garrison s taste and education: " In the month of August, I issued pro posals for publishing the Liberator in Washington City; but the enterprise, though hailed in different sections of the country, was palsied by public indifference. Since that time, the removal of the Genius of Uni versal Emancipation to the Seat of Govern ment has rendered less imperious the estab lishment of a similar periodical in that quar ter. " During my recent tour for the purpose of exciting the minds of the people by a series of discourses on the subject of slavery, every place that I visited gave fresh evi dence of the fact that a greater revolution in public sentiment was to be effected in the free States and particularly in New Eng land than at the South. I found con tempt more bitter, opposition more active, 36 THE FIGURE detraction more relentless, prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen, than among slave-owners themselves. Of course, there were individual exceptions to the contrary. This state of things afflicted, but did not dishearten me. I determined at every hazard to lift up the standard of eman cipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker Hill and in the birthplace of liberty. That standard is now unfurled; and long may it float, unhurt by the spolia tions of time or the missiles of a desperate foe yea, till every chain be broken, and every bondman set free ! Let Southern op pressors tremble let their secret abettors tremble let their Northern apologists tremble let all the enemies of the perse cuted blacks tremble. " I deem the publication of my original Prospectus unnecessary, as it has obtained a wide circulation. The principles therein inculcated will be steadily pursued in this paper, excepting that I shall not array myself as the political partisan of any man. In de fending the great cause of human rights, I wish to derive the assistance of all religions and of all parties." Thus began Garrison in his first editorial in the Liberator. Does this seem egotism, 37 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON this almost pompous deliberation, this taking off his coat and laying it across a chair as he makes his bow to the public? Yes, it is egotism. It is gigantic egotism but not the egotism of vanity or self-seeking. It is the selfless egotism of a supreme self-asser tion, put forth unconsciously by human na ture; and as such it is in itself a sample of what that age needed, the sample of a spirit of independence without which slavery never could and never would have been abolished. Let us proceed with the edi torial. . . . " Assenting to the self- evident truth maintained in the American Declaration of Independence, that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty, and the pur suit of happiness/ I shall strenuously con tend for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population. In Park Street Church, on the Fourth of July, 1829, in an address on slavery, I unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full 38 THE FIGURE of timidity, injustice, and absurdity. A similar recantation, from my pen, was pub lished in the Genius of Universal Emancipa tion at Baltimore, in September, 1829. My conscience is now satisfied. " I am aware that many object to the se verity of my language ; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moder ate alarm ; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen ; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest I will not equivocate I will not excuse I will not retreat a single inch AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead. " It is pretended that I am retarding the cause of emancipation by the coarseness of my invective and the precipitancy of my measures. The charge is not true. On this question my influence humble as it is 39 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON is felt at this moment to a considerable ex tent, and shall be felt in coming years not perniciously, but beneficially not as a curse, but as a blessing; and posterity will bear testimony that I was right. I desire to thank God that He enables me to disre gard * the fear of man which bringeth a snare/ and to speak his truth in its simplic ity and power. . . . . . . " And here I close with this fresh dedication: " Oppression ! I have seen thee, face to face, And met thy cruel eye and cloudy brow ; But thy soul-withering glance I fear not now For dread to prouder feelings doth give place Of deep abhorrence ! Scouring the disgrace Of slavish knees that at thy footstool bow, I also kneel but with far other vow Do hail thee and thy herd of hirelings base : I swear, while life-blood warms my throb bing veins, Still to oppose and thwart, with heart and hand, Thy brutalizing sway till Afric s chains Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land, 40 THE FIGURE Trampling Oppression and his iron rod : Such is the vow I take - SO HELP ME GOD ! " Garrison s early history is the familiar tale of poverty, and reminds one of Benja min Franklin s boyhood. His mother, a person of education and refinement, was, during Garrison s babyhood, plunged into bitter destitution. He was born in New- buryport, Massachusetts, in 1805. At the age of nine, in order to help pay for his board, he was working for Deacon Bartlett in Newburyport. Later, he learned shoe- making at Lynn, cabinet-making at Haver- hill, and in 1818, at the age of thirteen, was apprenticed to a printer and newspaper pub lisher. Now began his true education. He read Scott, Byron, Moore, Pope, and Camp bell; and at the age of seventeen, was writ ing newspaper articles in the style of the day. By the time he was twenty, Garrison was a thoroughgoing printer and journalist ; and during the last three years of his ap prenticeship he had entire charge of his mas ter s paper. During the next four years, he edited four newspapers, and embraced va rious reforms besides Anti-slavery, e. g., Temperance, Education, Peace, Sabbatarian ism, etc. He seems at this period to be 41 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON like a hound on a scent, as he takes up and abandons one newspaper after another. He is already a reformer, already a boiling enthusiast, already an insuppressible Vol ubility, already one-ideaed upon any sub ject that he treats. If his theme be Temperance, then moderate drinking is the worst enemy of man. He joins most heartily in the anathema against to bacco either in chewing, smoking, or snuff ing. He is against capital punishment and imprisonment for debt, and it is safe to say that he would, at a moment s notice, have delivered a violent judgment upon any sub ject that aroused his compassion. Whatever else he was, he was a full-grown being at the age of twenty-four, when Ben jamin Lundy persuaded him to devote his life to the cause of the slave. Benjamin Lundy, the quiet Quaker, had been editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation since 1821, and was at this time (1828) estab lished in Baltimore, where he had recently been assaulted and almost killed in the streets by Austin Woolfolk, a slave trader. Lundy s practice was to walk from town to town throughout the country, founding Anti- slavery societies, and introducing his news paper. He first met Garrison while he was 42 THE FIGURE on a visit to Boston, and at a later date he walked from Baltimore to Bennington, Ver mont, where Garrison was editing a journal, in order to convert Garrison. He suc ceeded. Garrison left Vermont and became co-editor of the Genius in Baltimore. Be fore he migrated to Baltimore, however, he visited Boston and there on July 4th, 1829, he delivered an address in the Park Street Church which is really the beginning of his mission. The Reverend John Pierpont (the grandfather of Pierpont Morgan) was present and wrote a hymn for the oc casion. Whittier, a stripling, was also pres ent. The tone and substance of this ad dress are strikingly like those of Emerson s Phi Beta Kappa address (delivered six years later), in which Emerson made his manly salutatory to his age. Garrison s words are as follows: " I speak not as a partisan or an opponent of any man or measures, when I say that our politics are rotten to the core. We boast of our freedom, who go shackled to the polls, year after year, by tens, and hun dreds, and thousands! We talk of free agency, who are the veriest machines the merest automata in the hands of unprin cipled jugglers ! We prate of integrity, and 43 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON virtue, and independence, who sell our birth right for office, and who, nine times in ten, do not get Esau s bargain no, not even a mess of pottage ! Is it republicanism to say that the majority can do no wrong? Then I am not a republican. Is it aristocracy to say that the people sometimes shamefully abuse their high trust? Then I am an aris tocrat. . . . " Before God, I must say, that such a glar ing contradiction as exists between our creed and practice, the annals of six thousand years cannot parallel. In view of it, I am ashamed of my country. I am sick of our unmeaning declamation in praise of lib erty and equality; of our hypocritical cant about the unalienable rights of man. I could not, for my right hand, stand up be fore a European assembly, and exult that I am an American citizen, and denounce the usurpations of a kingly government as wicked and unjust; or, should I make the attempt, the recollection of my country s barbarity and despotism would blister my lips, and cover my cheeks with burning blushes of shame." Let us now take a few sentences from Emerson s Phi Beta Kappa address : "The spirit of the American freeman is 44 THE FIGURE already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See al ready the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. . . . Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these, but are hindered from action by the dis gust which the principles on which busi ness is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hope ful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him." The difference between Emerson and Garrison is that Emerson is interested in aes thetic, Garrison in social matters. The one represents the world of intellect, the other, the world of feeling. Both speak the same idea, each according to his own idiom. Both are, in essence, affronting the same 45 W>LLIAM LLOYD GARRISON evil the Dominion of Slavery. The dif ference is that Garrison has seen the evil plainly, and has laid his hand upon it; Em erson was to live in ignorance of its specific nature for many years to come. I shall revert again to the relation between these two young men, both so noble, both of such immense consequence to the country, each of them, in a sense, the father of all of us whose spirits were raised up by God to shed new life upon America. We must return to Garrison as the co- editor with Lundy of the Genius of Uni versal Emancipation in Baltimore. Inas much as Garrison had already received his revelation as to immediate emancipation, and Lundy favored slower methods, the two partners agreed to sign their articles separately. Baltimore was, at that time, the most northern port in the coastwise slave trade: and Garrison constantly saw the slaves being shipped south in New England bottoms. It was not long before Garrison was thrown into jail in Baltimore as the re sult of a suit for criminal libel, brought by a New England slave trader whom he had denounced. The Mr. Todd whom he " li beled," and about whom he spoke only the truth, was a fellow townsman of Garrison s, 46 THE FIGURE being a native of Newburyport, Mass., and was thus a natural target for Garrison s in vective. Garrison remained in jail seven weeks, during which time he conducted a most telling campaign of pamphlets, private letters and public cards, sonnets, letters to editors, etc., with the result that the whole of America heard of the incident. Mr. Ar thur Tappan of New York became inter ested in the case, and secured Garrison s re lease by paying the fine of one hundred dollars. This was in the spring of 1830. Thus it may be seen that at the time that Garrison returned to Boston and established his Liberator (1830-31) he was twenty-five / years old, a consummate controversialist, - | and the apostle of a new theory Immedi- ^ ate Emancipation, for which he had already suffered imprisonment. The world has no terrors for a man like this. Anti-slavery action did not begin with Garrison. There had been Anti-slavery so cieties for fifty years before him; there ex isted in 1830 perhaps a hundred and fifty of them, many of them being in the slave states. But the new movement did not spring jrom these old societies. It was mili tant as they were not: it was dissatisfied with their mild methods and inactivity: in 47 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON fact, it denounced them. The new move ment came bursting up like a subterranean torrent. I have no doubt that Garrison and his mission were somehow fundamentally con nected with the labors of the Anti-slavery men who kept the name of mercy alive be tween 1776 and 1820. Yet these old agen cies were upheaved from beneath. Aboli tion appeared at the North and over slaughed them; the Slave Power developed new heat at the South and burned out the roots of them. Any single anecdote of those times will be apt to illustrate both i sides of the question, i. e., the new vulture \quality of slavery at the South, and the new Ibulldog quality of Abolition at the North. For instance, when the Southern statesmen recognized the existence of Abolition, they began passing laws against the introduction of Abolition literature into the South, and they began to correspond with Northern statesmen and officials with the aim of sup pressing Garrison. The Legislature of Georgia, in 1831, offered a reward of $5000 for the arrest and conviction of Gar rison under the law r s of Georgia. The Southern press went into paroxysms of clamorous rage. On the other hand, Gar- THE FIGURE rison is by no means deficient in vigor of feeling. The following is his comment on the reward: " A price set upon the head of a citizen of Massachusetts for what ? For dar ing to give his opinions of the moral aspect of slavery! Where is the liberty of the press and of speech ? Where the spirit of our fathers? Where the immunities secured to us by our Bill of Rights? Are we the slaves of Southern taskmasters? Is it treason to maintain the principles of the Declaration of Independence? Must we say that slavery is a sacred and benevolent institution, or be silent? Know this, ye senatorial patrons of kidnappers! that we despise your threats as much as we deplore your infatuation: nay, more know that a hundred men stand ready to fill our place as soon as it is made vacant by violence. The Liberator shall yet live live to warn you of your danger and guilt live to plead for the perishing slaves live to hail the day of universal emancipation!" Now we can see at a glance that this new j Abolition is much more than Abolition: it is Courage. Garrison s tone here takes us back a generation to James Otis, to John Adams, and to the other Revolutionary he- 49 roes; and he is really standing for constitu tional liberty quite as distinctly, and at as crucial a moment, as those gentlemen had done. Garrison s language is harsh ; but he is almost the only out-and-out masculine person in the North. No: there was one other the aged John Quincy Adams ; and Adams was as harsh, and as unmeasured, as Garrison. Nay, Adams was personally bit ter, which Garrison never was. Adams was, in reality, a survivor of 1776, an un tamed aristocrat and he bore a vase of the old fire in his bosom. This was per mitted to Adams because no one could stop him; but men vaguely imagined that Garrison s fire could be put out. In 1831, Garrison was indicted in North Carolina. The South was not wrong in thinking that the official classes at the North would lend aid in suppressing the new movement. Judge Thatcher of the Munici pal Court in Boston made a charge to the Grand Jury (1832) in which he laid the foundation for the criminal prosecution of Abolitionists. No one could tell just how far subserviency might go. The Mayor of Boston, Harrison Gray Otis, was nat urally appealed to by the Southern states men to protect them against the circulation so THE FIGURE of Abolition literature. It was in 1829 that Otis was first called on to do something about " Walker s appeal," a fierce, Biblical pamphlet, full of power, written by a col ored man in Boston and urging the slaves to rise. Otis replied that the author had not made himself amenable to the laws of Massachusetts, and that the book had caused no excitement in Boston. Garrison had had nothing to do with Walker s pamphlet, and had publicly condemned its doctrines. None the less, Walker s appeal was an out crop of the same subterranean fire that coursed through Garrison, and when Nat Turner s Slave Rebellion broke out (1831) and a dozen white families were murdered in Virginia, the whole South was thrown into a panic, and attributed the insurrection to the teachings of the Abolitionists. This puny rebellion was easily put down. Turner was hanged, his followers were burnt with hot irons, their faces were muti lated, their jaws broken asunder, their ham strings cut, their bodies stuck like hogs, their heads spiked to the whipping-post. No con nection was ever discovered between Nat Turner s Rebellion and the Abolitionists, who never at any time sent their papers to slaves. The illiteracy of the blacks made it WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON improbable that they had been influenced by any sort of writings. And yet one cannot help feeling that the existence of a militant propaganda in their behalf had reached the consciousness of the slaves, and that this rising was the outcome of the new age. Angels wings were beating upon the air, and charging it with both life and death, till even dumb slaves felt the impulsion. Various Southern governors, statesmen, and newspapers renewed the campaign against the Liberator, and Otis was again appealed to. " To be more specific in our object," says the National Intelligencer which was pub lished in Washington, and was one of the most influential journals of the epoch, " we now appeal to the worthy Mayor of the City of Boston, whether no law can be found to prevent the publication, in the city over which he presides, of such diabolical papers (copies of the Liberator) as we have seen a sample of here in the hands of slaves, and of which there are many in cir culation to the south of us. We have no doubt whatever of the feelings of Mr. Otis on this subject, or those of his respectable constituents. We know they would prompt him and them to arrest the instigator of 52 THE FIGURE human butchery in his mad career. We know the difficulty which surrounds the subject, because the nuisance is not a nui sance, technically speaking, within the lim its of Massachusetts. But, surely, if the courts of law have no power, public opin ion has to interfere, until the intelligent Legislature of Massachusetts can provide a durable remedy for this most appalling grievance. . . ." Robert Y. Hayne of Columbia, S. C, begged Otis to find out whether Garrison had mailed him (Hayne) a copy of the Liberator. Otis obsequiously sent a deputy to question Garrison. This was something very like a prostitution of his office on the part of Mayor Otis; because what Hayne wanted was to obtain evidence to be used in a criminal prosecution of Garrison. Gar rison at once becomes the able constitutional lawyer. " The Hon. Robert Y. Hayne of Colum bia, S. C.," says the Liberator of October 29th, 1831, " (through the medium of a letter), wishes to know of the Mayor of Boston, who sent a number of the Liberator to him, a few weeks ago. The Mayor of Boston (through the medium of a deputy) wishes to know of Mr. Garrison whether he 53 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON sent the aforesaid number to the aforesaid individual. Mr. Garrison (through the medium of his paper) wishes to know of the Hon. Robert Y. Hayne of Columbia, S. C., and the Mayor of Boston, what authority they have to put such questions ? " We can see in this, as in all the rest of Garrison s activity, the tactician of genius. We can see also the inner relation between morality and constitutional law, which ex ists in all ages. The Reformer is always struggling against arbitrary power. He in vokes the protection of some law or cus tom which exists, or ought to exist. In cases where this law or custom has a his toric basis, the struggle goes on in the form of constitutional law. The picture of the Reformer is always the picture of Courage and of Mercy: the courageous man who is, by his conduct, protecting the weak. It is this vision of courage and mercy in opera tion, that melts the heart and inspires new courage and mercy in the beholder. Here is the great question which stands behind all the details ; for courage and mercy are of eternal importance. That is why we hear so much of Pym, Hampden, etc. Their conduct has a direct relation to present conditions. No day passes in which every man is not put 54 THE FIGURE to the test many times over, as to his per sonal relation towards the cowardices and cruelties of his own age. Mayor Otis saw nothing important in the episode which has given him a Dantesque immortality. He had never heard of the Liberator. He therefore, procured a copy of it. "I am told," he said, "that it is sup ported chiefly by the free colored people ; that the number of subscribers in Balti more and Washington exceeds that of those in this city, and that it is gratuitously left at one or two of the reading-rooms in this place. It is edited by an individual who formerly lived at Baltimore, where his feel ings have been exasperated by some occur rences consequent to his publications there, on topics connected with the condition of slaves in this country. . . ." At a later period Otis wrote: " Some time afterward, it was reported to me by the city officers that they had fer reted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all col ors. This information, with the consent of the aldermen, I communicated to the above- 55 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON named governors, with an assurance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people. In this, however, I was mistaken." History has left us, in this anecdote, a sil houette of Harrison Gray Otis, one of Bos ton s most eminent personages at that time, the representative of the old Puritan blood, of the education, wealth, good looks, social prominence, and political power of Boston s leaders. In how short a time, and with how easy a transformation does patriot turn tyrant. Here is the nephew of James Otis, hand in glove with the iniquity of his age. He who was rocked in the cradle of liberty, is now the agent of the Inquisition. And he is perfectly innocent. He is a mere toy and creature of his time. A new issue has arisen that neither he nor his generation understand, and behold, they have become oppressors. The Hercules that is to save mankind from these monsters is in the meanwhile working fourteen hours a day, setting type. The Liberator was begun without a dollar of capital and without a single subscriber. Garrison and his partner, Isaac Knapp, a young white man equally poor and equally 56 THE FIGURE able to bear privation, composed, set, and printed the paper themselves. They lived chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes and a little fruit, obtained from the baker s shop opposite and from a petty cake and fruit shop in the basement. " I was often at the office of the Liberator," wrote the Rev. James C. White. " I knew of his (Garri son s) self-denials. I knew he slept in the office with a table for a bed, a book for a pillow, and a self -prepared scanty meal for his rations in the office, while he set up his articles in the Liberator with his own hand, and without previous committal to paper." " It was a pretty large room," says Jo- siah Copley, who visited it in the winter of 1832-33, "but there was nothing in it to relieve its dreariness but two or three very common chairs and a pine desk in the cor ner, at which a pale, delicate, and appar ently over-tasked gentleman was sitting. . . . I never was more astonished. All my preconceptions were at fault. My ideal of the man was that of a stout, rugged, dark-visaged desperado something like we picture a pirate. He was a quiet, gen tle, and I might say handsome man a gentleman indeed, in every sense of the word." 57 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON " The dingy walls ; the small windows, bespattered with printer s ink; the press standing in one corner; the composing- stands opposite ; the long editorial and mail ing table, covered with newspapers ; the bed of the editor and publisher on the floor all these," says Oliver Johnson, " make a picture never to be forgotten." IV PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE THERE are pages in the memoirs of Anti slavery that shine with a light which sancti fies this continent, and which will be un- diminished a thousand years hence. Nay, it will shine more clearly then than now; for we are still living in the valley of the shadow of death. The war followed so quickly upon the true awakening of the nation as to the na ture of slavery that those early watchers, whose cries had aroused us, were still in Coventry; they were still held to be odious, although their piercing appeal had put life and religion into all. The North died for the slave, with condemnation of the Aboli tionist upon its lips. This paradoxical out come was due to the rapidity with which events moved during the final crisis. A revolution may be studied in its origins, and may be comprehended through its results; but during the actual cascade that leads from the one epoch to the other, scene succeeds 59 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON scene with such fury that history becomes unintelligible. In the years that intervened between the Kansas troubles and the out break of the war, so many things happened at once that all issues and all feelings were telescoped together. There followed the picturesque horrors and scenes of war-time; there followed the new patriotism, the new heroes, the New Legend all of it so vivid, so drenched in grief, so glorified by honor, so informed with the mean ing of a new heaven and a new earth, that ^the immediate past was belittled. The \ Abolitionists thus passed straight from the odium of people preaching unpleasant truth to the odium of people proclaim ing what everybody knows. They have never had a heyday. Their cause triumphed but not they themselves. They still re main under a cloud in America, and are regarded with some distrust by the historian and by the common man. I can scarcely find a man who sees in these early Abolitionists, as I do, the lamp and light of the whole after-coming epoch. Perhaps our age is still too near to theirs to do it justice; and the mere flight of time may bring men to a truer perspective of the whole matter. 60 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE Religious animosities do not die out in a moment. Many of us still feel a lambent and rising heat course through our veins in reading the history of the religious wars of three centuries ago. This is be cause those wars have come down in fam ily life, and are thus a part of the intimate personal history of men. So of this just-buried cause, Abolition. Consider how the American of to-day reads the Con stitutional History of the years before the war. Nullification, the Texas scheme, the Mexican War, the Repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the Kansas troubles all these things and every subsidiary foreign or domestic issue in our annals, are interest ing to us because we feel so intimately the hot place in each one of them. Part of this heat comes from prejudice and ac cident, part of it from the central focus of truth; and we cannot always be sure which kind it is that burns in us. But there is a species of glow that can be trusted. It comes to us when we read accounts of hero ism. Tales of noble self-sacrifice never re main mere adjuncts to a creed, or portions of a partisan tradition. They contain in themselves the whole of salvation. Poster ity will recur to the age of the Anti-slavery 61 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON movement in order to find there those little digests of human nature which are true to all time. Here are the gems in the treas ury of a nation s life; and it matters not to later ages whether the geological strata in which they lie embedded be Catholic or Protestant, Christian or pagan, political or religious. Whenever a reform movement is started in this world and is making headway, the evils which it threatens instinctively strive to gain control over it. We see this every day in our local citizens movements, which always begin by sincere activity, and almost always grow effete through capture by the politicians. Our civil service asso ciations tend to become absorbed by the political parties, who man them with paid officials, and run up the expenses till the cure has become a part of the disease. This oscillation between reform and absorption goes on ceaselessly; and the young prophet always finds himself obliged to attack and destroy some sham reform association, bearing a fine name, before he can get at the real evil. Let us note this also; that a somnolent and inactive reform association, with a fine name, and an aroma of original benevolence about it, and perhaps even a 62 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE superficially good record, is the very sort of association to attract respectable, rich, lazy, and conservative people. The Colonization Society in 1830 sented an extreme case of sham reform. It had been started in 1816 in Virginia, with the avowed object of transporting free ne groes to Africa. It had been pushed with diligence and paraded as the cure for the evils of slavery, and its benevolence was as sumed on all hands. Everybody of conse quence belonged to it. Garrison, himself, joined it in good faith. This Colonization Society had, by an invisible process, half conscious, half unconscious, been trans formed into a serviceable organ and mem ber of the Slave Power. In order to in vestigate the real functions of this society, Garrison, in 1831, obtained from its head quarters at Washington, the files of its doc uments and of its newspaper, the African Repository. " The result of his labors," says Oliver Johnson, " was seen in a bulky pamphlet, that came from the press in the spring, en titled Thoughts on African Colonization; or, an Impartial Exhibition of the Doc trines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society; together 63 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON with the Resolutions, Addresses and Re monstrances of the Free People of Color/ As a compilation of facts and authorities it was unanswerable and overwhelming. It condemned the Colonization Society out of its own mouth, and by a weight of evidence that was irresistible. There was just enough of comment to elucidate the testi mony from official sources and bring it within the comprehension of the simplest reader. His indictment contained ten aver ments, viz. : i. The American Colonization Society is pledged not to oppose the system of slavery; 2. It apologizes for slavery and slave-holders; 3. It recognizes slaves as property; 4. It increases the value of slaves; 5. It is the enemy of immediate abolition; 6. It is nourished by fear and selfishness; 7. It aims at the utter expulsion of the blacks; 8, It is the disparager of the free blacks; 9. It denies the possibility of elevat ing the blacks in this country; 10. It de ceives and misleads the Nation. Each of these averments was supported by pages of citations from the annual reports of the so ciety, from the pages of its official organ, the African Repository, and from the speeches of its leading champions in all parts of the country. It was impossible to 64 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE set this evidence aside, and equally so to re sist the conclusions drawn therefrom. The work could not be, and therefore was not answered." The book made a tremendous sensation and became the arsenal of the Abolitionists in this country and of their exponents abroad. " It was early in 1852, I think," says Elizur Wright, " that Mr. Garrison struck the greatest blow of his life or any man s life by publishing in a thick pamphlet, with all the emphasis that a printer knows how to give to types, his Thoughts on Col onisation/ The Colonization Society was an embodiment of the public consciousness. It was prevalent, it was a part of the peo ple s daily life. All the great divines be longed to it, all the academic bigwigs, so cial figure-heads and moneyed men. And yet, in fact, Colonization was a sort of ob scene dragon that lay before the Palace of Slavery to devour or corrupt all assailants. Garrison attacked it like Perseus, with a ferocity which to this day is thrilling. His eyes, his words, and his sword flash and glitter. And he slew it. He cut off its supplies, he destroyed its reputation in Eu rope; and he thereby opened the path be tween the Abolition movement and the con- 65 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON science of America. Nothing he ever did was more able. Nothing that Frederick the Great, Washington or Napoleon ever did in the field of war was more brilliant than this political foray of Garrison, then at the age of twenty-seven, upon the key- position and jugular vein of slavery. Among the immediate consequences of Garrison s pamphlet on colonization was the contest over Lane Seminary at Cin cinnati, a contest which became the storm center of Abolition influence for a year, and qualified public opinion ever after. I quote part of the account given by Oliver John son from his well-known volume on Gar rison and his time from which many of these illustrations are taken. Johnson was a right-hand man of Garrison s and at times was editor and co-editor of the Lib erator. He gave up his life to Anti-slavery, and is a fair example of the sort of man who came into existence, as if by miracle, when Garrison stamped his foot in 1830. " The founding of Lane Seminary, at the gateway of the great West, was a part of this plan, to extend the influence of Ortho doxy, and Dr. Beecher,* being generally * Rev. Lyman Beecher, father of Henry Ward Beecher and of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 66 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE recognized as the leader of New England Revivalism, and the strongest representa tive of the advanced school of Orthodoxy at that day, Mr. Tappan thought that he of all others was the man best fitted to train a body of ministers for the new field. The Doctor, after considerable delay, and to the great grief of his Boston church, accepted the appointment. Such was his fame that a large class of students, of unusual ma turity of judgment and ripeness of Chris tian experience, was at once attracted to the Seminary. In the literary and theological departments together, they numbered about one hundred and ten. Eleven of these were from different slave States; seven were sons of slaveholders; one was himself a slaveholder, and one had purchased his free dom from cruel bondage by the payment of a large sum of money, which he had earned by extra labor. Besides these there were ten others who had resided for longer or shorter periods in the slave States, and made careful observation of the character and workings of slavery. The youngest of these students was nineteen years of age ; most of those in the theological department were more than twenty-six, and several were over thirty. Most if not all of them 67 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON had been converted in the revivals of that period, and were filled with the revival spirit in which Dr. Beecher so much delighted. A more earnest and devoted band of stu dents was probably never gathered in any theological seminary. The Doctor had great pride as well as confidence in them." The students in this Seminary at Cincin nati were planning to form a Colonization Society, and Garrison s pamphlet being in the air, its arguments were being used to op pose the plan. The students therefore organized a nine days solemn debate upon the whole matter, with the result that Garrison and Immediate Emanci pation carried the day. In the meantime the country at large took an interest in the affair, and the press assailed the Seminary as a hotbed of Abolition. Dr. Lyman Beecher and the trustees were harried and threatened. The hearts of the Abolition ists were stirred to the depths. " In every part of the free States," says Oliver Johnson, " there were Christian men and godly women not a few, who prayed to God night and day that Lyman Beecher might be imbued with strength and courage to stand up nobly in the face of the storm that raged around him, and maintain the 68 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE right of his pupils, as candidates for the Christian ministry, to investigate and dis cuss the subject of slavery, and to bear their testimony against it as a sin, and & mighty hindrance to the spread of the Gospel." At last, the trustees of the Seminary, thinking to avoid the danger, forbade the students to discuss slavery at all even in private. The outcome was that seventy or eighty students resigned in a body. The institution was disgraced and wrecked; it never recovered from the experience. The greatest result of the episode, however, was this, that the young men who resigned be came, by force of circumstances, something like public characters. Their first step was a public one into the arena. They issued an appeal to the Christian public, and many of them went out into the world as protag onists of Abolition. Here was a miraculous draught indeed; for, of course, among them were men of mark; and Theodore D. Weld, the ring leader, was, as Johnson says, the peer of Beecher himself in native ability. Thus burst a seed-pod of Abolition. This propa- gative influence had been in Garrison s pamphlet. That pamphlet evoked, it elicited, it agitated. When we come later to review 69 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON Garrison s writings, let us remember what these writings accomplished. Let us re member that, however tedious this pamphlet on Colonization may seem to us, however dead it may fall, under criticism, to-day, it had this life-giving quality in its own time. Another of the early picturesque episodes of Anti-slavery history was the case of Pru dence Crandall. It set the world ringing, and caused new champions to step forward, fully armed, out of that mystical wood which ever fringes the open lawns where heroes are at combat. I again quote from Oliver Johnson: " In 1832, Prudence Crandall, a Quaker young woman of high character, established in Canterbury, Windham County, Conn., a school for young ladies. Now there was in that town a respectable colored farmer named Harris, who had a daughter, a bright girl of seventeen, who, having passed cred itably through one of the district schools, desired to qualify herself to be a teacher of colored children. She was a girl of pleas ing appearance and manners, a member of the Congregational church, and of a hue not darker than that of some persons who pass for white. Miss Crandall, good Quaker that she was, admitted this girl to 70 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE her school. The pupils, some of whom had been associated with her in the district school, made no objection; but some of the parents were offended, and demanded the removal of the dark-skinned pupil. Miss Crandall made a strong appeal in behalf of the girl, and did her best to overcome the prejudices of the objectors, but in vain. After reflection she came to the conclusion, from a sense of duty, to open her school to other girls of a dark complexion. The an nouncement of her purpose threw the whole town into a ferment. A town-meeting was held in the Congregational church, and so fierce was the excitement that the Rev. Samuel J. May and Mr. Arnold Buffum, the Quaker President of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, who had been deputed by Miss Crandall to speak for her, were denied a hearing." Why has this woman no tablet? Will the annals of Canterbury, Connecticut, show a more heroic figure during the next thou sand years that the hamlet waits to cele brate its patron saint? Had Prudence Crandall lived in the time of Diocletian, or in the time of Savonarola, or in the time of Garibaldi, she would have had a shrine to which Americans would have flocked to- WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON day. Not without immense influence was the stand she made. It cost two years of struggle, during which the Slave Power, as we have seen, passed such bills to suppress her as, in the rebound, weakened its hold on the people of the North. We now find it hard to imagine that, in 1834, it should have been a crime in Connecticut to give primary education to colored girls. Yet such was the case. Prudence Crandall was indicted. At her first trial there was a disagreement of the jury. Upon the second she was con victed. An appeal was thereupon taken and was followed by a disagreement among 1 the judges. Thereafter the matter was al lowed to drop, through the finding of a flaw in the indictment. All this, however, was not done in a corner, nor without the indignation of all warm-hearted people, nor without the exhibition of splendid legal ability on both sides of the contest. Im portant law-suits were the bull-fights of America before the war. This one called into being a new local newspaper, supported by Arthur Tappan, because the existing pa pers would publish only the Pro-slavery side of the contest. It called into activity also several new propagandists of the first order, 72 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE including C. C. Burleigh, who was turned from the career of a brilliant advocate and was transformed for life into an evangelist of liberty, through the courage of this woman. Her story showed the lengths to which the Slave Power not only would but could go at the North, and gave a glance into the burning pit, which even casual and callous persons could not forget. It was while this long contest was in progress that the National Anti-Slavery So ciety was formed by a meeting at Phila delphia of about sixty Abolitionists, from eleven states. How young these men were may be judged by the fact that forty-five of them survived to witness the emancipa tion of the slaves thirty years later. I quote a few paragraphs from Samuel J. May s reminiscences, which picture the state of mind of these men as their deliberations of several days drew to a close. The men had, for the most part, never seen each other before this meeting. A declaration of principles had been prepared. " Between twelve and one o clock," says Mr. May, " we repaired with the Declara tion to the hall. Edwin P. Atlee, the chair man, read it to the Convention. Never in my life have I seen a deeper impression 73 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON made by words than was made by that ad mirable document upon all who were there present. . . . "At the suggestion of an Orthodox brother, and without a vote of the Conven tion, our President himself, then an Ortho dox minister, readily condescended to the scruples of our Quaker brethren, so far as not to call upon any individual to offer prayer; but at the opening of our sessions each day he gave notice that a portion of time would be spent in prayer. Any one prayed aloud who was moved to do so. It was at the suggestion also of an Orthodox member that we agreed to dispense with all titles, civil or ecclesiastical. Accordingly, you will not find in the published minutes of the Convention appendages to any names, neither D. D., nor Rev., nor Hon., nor Esq., no, not even plain Mr. We met as fel low men, in the cause of suffering fellow men. . . . " I cannot describe the holy enthusiasm which lighted up every face as we gathered around the table on which the Declaration lay, to put our names to that sacred instru ment. It seemed to me that every man s heart was in his hand as if every one felt that he was about to offer himself a 74 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE living sacrifice in the cause of freedom, and to do it cheerfully. There are moments when heart touches heart, and souls flow into one another. That was such a moment. I was in them and they in me; we were all one. There was no need that each should tell the other how he felt and what he thought, for we were in each other s bos oms. I am sure there was not, in all our hearts, the thought of ever making violent, much less mortal, defense of the liberty of speech, or the freedom of the press, or of our own persons, though we foresaw that they all would be grievously outraged. Our President, Beriah Green, in his ad mirable closing speech, gave utterance to what we all felt and intended should be our course of conduct. He distinctly foretold the obloquy, the despiteful treatment, the bitter persecution, perhaps even the cruel deaths we were going to encounter in the prosecution of the undertaking to which we had bound ourselves." The age played its part quite handsomely in apportioning persecution to the new preachers of the Gospel. The case of Amos Dresser may be cited as a sample from Oliver Johnson: " Amos Dresser, a young theological stu- 75 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON dent (a native of Berkshire County, Mass.), went to Nashville, Tenn., in the summer of 1835, to sell the Cottage Bible/ His crime was that he was a member of an anti- slavery society, and that he had some anti- slavery tracts in his trunk. For this he was flogged in the public square of the city, under the direction of a Vigilance Commit tee, composed of the most distinguished cit izens, some of them prominent members of churches. He received twenty lashes on the bare back from a cowskin. On the previous Sunday he had received the bread and wine of the communion from the hands of one of the members of that Vigilance Committee! Another member of the Com mittee was a prominent Methodist, whose house was the resort of the preachers and bishops of his denomination." Now Dresser was a Massachusetts man. One wonders how the slaveholders would have behaved if a Southerner had, for any cause whatever, been treated in Massachu setts as Dresser was treated in Tennessee. But the North made no complaints. It is incredible and this is the difficulty which the whole epoch presents to us it is in credible that the earth should ever have nur tured such a race of cowards as the dom- 76 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE inant classes in our Northern States seem to have been. And yet we know they were no worse, nor very different from other persons recorded in history; they furnish merely an acute, recent example of how self-interest can corrupt character, of how tyranny can delude intellect. The suffer ings of such persons as Dresser are never lost. It required just such exhibitions as this to make the North see to what depths it had sunk. For many years, however, the North could draw no inference from such cases, except this : that persons like Dresser were misguided fools, who inter fered with matters best left alone. The next picture must be of another kind. It shall be of the young Puritan divine, Samuel J. May, a descendant of the Sewalls and Quincys and of all that Eighteenth Cen tury New England aristocracy of learning and virtue, which seems to have dwindled and withered in a single generation, and left except for one or two bright spirits nothing but shadow-characters, and feeble-natured persons on the stage. The occasion of May s conversion was Garrison s first Boston address, which was given in 1830 in Julien Hall, the hall being lent for the purpose by an associa- 77 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON tion of avowed infidels. Garrison had but recently denounced the principles of these men ; for at this time he was intensely ortho dox. The lesson in charity he thus re ceived from opponents must have been salutary, even to him. The whole inci dent, including May s conversion, shows how closely knitted together are all the lib eral impulses in a community. At this time May was thirty-three. His family be sought him to shun the new fanaticism ; but he put their counsels gently aside. May is the angel of Anti-slavery. He gives the following account of his conversion: " Presently the young man (Garrison) arose, modestly, but with an air of calm determination, and delivered such a lec ture as he only, I believe, at that time, could have written; for he only had had his eyes so anointed that he could see that outrages perpetrated upon Africans were wrongs done to our common humanity; he only, I believe, had had his ears so completely un stopped of prejudice against color that the cries of enslaved black men and black women sounded to him as if they came from brothers and sisters. " He began with expressing deep regret and shame for the zeal he had lately mani- 78 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE fested in the Colonization cause. It was, he confessed, a zeal without knowledge. He had been deceived by the misrepresenta tions so diligently given, throughout the free States by Southern agents, of the de sign and tendency of the Colonization scheme. During his few months residence in Maryland he had been completely unde ceived. He had there found out that the design of those who originated, and the es pecial intentions of those in the Southern States that engaged in the plan, were to re move from the country, as a disturbing element in slaveholding communities, all the free colored people, so that the bondmen might the more easily be held in subjection. He exhibited in graphic sketches and glow ing colors the suffering of the enslaved, and denounced the plan of Colonization as de vised and adapted to perpetuate the system, and intensify the wrongs of American slavery, and therefore utterly undeserving of the patronage of lovers of liberty and friends of humanity. " Never before was I so affected by the speech of man. When he had ceased speak ing I said to those around me : * That is a providential man; he is a prophet; he will shake our nation to its center, but he will 79 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON shake slavery out of it. We ought to know him, we ought to help him. Come, let us go and give him our hands/ Mr. Sewall and Mr. Alcott went up with me, and we introduced each other. I said to him : l Mr. Garrison, I am not sure that I can indorse all you have said this evening. Much of it requires careful consideration. But I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you are called to a great work and I mean to help you/ With a mind as acute as a lawyer s, and a spirit as unselfish as a seraph s, May plunged into the cause. It is he who ap peared upon the scene to protect and to repre sent Prudence Crandall at the meeting of her townsfolk which it was not safe for her to attend. It is he who has left us the best short book on the early years of the movement, from which book many of these illustrations are taken. He was of milder speech than Garrison. " O my friend," cried May at the close of an expostulation with Garrison, " do try to moderate your indignation, and keep more cool; why, you are all on fire." Garrison stopped, laid his hand on May s shoulder with a kind but emphatic pressure, and said slowly: " Brother May, I have need to be all on fire, 80 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE for I have mountains of ice about me to melt." "From that time to this," adds Mr. May, " I have never said a word to Mr. Garrison in complaint of his style. I am more than half satisfied that he was right then, and we who objected were mis taken." May was not so political-minded as Gar rison; he had not Garrison s strategic un derstanding of the fight, nor Garrison s gift of becoming the central whirpool of idea and of persecution. But he was the diviner spirit of the two. I do not think Garrison could have made the following appeal. It moves in a region of humility which is foreign to Garrison s nature, to his tactics and to his genius. Dr. Channing had been a family friend of the Mays, and had been particu larly kind to Samuel when the latter was a small boy. This affectionate relationship had never been shaken. The story must be told by May himself. " Late in the year 1834," says Mr. May, " being on a visit in Boston, I spent several hours with Dr. Channing in earnest conver sation upon Abolitionism and Abolitionists. My habitual reverence for him was such that I had always been apt to defer per haps too readily to his opinions, or not to 81 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON make a very stout defense of my own when they differed from his. But at the time to which I refer I had become so thoroughly convinced of the truth of the essential doc trines of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and so earnestly engaged in the dissemina tion of them that our conversation assumed, more than it had ever done, the character of a debate. He acknowledged the ines timable importance of the object we had in view. The evils of Slavery, he assented, could not be overstated. He allowed that removal to Africa ought not to be made a condition of the liberation of the enslaved. But he hesitated still to accept the doctrine of immediate emancipation. His principal objections, however, were alleged against the severity of our denunciations, the harshness of our epithets, the vehemence, heat, and excitement caused by the ha rangues at our meetings, and still more by Mr. Garrison s Liberator. The Doctor dwelt upon these objections, which, if they were as well founded as he assumed them to be, lay against what was only incidental, not an essential part of our movement. He dwelt upon them until I became impa tient, and, forgetting for the moment my wonted deference, I broke out with not a 82 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE little warmth of expression and manner: " * Dr. Channing, I said, I am tired of these complaints. The cause of suffering humanity, the cause of our oppressed, crushed colored countrymen, has called as loudly upon others as upon us Abolitionists. It was just as incumbent upon others as upon us to espouse it. We are not to blame that wiser and better men did not espouse it long ago. The cry of millions, suffering the cruel bondage in our land, had been heard for half a century and disregarded. " The wise and prudent " saw the terrible wrong, but thought it not wise and prudent to lift a finger for its correction. The priests and Levites beheld their robbed and wounded countrymen, but passed by on the other side. The children of Abraham held their peace, and at last " the very stones have cried out " in abhorrence of this tre mendous iniquity; and you must expect them to cry out like " the stones." You must not wonder if many of those who have been left to take up this great cause, do not plead it in all that seemliness of phrase which the scholars and practiced rhetori cians of our country might use. You must not expect them to manage with all the calmness and discretion that clergymen and 83 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON statesmen might exhibit. But the scholars, the statesmen, the clergy had done nothing, did not seem about to do anything; and for my part I thank God that at last any persons, be they who they may, have ear nestly engaged in this cause; for no move ment can be in vain. We Abolitionists are what we are babes, sucklings, obscure men, silly women, publicans, sinners, and we shall manage this matter just as might be expected of such persons as we are. It is unbecoming in abler men who stood by and would do nothing to complain of us because we do no better. " * Dr. Channing, I continued with in creased earnestness, it is not our fault that those who might have conducted this great reform more prudently have left it to us to manage as we may. It is not our fault that those who might have pleaded for the enslaved so much more wisely and elo quently, both with the pen and the living voice, than we can, have been silent. We are not to blame, sir, that you, who, more perhaps than any other man, might have so raised the voice of remonstrance that it should have been heard throughout the length and breadth of the land we are not to blame, sir, that you have not so 84 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE spoken. And now that inferior men have been compelled to speak and act against what you acknowledge to be an awful sys tem of iniquity, it is not becoming in you to complain of us because we do it in an inferior style. Why, sir, have you not taken this matter in hand yourself? Why have you not spoken to the nation long ago, as you, better than any other one, could have spoken ? " At this point I bethought me to whom I was administering this rebuke, the man who stood among the highest of the great and good in our land, the man whose reputation for wisdom and sanctity had be come world-wide, the man, too, who had ever treated me with the kindness of a father, and whom, from my childhood, I had been accustomed to revere more than any one living. I was almost overwhelmed with a sense of my temerity. His counte nance showed that he was much moved. I could not suppose he would receive all I had said very graciously. I waited his reply in painful expectation. The minutes seemed very long that elapsed before the silence was broken. Then in a very subdued manner and in the kindliest tones of his voice he said, * Brother May, I acknowledge the jus- 85 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON tice of your reproof. I have been silent too long. Never shall I forget his words, look and whole appearance. I then and there saw the beauty, the magnanimity, the humility of a truly great Christian soul. He was exalted in my esteem more even than before." Surely this is as moving an appeal as one man ever made to another; and the figures of May and Channing seem to stand as in a bas-relief symbolizing the old and the new generation. Are the caverns of Anti-slav ery controversy strewn with fragments of such marble as this ? I know that Emerson used to say that eloquence was dog-cheap at Anti-slavery meetings; but I did not expect to find gestures so sublime or episodes so moving. The figures of Hebrew history of Jacob and Joseph, of Nathan and David, of Hagar and Ishmael rise before us in their solemn, soul-subduing reality; and are one in spirit with these Anti-slavery scenes. My shelves are lined with books about Saint Francis of Assisi ; my walls are pa pered with photographs of men of genius in Florence, and of saints in Sienna. I desire also to remember the saints of New Eng land. We Americans are digging for art and for intellect in Troy, in Sardis and in 86 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE Egypt. Let us sometimes also dig in the old records of our own towns; and, while doing so, let us pray that mind be given us to understand what we bring to light. In the year following his interview with May (1836), Dr. Channing published his famous pamphlet on Slavery, which was of enormous value to the Anti-slavery cause, though it did not coincide with Abolition opinion. It condemned Slavery to heart s content, but did not advocate immediate ac tion. The engines of rationalism and the fountains of morality were by Channing turned upon the entire subject. This was no half -work: it was thorough. Chan ning s name carried the book into houses, both at the North and in the South where no Abolition literature could penetrate; and made it a mile-stone in the progress of Anti-slavery. Its most lasting im portance to posterity, however, is that it proves Channing s courage, and shows that his occasional subserviency toward his Trustees was not due to a defect in his na ture, but to a defect in his education, a de fect in his vision. Could the matter have been explained to his mind through the elaborate machinery of his own philosophy, he would have broken his chains. There 87 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON are plenty of people to whom the crucial problems of their own lives never get pre sented in terms that they can understand. Abolitionists were, of course, not satisfied with Channing s pamphlet ; for he could not sanction their views ; and indeed he repeated many of the commonplace charges against them, e. g., "that the Abolitionists exag gerated the importance of their cause; that they sent their literature to the slave; that their language was too violent/ etc. Most of these charges appear to-day to con tradict the main thesis of the book, and to record merely the nervous petulance of that age. The Slave Barons and their Boston friends were cut to the heart by Channing s essay. They denounced him as an even more dangerous enemy than Garrison. If, at times, we feel dissatisfied with Chan ning s caution, we should remember that he was a middle-aged man when these prob lems arose. Channing was born in 1780; and Anti-slavery was an agony in the blood of young men, in 1829. I have referred to John Quincy Adams detestation of slavery. He was, however, never an Abolitionist, and he did not even favor the abolition of slavery in the District PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE of Columbia. For this latter opinion he had the most fantastic reason; namely that, al though the residents of the District had no votes, and were governed by Congress, nev ertheless he felt himself to be all the more bound in honor to act during his term in Congress as if he were the representative chosen by the people of that District; that is, to act according to what he knew to be the will of his quasi constituents. But, for his real constituents he held no such rever ence, and in his dealings with them he was governed by his own conscience. Such are the vagaries of men. The romantic, extravagant nature of this man was, at an early age, put in irons to law, diplomacy, politics, and administrative duty. He was a born agitator, who ap peared at a time when his peculiar talents were not demanded by the age. In John Quincy Adams boyhood all the talents and energies of this country were required for the assembling, setting in motion, and keep ing together of the machineries of our new Government. There was no demand for an agitator, whose function is always to dis place, to disperse, and to pull apart. And thus it happened with John Quincy Adams I that he was never young till he was old. I 89 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON The opportunity to exercise his extraordi nary talents for agitation came when he took his seat in Congress toward the close of his long, brilliant career. He proceeded to focus the entire attention of the country upon one or two points of parliamentary procedure. Now an agitator is a man who is willing to make use of the members of government, not only for the various purposes for which they are framed, as, e. g., the Legislature to legislate, the Judiciary to adjudicate, the Executive to administer, etc., but this man makes use of any or all of them as a ma chine to spread an idea. He uses the forms of government as an educational apparatus. The branch of the Anti-slavery cause which it became Adams fate to develop, was the conflict between Slavery and the right to petition. The policy of the Slave Power was to smother all petitions upon the sub ject of Slavery which came before Con gress, by laying them upon the table unread. During half a dozen years Adams fought this fight practically alone. If we picture to ourselves a man who had grown up with the country, who had the most intimate recondite, passionate knowledge of its con stitutional law, dedicating himself to the 90 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE plainest proposition regarding free speech, and proclaiming it in the face of a howling but comparatively unlettered majority, who seethed, and raged, and raved about him like the waves about a light-house we have John Quincy Adams at an age of over seventy, presenting the Abolition petitions in Congress. His figure is part of the Anti- slavery struggle. It is clear to our instinct that if Adams did not have Abolition in his veins, he had something almost as good; he had the thing that Abolition was the sign of, namely, courage. His peculiar kind of courage was, in one sense, not as good as Abolition ; for it was not an elixir. It would never have abolished slavery : it was not self- perpetuating. It would have died with him. Yet the passion within- him, which he cloaked under the name of Free Speech, was in reality the Will to Pity, the Will to Love, the Will to express freely that emotional side of man s nature with which he himself was so richly endowed. This is why the last page of this man s life lifts him into a new kind of greatness. It makes no dif ference what he did before this era. His service to the Abolition cause was propor tionate to his position. His conduct showed! the country what slavery pointed to, and 91 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON demonstrated also the conservative nature of Abolition. It showed that Abolition was at one with the foundations of society. The aristocracy of Boston, during these years, regarded John Quincy Adams as an enfant terrible; but the people of Massa chusetts stood by him and, in the end, ral lied to congratulate him at a monster meet ing. Human nature could not withhold its tribute of admiration. George Thompson, an Englishman, whose life had been devoted to the cause of Anti- slavery in the British colonies, and who was one of the greatest popular orators of that day, had done more than any one man to abolish West Indian Slavery; and it was natural that Garrison, who went to England in 1833 for conference with the victorious British Abolition ists, should enlist Thompson in the Ameri can cause and bring him to America. Upon the passage of the Act abolishing Slavery in the West Indies, Lord Brougham had risen in the House of Lords and said : " I rise to take the crown of this most glorious vic tory from every other head, and place it upon George Thompson s. He has done more than any other man to achieve it." One can imagine how the Americans of 92 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE 1833, who set a price on the heads of their own compatriots when they were Abolition ists, would welcome the most powerful, the most popular living advocate of the hated cause a stranger and an Englishman. Thompson was mobbed and hounded, threat ened, insulted, and would have been killed if fate had assisted ever so little by lending the opportunity. I shall content myself with giving Mr. May s description of Thompson s eloquence. " Mr. Thompson then went on to give us a graphic, glowing account of the long and fierce conflict they had had in England for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. His eloquence rose to a still higher order. His narrative became a continuous metaphor, admirably sustained. He repre sented the Anti-slavery enterprise in which he had been so long engaged as a stout, well- built ship, manned by a noble-hearted crew, launched upon a stormy ocean, bound to carry inestimable relief to 800,000 sufferers in a far-distant land. He clothed all kinds of opposition they had met, all the difficul ties they had contended with, in imagery suggested by the observation and experience of the voyager across the Atlantic in the most tempestuous season of the year. In 93 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON the height of his descriptions, my attention was withdrawn from the emotions enkindled in my own bosom sufficiently to observe the effect of his eloquence upon half a dozen boys, of twelve or fourteen years of age, sit ting together not far from the platform. They were completely possessed by it. When the ship reeled or plunged or stag gered in the storms, they unconsciously went through the same motions. W r hen the enemy attacked her, the boys took the live liest part in battle manning the guns, or handing shot and shell, or pressing forward to repulse the boarders. When the ship struck upon an iceberg, the boys almost fell from their seats in the recoil. When the sails and topmasts were well-nigh carried away by the gale, they seemed to be strain ing themselves to prevent the damage; and when at length the ship triumphantly sailed into her destined port with colors flying and signals of glad tidings floating from her topmast, and the shout of welcome rose from thousands of expectant freedmen on the shore, the boys gave three loud cheers, Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! This irre pressible explosion of their feelings brought them at once to themselves. They blushed, 94 PICTURES OF THE STRUGGLE covered their faces, sank down on their seats, one of them upon the floor." It was one thing for the American to thrill for the liberty of Greece, Poland, or Hun gary; and another to allow foreign enthu siasts to thrill over American Anti-slavery. Thompson was marked for assassination and kidnapping; and a gibbet was erected for him in Boston. It was Thompson whom the mob were in search of when they caught Garrison at the meeting of the Female Anti- slavery Society, soon to be described. The impertinence of Thompson consisted in his being a foreigner, and this fact played upon the peculiar American weakness our sen sitiveness to foreign opinion. " He comes here from the dark corrupt institutions of Europe," said Mr. Sprague in Faneuil Hall, " to enlighten us upon the rights of man and the moral duties of our own condition. Re ceived by our hospitality, he stands here upon our soil, protected by our laws, and hurls firebrands, arrows and death into the habitations of our neighbors, and friends, and brothers; and when he shall have kindled a conflagration which is sweep ing in desolation over the land, he has only to embark for his own country, and there 95 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON look serenely back with indifference or ex ultation upon the widespread ruin by which our cities are wrapt in flames, and our gar ments rolled in blood. ... If the storm comes, we must abide its pelting; if convul sions come, we must be in the midst of them. To us, then, it belongs to judge of the ex igencies of our own condition, to provide for our own safety, and perform our own duties without the audacious interference of for eign emissaries." I am grateful to this man, George Thomp son. He stood for courage in 1835 in Mas sachusetts. He typified courage also at a later time during the Civil War when he stood with John Bright and W. E. Forster as the expounders of the cause of the North before the people of Great Britain. He was one of the friends of the United States to whom it is due that England s governing classes did not assist the South openly, and thereby give rise to an age-long, never-dying antagonism between England and America. I am glad that George Thompson lived to be thanked by Lincoln and his Cab inet, and to be ceremoniously received in a House of Representatives thronged with the best intellects arid hearts in America. V THE CRISIS I HAVE given the foregoing sketches almost at random, and, where possible, in the words of others, in order to call up the decade be tween 1830 and 1840 without myself feeling the responsibility of a historian, and without asking the reader to give a chronological at tention. Facts often speak for themselves more truly, the less we explain them; and the philosophy of history is perhaps a delu sion. It was between 1830 and 1840 that the real work of Garrison was done. At the beginning of that decade Abolition was a cry in the wilderness : at the end of it, Ab olition was a part of the American mind. Garrison s occupation throughout the epoch was to tend his engine his Liberator and to assist in the formation of Anti-slavery societies. Every breath of the movement was chronicled in the Liberator, every new convert wrote to Garrison for help. Gar-L rison was the focus, the exchange, the center f 97 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON and heart of Anti-slavery activity. He was the channel into which the new streams flowed. If a drop of Abolition fell from the sky anywhere in America, it was found in the Liberator upon the following morn ing. This drawing of the new men into a knowledge of each other made magical heat. Every Abolition act or thought went im mediately into the general Abolition con sciousness. It was Garrison who caused the heat-lightning of 1825 to turn into the thun derbolts of 1835. His gift of doing this was his greatness. We must imagine Garrison then, as always, behind and underneath the ma chinery and in touch with all the forces at work, writing away at his terrible Lib erator fomenting, rebuking, retorting, supporting, expounding, thundering, scold ing. The continuousness of Garrison is ap palling, and fatigues even the retrospective imagination of posterity: he is like an all- night hotel : he is possessed : he is like some thing let loose. I dread the din of him. I cover my head and fix my mind on other things; but there is Garrison hammering away, till he catches my eye and forces me to attend to him. If Garrison can do this to me, who am protected from dread of him by 98 THE CRISIS eighty years of intervening time, think how his lash must have fallen upon the thin skins of our ancestors ! Garrison, then, and his propaganda went forward; the South under its resentment swelled and fretted, and every phase of the matter was day by day recorded in the Lib erator, which remains as the inexhaustible coal-bed and historical deposit of these things. Every leaf and twig, every letter, every quarrel, every prayer, is here pre served in the immortality of petrifac tion. To be in himself the focalization and to leave behind him the fossilization of that wonderful epoch was Garrison s function. The crisis in the struggle came in 1835-6, when a great attempt was seriously made by the whole organized force of the Slave Power to put down the Abolitionists. This suppression was to be done in the or dinary, historic way through laws to be made against them, and through violence, where law fell short. It will be seen in an instant that law was, throughout, on the side of the Abolitionists; and this is the reason why the violence was so great. The South could not get at Garrison through sheriffs and jailers. Therefore it was 99 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON tempted to resort to riots and extra-legal ter rorism. It was lured into the fabrication of myths as for instance, the myth that the constitution protected slavery against ad verse opinion, the myth that the Abolition ists favored slave-insurrection, the myth that the language of the Abolitionists was so extreme as to make them the enemies of so ciety, the exceedingly absurd myth that to send Anti-slavery publications through the United States mails directed to adult white men in the South was, somehow, an atro cious outrage. The truth is that between 1830 and 1835, the element of passion was rising past the danger point, and running into something like insanity in the Southern mind. A mad man believes his own logic, and ever drives it further. The failure of law to protect the South left no accurate demarcation as to their demands. At the beginning, the slaveholders protested that Garrison should be silenced, because he was a fanatic ; but be fore long they were demanding that the Abolitionists should be hanged, and were mingling the name of Channing in their execrations. In the beginning they de manded only to be let alone ; but before long they were swearing that the South should 100 THE CRISIS buy and sell slaves underneath Bunker Hill monument. This tidal fury could not be conciliated. Anything that threatened the existence of Slavery stimulated the fury and the time had come when all nature began to threaten Slavery. Slavery began, in fact, to stalk abroad and horrify the world : Slavery came out of its lair. At first there were meetings in the South, destruction of Abolition liter ature in the mails; then white Vigilance Committees, and State Legislatures called, in chorus, upon the North to stop the plague of Abolition by the enactment of stringent laws against the reformers. A giant dem onstration was planned by the friends of the South to take place at Faneuil Hall in Boston 1500 names being appended to the call for the meeting. This meeting was to demonstrate the good faith of the North towards the slaveholders, and to give public opinion a set towards the enactment of criminal statutes against Anti-slavery. The meeting was a tremendous success and proved to be a sort of " view-halloo " for Slavery. It was naturally followed by an increase of riots and mob violence against the Abolitionists. The most important of the new ebullitions was the so called Boston 101 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON mob (October 21, 1835), which led Garri son about with a rope round him and might easily have ended in his death. Gen eral Jackson, the President of the United States, referred to the recent Pro-slavery demonstration at the North in his Message to Congress, in December, 1835. " It is fortunate for the country," he says, " that the good sense, the generous feeling, and the deep-rooted attachment of the peo ple of the non-slaveholding States to the Union, and to their fellow citizens of the same blood in the South, have given so strong and impressive a tone to the senti ments entertained against the proceedings of the misguided persons who have engaged in these unconstitutional and wicked attempts [ to circulate through the mails inflamma tory appeals addressed to the passions of the slaves ]." Here was support from high quarters. It was not till January, 1836, that the time came for Edward Everett, Governor of Massachusetts, to take notice of the entreat ies of the Southern States. In his Message to the Massachusetts Legislature he intimated that the Abolitionists could be punished un der the law as it stood : because " whatever by direct and necessary operation is calcula- 102 THE CRISIS ted to excite insurrection among slaves may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common law." This part of his Message was re ferred to a joint Committee of Five of the Legislature, together with the Southern en treaties. It was in the hearings before this committee, that the work was done which put an end to Southern hopes of enslaving Massachusetts. The great attempt was foiled. The South had done its utmost to suppress Abolition, and had failed. After this time, Abolition is in the field as an ac cepted fact. Within eight years thereafter, in 1844, Birney was nominated for the Presidency as the candidate of a third party. We must think of this whole Southern movement as a big, mountainous wave, in volving multitudinous lesser waves and ed dies, which, as it rolled forward and surged back, created complex disturbances, all inter locked with one another. The power of the South was exerted over the President at Washington and over the ruffian on the street corner, and it was all one power, one pull together, one control. Let us take a rapid but clear glance over certain stages of the movement which have already been men tioned. The popular feeling at the South, which was the motive power of the whole 103 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON affair, may be illustrated in a paragraph from the Richmond Whig: "Let the hell-hounds of the North be ware. Let them not feel too much security in their homes, or imagine that they who throw firebrands, although from, as they think, so safe a distance, will be permitted to escape with impunity. There are thousands now animated with a spirit to brave every danger to bring these felons to justice on the soil of the Southern States, whose women and children they have dared to endan ger by their hell-concocted plots. We have feared that Southern exasperation would seize some of the prime conspirators in their very beds, and drag them to meet the pun ishment due their offenses. We fear it no longer. We hope it may be so, and our ap plause as one man shall follow the success ful enterprise." This then is the outer ring of fiery feeling which dreamed of moving Northward and doing, it knew not what, to put down Aboli tion. The spirit of violence, as shown, for instance, in the breaking into of the United States Post-office at Charleston, S. C, and the seizing of Abolition newspapers for a bonfire, was redoubled by the attitude of the Federal authorities. The United States 104 THE CRISIS Postmaster-General, Amos Kendall, a Mas sachusetts man, approved the deed. Now, the only reason why riots do not occur every day, accompanied by destruction of property and injury to unoffending persons, is that the strong arm of law and order is against the ubiquitous loafer and ruffian. Once let this gentleman see a chance of riot ing with impunity, and he instantly appears and riots. How easily then did disturb ances follow when State and National of ficials, as well as the rich and respectable classes, gave the cue. The average man at the time we are chronicling really believed that the Abolitionist was a criminal in es sence, and ought to be proclaimed as such by law. The Anti-slavery writers, in describing this period, use the terminology of fiercer times. Harriet Martineau calls it a " Mar tyr Age," and we constantly hear of the " reign of terror " in 1835. Now the term " persecution " is apt to call up in our minds the fiercest images of history, scenes of bloodshed and tyranny, combats with wild beasts in the amphitheater, executions in the market-place, men driven to hide in caves in the rocks, etc. The unpleasantnesses and injustices to which the Abolitionists were 105 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON subjected never justified a literal appli cation of the terms " martyr," " reign of terror," etc. ; but the word " persecution " is most aptly used to describe their sufferings, if we reflect that there are persecutions which do not result in death. Prudence Crandall was certainly persecu ted; the Abolitionist was harassed and his life was made as uncomfortable as the law would permit. The outrages, both legal and extra-legal, which fell upon Anti-slavery people, may be studied at leisure in the press of the time. They lie upon any page of the history of that day. The following are severe cases. They are mentioned in the large life of Garrison: " Dr. Reuben Crandall, a perfectly inno cent man and younger brother of Prudence Crandall, was thrown into a noisome jail in Georgetown, in the District of Columbia, on a charge of circulating Tappan, Garrison & Company s papers, encouraging the negroes to insurrection/ for which a mob would fain have lynched him. ... It was nearly a year before he was brought to trial, and meantime his health had been ruined." " Five thousand dollars were offered on the Exchange in New York for the head of Arthur Tappan on Friday last," writes 106 THE CRISIS Henry Benson to Garrison. " Elizur Wright is barricading his house with shut ters, bars and bolts/ " How imminent is the danger that hovers about the persons of our friends, George Thompson and Arthur Tappan ! " writes Garrison to George Benson. " Rewards for the seizure of the latter are multiplying in one place they offer three thousand dol lars, for his t ears a purse has been made up, publicly, of $20,000, in New Orleans for his person. I, too, I desire to bless God, am involved in almost equal peril. I have just received a letter written evidently by a friendly hand, in which I am apprised that my life is sought after, and a reward of $20,000 has been offered for my head by six Mississippians. He says Beware of the assassin ! May God protect you ! and signs himself A Marylander, and a resi dent of Philadelphia/ " Typical cases were the town-meeting appointment of a vigilance committee to prevent Anti-slavery meetings in Canaan, N. H. ; the arrest of the Rev. George Storrs, at Northfield, in the same State, in a friendly pulpit, at the close of a discourse on slavery, as a common brawler/ and his subsequent sentence by a justice of the peace to hard 107 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON labor in the House of Correction for three months (not sustained on appeal) ; and the repeated destruction of Birney s Philan thropist printing-office by the gentlemen of property and standing in Cincinnati an outrage bearing a close resemblance to that engendered by the Faneuil Hall meeting, and ending in a midnight raid upon the colored homes of the city, with the connivance of the mayor." As for mere social ostracism, the refusal on the part of Beacon Street to ask Wendell Phillips to dinner, the black-balling at the Clubs in New York of distinguished Aboli tionists, the Muse of History cannot re cord these things among her tragedies. We have seen, in the case of Henry I. Bowditch and his walk with Douglass, upon what plane the drama moved. It was a drama of char acter, rather than a drama of blood. The Anti-slavery people are, however, not inexcusable in calling this epoch " the reign of terror." It was, at any rate, a reign of brickbats and anathema, which developed here and there into tarring and feathering and murder. The reason why it did not turn into a veritable reign of terror, a time of proscription and execution, is that the middle classes at the North awoke out of 108 THE CRISIS their lethargy, and protected the reformers instead of oppressing them. The passions were there ; the introverted enthusiasm of the South and the martyr spirit of the Abolition ist were there. There also was the pliant tool between them the Northern business man. This tool, however, broke. The great meeting in Faneuil Hall, al ready spoken of, a meeting attended by nu merous Southerners who made the journey to Boston on purpose, represents the apogee of the Sun of Liberty in America. In con sidering this meeting we are again baffled by the strangeness of its historic atmosphere; the low pulse of the Northerner is a puzzle to us. It is easy to understand and sym pathize with the Southern tiger bereft of his prey, and with the Northern lamb who lifts up his voice for justice before being de voured. The first is the typical tyrant, and the second the typical saint. The conduct, however, of the Massachusetts Philistine, who looks like an educated gentleman and acts the part of a terrified servant, is a dif ficult thing to understand. We can get a sidelong glimpse into the mystery by remem bering how people behave in moments of panic with what meanness, with what ir rational thoughtlessness, with what denial of 109 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON their true selves. Now the Massachusetts statesmen, business men, and persons of dis tinction and wealth, had lived for years in a state of continuous panic. This had shred ded them into spectres. It is quite true that there was a spiritual " reign of terror " at this epoch, a terror which intimately affected all classes, and the Abolitionists phrase is thus truer than it seemed. Peleg Sprague, one of Massachusetts most distinguished men, a United States Senator and former Congressman, and a thoroughly representative mouthpiece of the Conservative classes at the North, spoke as follows at the memorable Pro-slavery meet ing in Faneuil Hall: " Time was, when ... the generous and gallant Southrons came to our aid, and our fathers refused not to hold communion with slaveholders. . . . When He, that slaveholder (pointing to the full-length por trait of Washington), who from this can vas smiles upon you his children with paternal benignity, came with other slave holders to drive the British myrmidons from this city and this hall, our fathers did not re fuse to hold communion with him or them. With slaveholders they formed the Confed eration, neither asking nor receiving any no THE CRISIS right to interfere in their domestic relations ; with them they made the Declaration of In dependence, coming from the pen of that other slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson, a name dear to every friend of human rights. And in the original draft of that Declara tion was contained a most eloquent passage upon this very topic of negro slavery, which was stricken out in deference to the wishes of members from the South." There is something about this language so far removed from good sense that it gives us pause. That something is the influence of terror. Mr. Harrison Gray Otis, who moved on a still higher social plane than Sprague, nay, who stood very near the gods in the imagination of Bostonians, spoke as follows : " I deny that any body of men can law fully associate for the purpose of undermin ing, more than for overthrowing, the gov ernment of our sister States. There may be no statute to make such combinations penal, because the offense is of a new com plexion." Mr. Otis found an even stronger objec tion to the Society in " its evident direction towards becoming a political association, whose object it will be, and whose tendency in WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON now is, to bear directly upon the ballot-boxes and to influence the elections," as in the re cent case of Abbott Lawrence. " How soon might you see a majority in Congress re turned under the influence of (Anti-slavery) associations ? " Otis reasoning here is the chattering of teeth. "The ballot-box and election!" why not ? The slavery issue to come into politics who can prevent it? Where are we? Who is talking? Have I read that sentence aright? Such questions go through one s mind no matter how often one re-reads these speeches. It must be con fessed that a city is not far from chaos when so much passion and so faint a rationality can go forth as the voice of her powerful classes, and of her educated men. The situ ation was greatly alleviated by the good sense and calmness of the Abolitionists ; for although Garrison s language was generally blatant, his conduct was invariably exem plary; and the reformers course of action in legal and legislative maneuvering was often brilliant in the extreme. The Boston Abolitionists behaved during this trying season with circumspection. After the Faneuil Hall demonstration, Mayor Lyman, who had presided at that 112 THE CRISIS meeting, had, in a courteous if not friendly manner, privately counseled them to dis continue their meetings while the public mind was so heated, at the same time assur ing them that he would protect them in their rights if they chose to exercise them. They therefore held only their constitutional meetings ; and it was one of these which fell due on Wednesday, October 14, the an niversary of the formation of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. This meeting was postponed and duly advertised for Octo ber 21, 1835. On that day a Pro-slavery mob, organized by newspaper men and busi ness men, and composed of from two to five thousand particularly respectable persons, was got together for the purpose of tarring and feathering George Thompson, who was believed to be at the meeting. As Thomp son was not to be found, the mob cried out for Garrison. It surged into the women s meeting where Garrison was. For some time the thirty women went forward with their prayers and proceedings while the mob howled upon them. Garrison left the meet ing in order to protect it, but could not es cape from the building on account of the crowd. He therefore retreated across the hall to the Anti-slavery office which hap- 113 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON pened to be in the same building. Thither the crowd followed him. " An assault," according to Garrison s ac count of the matter, " was now made upon the door of the office, the lower panel of which was instantly dashed to pieces. Stooping down and glaring upon me as I sat at the desk, writing an account of the riot to a distant friend, the ruffians cried out There he is ! That s Garrison ! Out with the scoundrel ! etc., etc. Turning to Mr. Burleigh, I said * You may as well open the door, and let them come in and do their worst. But he, with great presence of mind, went out, locked the door, put the key in his pocket, and by his admirable firmness succeeded in keeping the office safe." Mayor Lyman now appeared upon the scene, and prevailed upon the women to adjourn. They passed down the staircase " amid manifestations of revengeful bru tality " and so, in a close column, to the house of Francis Jackson, a new and power ful recruit to their cause. Mayor Lyman now had to deal with the mob. Their at tention had been attracted to the Anti-slav ery sign board and Mayor Lyman permitted its demolition by the crowd, a betrayal of his trust as custodian of property and of the 114 THE CRISIS peace which Garrison never forgave. The Mayor thereupon devoted his energies to helping Garrison to make good his escape from the mob. Garrison was induced to get out of a rear window, and one of the sheriffs, in order to persuade the crowd to disperse, announced that Garrison had es caped. The crowd, however, got on his track and followed after him. It came up with him in a carpenter s shop. The crowd was made up of both friends and foes. " On seeing me/ continues Garrison, " three or four of the rioters, uttering a yell, furiously dragged me to the window, with the intention of hurling me from that height to the ground; but one of them relented and said Don t let us kill him outright. So they drew me back, and coiled a rope about my body probably to drag me through the streets. I bowed to the mob, and re questing them to wait patiently until I could descend, went down upon a ladder that was raised for that purpose. I fortunately ex tricated myself from the rope, and was seized by two or three powerful men, to whose firmness, policy, and muscular energy I am probably indebted for my preservation. They led me along bareheaded (for I had us WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON lost my hat), through a mighty crowd, ever and anon shouting, He shan t be hurt ! You shan t hurt him! Don t hurt him! He is an American/ etc., etc. This seemed to excite sympathy among many in the crowd, and they reiterated the cry, He shan t be hurt! " At this point we will turn to Charles Bur- leigh s tale : " Going to the Post-office, I saw the crowd pouring out from Wilson s Lane into State Street with a deal of clamor and shouting, and heard the exulting cry, * They ve got him they ve got him/ And so, sure enough, they had. The tide set to ward the south door of the City Hall, and in a few minutes I saw Garrison between two men who held him and led him along, while the throng pressed on every side, as if eager to devour him alive. His head was bare, his face a little more highly colored than in his most tranquil moments, as if flushed by moderate exercise, and his counte nance composed." In the upshot, Mayor Lyman s efforts to save him were successful ; and Garrison was forthwith jailed for the night as a disturber of the peace. Throughout this episode Garrison acted with wisdom and courage. Had he behaved in any different manner, had he shown fight, 116 THE CRISIS i as Love joy did at Alton, had his followers! become exasperated, bloodshed would prob-; ably have followed and the whole contro-J versy in Boston would thenceforth have been overcast by the spirit of civil war. The thing to be noted is that Garrison s conduct during this mob was an exemplification of the whole Anti-slavery policy, which had been fully set out in the documents and liter ature of the movement during the preceding five years. Moral agitation with no resort to force, no resistance to force, was the Ab olition watchword. When a whole age is completely insane upon some subject, sane views upon that subject will seem like madness to the age. It was thus perfectly normal that the as sembly of moderate and holy persons who met in Philadelphia to form the national Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, and parted, as we have seen, with tears and prayers, should have been both watched and guarded by the police. These men seemed to that age like dangerous malefactors. So also was it accordant with spiritual law that Garrison should have been shut up as a rioter on the night following the Boston mob. He was a man of little humor where his principles were at stake, and could see nothing in the WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON arrest but a ghastly paradox; whereas in reality that arrest is a charming epitome of the times. How much danger was Garrison in while being dragged and hustled through the streets of Boston? Was there a pot of hot tar and a bath of feathers waiting at some convenient corner, which would have been produced and set in operation on the Com mon, but for Mayor Lyman s timely inter ference? Very likely there was. There seems to have been a plan to maltreat Thompson, which plan was divulged to the public through broadsides and to Garrison through anonymous letters, one of the let ters being friendly. We see the Garrison mob to-day as the sticking-point of violence in Boston. We know that this mob was not followed by a series of mobs. We see that it did no damage to speak of ; and there fore we cannot help thinking of it as a harm less affair. But a mob has always some thing devilish and incalculable in its action, and a mob led by gentlemen, a mob in which the ruffian saw that he was supported by the Bank President, and that no prosecution could possibly follow in the wake of the day, might be the most dangerous of all mobs. The experience of Birney and his press in 118 THE CRISIS Ohio, of Lovejoy and his press in Illinois, the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in Phila delphia and countless other acts of violence show that the Abolitionists did right to be alarmed. As a matter of fact they were seriously frightened. Though Garrison and the ladies put on as bold a front as they could, they did not feel like shaking hands with their old friend Mayor Lyman and regard ing that mob as a joke. There was, after all, a real and terrific force at the back of the mob. It was the mob of the Richmond Whig, of the Faneuil Hall Pro-Slavery meet ing. The Southern fire had moved North, and seemed to encircle the Anti-slavery agi tators. The " gentlemen of property and standing " to use the pompous newspaper phrase of the day who led the mob, were actuated by one of the major passions of hu manity defense of property. For in a big sense, in a metaphorical sense, the South was right ; and all this Abolition movement was a servile uprising. The slave heart and soul had somehow come into com munion with the Anti-slavery heart and soul, and together they were generating an earth quake beneath the slaver s feet. This whole religious message is mirrored in 119 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON " Uncle Tom s Cabin," a book which it took twenty years of Abolition to make the soil for. " Uncle Tom s Cabin " appeared in 1852 and is to-day our key to that whole epoch : but the vision of that book was in the heart of the Anti-slavery people long before. They gave that vision to the world ; they gave it to Harriet Beecher. The pic tures and thoughts of " Uncle Tom s Cabin " were sown into the mind of Harriet Beecher as a child; the emotion of it was generated in 1829. And so the early instinct to put down this whole movement as a servile in surrection had justification in fact. As a general rule servile insurrections are put down by officials; by judges, sheriffs and troops. Historic reasons made this course not feasible at the North. Therefore the deluded upper classes of Boston, who had thrown in their fortunes with slavery, did what all determined men do when law fails them they took the field personally. The women who marched through the rioters trembled with antagonism, if not with fear. One of them wrote afterwards: " When we emerged into the open day light, there went up a roar of rage and con tempt, which increased when they saw that we did not intend to separate, but walked 120 THE CRISIS in regular procession. They slowly gave way as we came out. As far as we could look either way the crowd extended evi dently of the so-called * wealthy and respect able/ the moral worth/ the influence and standing/ We saw the faces of those we had, till now, thought friends; men whom we never before met without giving the hand in friendly salutation; men whom till now we should have called upon for con demnation of ruffianism, with confidence that the appeal would be answered." There is something old-world, something more like the Eighteenth Century than the Nineteenth in this scene ; I would not miss it out of our history. But the people who took part in it could never think of it lightly. It was too real, too fierce, too dangerous. The mob was too near, and its genteel char acter was unpleasant. I have at times thought that the Anti-slavery people were almost ungrateful to Theodore Lyman. To them he was a man who had not done his duty; he should have protected their sign. He should have defied and dispersed the rioters, instead of conciliating the mob and dispersing the ladies meeting. He should have jailed the ringleaders in the riot and conducted Garrison in safety to his home. 121 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON And yet, for an official during a great mania, and for a man by nature timid during a riot, he seems to me to have done fairly well. He appeared upon the scene of conflict, and in the end saved Garrison from the clutches of the mob. The Abolitionists, like lawyers in a jury case, never missed a point; and the points against Lyman were obvious. He was a pawn in their demonstration. It was their function to throw up a clear sil houette of the times, and to show just how far Theodore Lyman had fallen short of efficient courage, and Boston, of liberty. We cannot hold them to the historic per spective, nor expect them to display a ju dicial temper upon the matter. I myself, however, feel grateful to Ly man for saving Garrison; though I also re spect Garrison for not altering his criticism by an iota because of the personal question. He could not step aside for a moment and play the part of philosophic spectator. As well expect a point which is moving in a curve in obedience to an alge braical formula to change its course for reasons of politeness. Let us not forget that all these people were wound up, and that each man and each group of men in the struggle was following a track like one of 122 THE CRISIS the heavenly bodies; being governed by a logic, unseen, mighty, and terrible, leading to greater things. The Boston mob gives a barometrical rec ord of conditions in the North in 1835. Every village had its Garrison, its Mayor Lyman, its Francis Jackson. Moved by the spectacle of Garrison s persecution, Charles Sumner, Henry I. Bowditch, and Wendell Phillips became converts to the cause. Every village in the North after October 21, produced its Bowditch, its Sum ner, its Phillips. There were now six State and three hundred auxiliary Anti-slavery societies, all formed since 1831. "So then," comments Garrison, " we derive from our opponents these instructive but paradox ical facts that without numbers, we are multitudinous; that without power, we are sapping the foundations of the Confederacy; that without a plan, we are hastening the abolition of slavery; and without reason or talent we are rapidly converting the nation." For the second time within three months it became wise for Garrison to leave Bos ton. His landlord, quite naturally, feared for the safety of his house. The printing- office of the Liberator was closed, and the 123 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON work was done clandestinely elsewhere. During this winter the Abolitionists kept rather quiet ; but they emerged in the spring to attend the Lunt Committee that Com mittee appointed by Governor Everett to con sider the requests from Southern legislatures that Massachusetts should do something to suppress Anti-slavery. The first hearing in the matter was held on March 4th, 1836, at the State House. The audience was so large that the Hall of the House of Representa tives had to be used. Many women, includ ing Harriet Martineau, were there, and the social, political and mercantile classes of Boston were represented. When the meet ing came to order Samuel J. May set forth the history of Abolition and showed the mildness of its methods. Ellis Gray Lor- ing, one of the earliest aristocrats to join the cause, reviewed the perfect legality of the ideals and conduct of the Anti-slavery societies. The gentle Charles Pollen, a learned and saintly man, began to expound the rights of man and to explain to the Com mittee the natural sequence of cause and ef fect which existed between the Faneuil Hall Pro-slavery meeting in August and the treat ment of Garrison by the mob in October. Chairman Lunt, who seems to have been a 124 THE CRISIS narrow partisan who little understood the issue under discussion, and who thought it his duty towards his constituents to brow beat the reformers, declined to allow Pollen to pursue this line of argument. The Abo litionists, upon this rebuff, brought the hear ing promptly to a close, asserting that they must be allowed to make their own argu ments or none. They immediately peti tioned the Legislature for permission to argue their own case in their own way be fore the Committee. This militant front assumed by the little body of Protestants was a very able piece of tactics. Their real appeal was, of course, directed to the grand public not to the public of the city of Boston, but to the people of the State of Massachusetts who were watching the whole proceeding with passionate interest. Would the Legislature dare to refuse the Abo litionists permission to present their own arguments in their own way? The permis sion was granted. The second hearing before the Lunt Com mittee was a stormy one. It was naturally crowded, because of the issues raised by the first. Mr. Lunt behaved, strange to say, with the same singular stupidity as at the first meeting. Let us remember that this 125 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON hearing was for the moment the center of the great storm of passion that had moved up from the South during the preceding year and by which it was hoped that the Abolition cause would be engulfed and ob literated. The center of the storm, how ever, is perfectly calm. The voice that comes from it is not a still small voice, but a very calm voice. It is the voice of Sam uel J. May. " It seemed," said Mr. May, addressing the chairman, " it seemed on the 4th instant that the chairman considered that we came here by his grace to exculpate ourselves from the charges alleged against us by the legislatures of several of the Southern States ; and that we were not to be permitted to express our anxious apprehen sions of the effects of any acts by our Legis lature intended to gratify the wishes of those States. In order, therefore, that we might appear before you in the exercise of our right as free citizens, we have appealed to the Senate and House of Representatives, and have their permission to do so. Dr. Pollen was setting before you what we deem the most serious evil to be apprehended from any condemnatory resolutions which the Legislature might be induced to pass; and if he is not permitted to press this upon 126 THE CRISIS your consideration our interview with the Committee must end here." Mr. Pollen was allowed by the chairman to proceed, but the following speaker, Rev. William Goodell, was compelled to sit down by the chairman. He was at the moment in the midst of a most telling quotation from Gov. McDuffie, of South Carolina, who had said that "the laboring population of no na tion on earth are entitled to liberty or capa ble of enjoying it." " Sit down," said Mr. Lunt, " the Committee will hear no more of it." The Abolitionists immediately and meekly showed their compliance by begin ning to leave the Hall. This is magnificent agitation : it is impos sible for reformers to be more able than this. Such conduct sends out an appeal to com mon sense, to justice, to fair play, to the mind of the average man and of the cour ageous person everywhere. And lo, before the Hall had emptied itself, there came a re sponse to that appeal, a response from one whose mere name was a summary of the traditions he spoke for. :t The audience here began to leave the Hall," continues Mr. May, " but were arrested by a voice in their midst. It was the voice of Gamaliel Brad ford, not a member of the Anti-Slavery So- 127 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ciety, who had come there only as a specta tor, but had been so moved by what he had witnessed that he pronounced an eloquent, thrilling, impassioned, but respectful ap peal in favor of free discussion." When Bradford sat down Mr. George Bond, one of the most prominent merchants and esti mable gentlemen of Boston, made a speech to the same effect. Abolition thus began to penetrate the stal wart and sensible classes. It could no longer be regarded as merely the infatuation of foolish persons. There were still to be years of struggle, but the loneliness was at an end. The great shattering climax of all this pe riod was the murder of Elijah P. Lovejoy, a young Presbyterian minister and native of Maine, on November 7th, 1837, at Alton, 111. He was shot down as he emerged from the burning building in which the last of four Anti-slavery printing-presses perished at the hands of infuriated Pro-slavery rioters. Lovejoy, though a clergyman, had determined to protect his rights of free speech under the Constitutional forms of self-defense. He and his friends had armed themselves according to law, and were under the protection of the Mayor of the town. They thus stood like the embat- 128 THE CRISIS tied farmer at Lexington nay, more strongly, for these men were not Revolu tionists, but peaceful citizens resisting illegal violence. Love joy was ruthlessly shot down by a shower of bullets from the street. Here was something that the average Ameri can could understand. It was not expressed in Biblical language, nor did it come from a saint; but it spoke to the fighting instinct in the common man. Nothing except John Brown s Raid ever \ sent such a shock across the continent, or so stirred the North to understand and to re sist the advance of slavery as Lovejoy s murder. The Abolitionists of Boston im mediately sought Faneuil Hall, which was at first refused. Dr. Channing, head ing the free-speech movement, joined with the Abolitionists in claiming the right to use the Hall. It was felt that the great public was behind this claim : the use of the Hall was granted. There followed that meeting to which the dazzling elo quence of Wendell Phillips has given im mortality. It was a free-speech, not an Abolition meeting, its object being to pro test against Lovejoy s murder as a crime against the statutory right of free speech. We see here a very different situation 129 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON from the state of things at the Faneuil Hall Pro-slavery meeting of 1835, when slavery had hired the Hall and held the floor. At the Lovejoy meeting freedom had hired the Hall and held the floor. Nevertheless the meeting was to some extent packed by the Pro-slavery element who hoped to stampede it in favor of the South. Phillips was an unknown young lawyer, the scion of a very distinguished family, and he had gone to the meeting without any intention of taking part in its proceedings. He was drawn into the fray by the extraordinary speech of James T. Austin, attorney-general of Mas sachusetts and leader of the conservatives. Austin declared that Lovejoy was not only presumptuous and imprudent while he lived, but that he " died as the fool dieth." He compared the murderers of Lovejoy with the men who destroyed the tea in Boston harbor, and said that wherever the Aboli tion fever raged there were mobs and mur ders. Austin was vociferously applauded! and there was some prospect that the whole meeting would break up in a riot. Phil lips had great difficulty in getting the atten tion of the audience. " Mr. Chairman," he said, " we have met for the freest discussion of these resolutions and the events which 130 THE CRISIS gave rise to them." (Cries of " question," "hear him," "go on," "no gagging" etc.) "I hope I shall be permitted to ex press my surprise at the sentiments of the last speaker surprise not only at such sen timents from such a man, but at the applause they have received within these walls. A comparison has been drawn between the events of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it asserted here, in Faneuil Hall, that Great Britain had a right to tax the Colonies; and we have heard the mob at Alton, the drunken murderers of Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard! (Great ap plause.) Fellow-citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine ? " (" No, no.") After giv ing a clear exposition of the difference be tween the riot at Alton and the Boston Tea Party, Phillips continued : " Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips (pointing to the portraits in the Hall) would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American the slanderer of the dead. (Great applause and counter -ap plause. ) The gentleman said that he should 131 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON sink into insignificance if he dared not gain say the principles of these resolutions. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans, and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up." (Applause and hisses, with cries of " Take that back! ") The uproar became so great that for a time no one could be heard. At length the Hon. William Sturgis came to Mr. Phillips s side at the front of the plat form. He was met with cries of " Phillips or nobody," " Make him take back rec reant; he shan t go on till he takes it back." When it was understood that Mr. Sturgis meant to sustain, not to interrupt Mr. Phillips, he was listened to and said, " I did not come here to take part in this discussion, nor do I intend to; but I do en treat you, fellow citizens, by everything you hold sacred, I conjure you by every asso ciation connected with this Hall, consecrated by our Fathers to freedom of discussion, that you listen to every man who addresses you in a decorous manner." Phillips re sumed his speech and made in this, his de but, one of the best remembered triumphs in a life of oratory. His speech, though im perfectly reported, is one of those historic speeches which carry their eloquence to the 132 THE CRISIS reader, even through the disguise of print. When Phillips was asked afterwards what his thoughts were during the delivery of it, he said he was thinking of nothing except the carrying of resolutions. This he ac complished and the vote of the meeting was cast for freedom: the murderers of Love- joy were denounced. The practical importance of this outcome to the Abolitionists is brought home to us in a letter written by one of them, a woman, to a friend in England. " Stout men, my husband for instance, came home that day and lifted up their voices and wept. Dr. Channing did not know how dangerous an experiment, as people count danger, he ad ventured. We knew that we must send our children out of town and sleep in our day garments that night, unless free dis cussion prevailed." The burning of Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, in May, 1838, was among the last of the outrages committed during this epoch of persecution. There seems after this to have been a simmering down of the antagonism of the public to the Abolition ists, and it was not until 1850 that another great attempt, the last attempt, was made by the united South to control the destinies of the North. VI RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT IT seems to be always the case in human af fairs that conditions grow better and worse at the same time. An evil reaches its cli max at the very moment that the corrective reform is making a hidden march upon it from an unexpected quarter. And so this epoch of crisis in mob violence against Ab olition must be recorded as the epoch during- which Abolition passed from the stage of moral agitation into the arena of practical politics. The Anti-slavery men had begun by heckling the clergy; they divided up the country into districts and sent their dreaded emissaries with lists of questions which the parsons had to answer. This process rent the churches, or rather it revealed the fact that the churches were Pro-slavery. In like manner the questioning of all candidates for office was taken up by the Abolitionists. In the year 1840 there were two thousand Anti-slavery societies with a membership of 134 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT two hundred thousand. It is apparent that the political parties at the North were about to feel the same disruptive power run through their vitals that the churches had felt. If you take up a history of the United States, or the biography of a statesman of this time, you will find that the author only begins to deal with Abolition in about the year 1840, that is, after it has reached the political stage. He writes perhaps a few pages, as Mr. Rhodes does, about the rise of the movement, taking for granted that the reader knows how Abolition got started, and why it was able so soon to overshadow all other questions. The same thing occurs in the history of the rise of Christianity; with this difference that the early stages of Christianity are involved in obscurity; whereas the activities of the early years of Abolition are recorded in accessible and thrilling books. The historian, as a gen eral rule, gives us only the history of politics. He seems not to be interested in the beginnings of things. And yet, those beginnings are the seed. The beginnings of any movement, the epoch when it is in the stage of idea, of agitation, of moral im pulse, and before it has assumed a shape 135 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON that can be termed political, these begin nings show its nature. In them you find the explanation of the later political stages. The history of the Anti-slavery struggle after 1840 that is to say, the history of political Anti-slavery has been well an alyzed and understood, and can be traced in the biographies of our statesmen. I am not going to retrace it in this essay; for I believe that Garrison s distinctive work was accomplished before 1840. I shall content myself with a few observations which apply to the whole period between 1830 and 1860, and which are equally true of the agita tional era and of the political era of the struggle. The spread of Anti-slavery sentiment was brought about through the doings of the Slave Power. From the time when the State of Georgia in 1830 offered a reward for the arrest of Garrison, till South Caro lina seceded in 1860, the education of the North was due to the activity of the South. While North and South were in ignorance of this fact, the form of the reaction and inter-action between Northern and South ern elements was the inevitable form through which such a drama must pass. The Slave Power believed that Garrison, 136 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT with some almost superhuman agency, was moving upon it to devour it. Slavery, dur ing the whole course of its long suicide, was, in its own view, striving to save it self from destruction. The Abolitionists brought into the conflict the element of Fate. The South knew that no form of compromise could bind Garrison. It felt this with the instinct of the hunted animal. It aimed a blow at the enemy, Abolition; and it struck free speech, it struck the right of petition, trial by jury, education, benevo lence, common sense. Slavery began its death agony in 1830, and was driven from one step to another merely as a consequence of the nature of man. If the South could have smiled at Abolition, if it could have kept its temper and lent no hand in assist ing the Abolitionists to bring forward their cause, then the way of the reformers would have been hard. This would have hap pened, perhaps, if Anti-slavery in America had been a pioneer cause, a new light lead ing the world. But our Anti-slavery cause was a mere means of catching up with Eu rope. The moral power of humanity at large prevented South Carolina from smil ing at Abolition. The slave-owners trem bled because they were a part of the thing 137 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON which criticized them. Massachusetts and South Carolina were parts of that modern world in which their heart-strings met. This solidarity between the North and the South was the cause of the anguish, and the means of the cure. In the early days of any movement it is only the expert who can read the times cor rectly. The lean prophet, in whose bosom the turmoil of a new age begins, sees proofs of that age everywhere. He thinks of nothing else, he cares for nothing else. Thus the Abolitionists could see in 1830 what the average man could not understand till 1845 tnat tne Slave Power was a Moloch which controlled the politics of the North and which, in the nature of things, could stick at nothing while engaged in per petuating that control. Garrison or May could perceive this in 1828 by taking an ob servation of Edward Everett or of Daniel Webster. But the average citizen could not see it; he lacked the detachment. His obfuscation was a part of the problem, a part of the evil in the period. In 1845 it required the Annexation of Texas to show to the man in the street those same truths which the Abolitionists had seen so plainly fifteen years before. The Annexation of 138 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT Texas was the most educational of all the convulsive demonstrations of the South. Where did the motive power reside from which all these changes proceeded? Was this motive power the conscience of the Ab olitionists? I do not think so. The Abo litionists stand nearer to a sense of justice, nearer to rational modern life than the rest of our compatriots of that time. But the Abolitionists were not the motive power; they were merely the point of entrance of new life into the community. Every stroke of his pulse that told an Abolition ist that something must be done about slavery, could perform its functions only by flashing down to Georgia, and coming back in the form of anger and of grief. Every argument that split a vestry, or left a mind ruined was necessary. It was es sential that these things should come. The metaphysical question was always the same, namely : " How far legal argu ment is valid when it contravenes human feelings ? " The question assumed various forms while the fire was eating its way through society towards the powder maga zine; but the substance of it never varied. The whole age-long contest in all its Pro tean forms is summarized in a well-known 139 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON legal anecdote. Judge Harrington of Ver mont is said to have told the attorney for a Southern owner who was seeking to re cover a fugitive slave in 1808, that his " evi dence of ownership " was insufficient. " What evidence does your Honor re quire? " " Nothing less than a bill of sale from God Almighty." This story gives the two elements, pity and business inter est, expressed in terms of constitutional ar gument. It summarizes the labors of our statesmen, Webster, Calhoun, Sumner, Taney, Douglas, Lincoln, each of whom had his bout with the problem. The unfor tunate American statesmen who were obliged to formulate a philosophy upon the matter seem to me like that procession of hypocrites in Dante s Purgatory, robed in mantles of lead. They emerge, each bent down with his weight of logic, blinded by his view of the inherited curse nursing his critique of the constitution; they file across the pages of our history from Jef ferson to Lincoln sad, perplexed men. The solution given by Garrison to the puzzle was that the law must give way, that the Constitution was of no importance, \ after all. This is what any American would have answered had the question con- 140 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT cerned the Constitution of Switzerland or of Patagonia. But, for some reason, our own Constitution was regarded differently. I suppose that the politics, theology, and formal organization of the whole world are never so important as they pretend to be. The element of material interest in these matters gives them their awful weight to contemporaries. When we are dealing with a past age this element evaporates, and we see clearly that most of the importances of the world have no claim to our reverence. Now when a man has felt in this way about his own age, we call him a great man; be cause we agree with him. For this is the test, and the only conceivable test of great ness that a man shall look upon his own age, and see it in the same light as that in which posterity sees it. We must concede greatness to Garrison. His early editorials upon the question of "disunion show that he viewed our Constitution in true historical perspective as early as 1832. Let us now remember some of the phases of the nightmare which, like a continuous Dreyfus case, perplexed all honest men, all thinking men in America for two genera tions. The Constitution was so inwoven with our social life that the conflict be- 141 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON tween the letter and the spirit was ubiqui tous. The restless probings went forward at the fireside, in the club, in the shop; no pil low was free from them. Slavery covered every sentiment with a cloak. Slavery was in literature, in religion, in custom. This social, daily, domestic, discussion and heart burn was the true means of regeneration. The political history of slavery was to be the outcome of this fireside discussion. The constitutional theory which any man held was, in this epoch, the outcome of his personal struggle with evil. In other words the slavery question had become the symbol of the relation between good and evil in practical life. We notice in all this the tardiness of the political world in ab sorbing new ideas. The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought. The world of politics lives and works in ideals which are twenty years old. The result of all the upturnings of con science, which went forward in millions of private breasts, was at length seen in the formation of the Republican Party. By the time that party was formed one could distinguish (as Mr. Rhodes points out), two classes of men among its members : the men actuated by pity for the slave, of 142 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT whom Sumner was the type; and the men actuated by resentment at being ruled from the South, of whom Seward was the type. It was, however, the Abolition tom-tom that had called both classes from the deep; and the Seward class was but an imperfect, half -a wakened example of the true thing. The Seward class could never stand fire. Its courage, for the infusion of courage was the sole function of that tom-tom, its courage was in the head and not, as yet, in the vitals. This class was subject to splen did visitations of new idea; and yet it was also subject to the occasional panic-stricken discovery that the bottom had dropped out after all, and that one must go softly, be cause life could not be trusted. The abstract, inscrutable nature of the contest between Freedom and Slavery first began to be revealed to the politicians in about 1850; and men then began to feel that the whole historic sequence of things was a fate-drama. Even then, everybody in politics was afraid to speak plainly about slavery. It required, for instance, notable insight as well as great political courage for Lincoln to state what was known to everyone. In 1858 he took his political life in his hands, and spoke of " the house 143 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON divided against itself." His associates were scandalized by his rashness, and begged him to omit the phrase. Merciful heavens! Had not this house been di vided against itself for three-quarters of a century? Yes, truly, this whole matter was a fate-drama, and in a deeper sense than Seward imagined or than even Lin coln could guess. Seward with his percep tion of the " irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces," and Lincoln with his vision of the blood of white men, drawn by the sword, which should repay the blood of slaves that had been drawn by the lash saw only the main crash of the drama. The reality of it was profounder, and the trailing consequences of it were to be more terrible than they suspected. The intellectual and moral heritages of slavery are with us still. The timidity of our public life and of our private conversa tion is a tradition from those times, which fifty years of freedom have not sufficed to efface. The morbid sensitiveness of the American to new political ideas has been a mystery to Europe. We cannot bear to hear a proposition plainly put ; or let me say, we are only recently beginning to cast off our hothouse condition, and to bear the 144 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT sun and wind of the natural world. I dcy not know anything which measures the timidity of the American nation better than the moderation of Lincoln s speeches, a moderation which he was obliged to adopt in order to be listened to. He was always in danger of showing his heart; he must avoid the taint of Abolition, the suspicion of any attack upon the Constitution. He must step gingerly and remember what part of the State of Illinois he is in at the mo ment. Even when the war breaks out Lin coln is obliged to invent a way of looking at that war which shall place the Union cause in a popular light. He is obliged to pretend that the war is not primarily about slavery at all. He is obliged to speak about the war in such a way as would be incom prehensible to any one who is not a close student of our conditions. He must re member the Border States. Here was a war over slavery which had been visibly brewing for more than a life time. The Anti-slavery party comes into power; the Slave States revolt and the question is whether the Government shall prosecute a war and extinguish slavery or not. This is the way in which the edu cated foreigner viewed the matter, and he 145 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON was right. There were, however, in the Northern and Border States, many educated Americans who had from their cradles been taught to regard slavery as a thing almost sacred a thing which could not rightfully become a cause of war between the States. Therefore great caution had to be used in making any popular statement of the mat ter. This war must be looked upon as a war, not about Slavery but about Union. Lincoln was thus obliged to befog his State papers with such careful statements as to his being for the Union without slavery, or for the Union with slavery, that the out sider really began to doubt whether, per haps, Lincoln meant that slavery might be retained in the end. Even in this crisis no one in political life was allowed to speak in plain terms. To do so was regarded as most unwise. The misguided and half- minded man of America had been trained to believe that Slavery was sacred; but for the Union he will die. So long as you call it Union he is ready to die for humanity. Lincoln, then, during the years of his leadership was obliged to stoop to the com plex, peculiar, and inferior character of the contemporary mind. He was one of the 146 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT greatest political geniuses and one of the most beautiful characters that ever lived; and he managed somehow to be intellectu ally honest and very nearly frank while ful filling his mission. Yet I can never read his debates with Douglas or consider his Border-State policy without being struck by the technical nature of all our history. One of Lincoln s chief interests in life, from early manhood onward, lay in emancipa tion. This he could not say and remain in politics; nay, he could not think it and re main in politics. He could not quite know himself and yet remain in politics. The awful weight of a creed that was never quite true the creed of the Constitution pressed down upon the intellects of our public men. This was the dower and curse of slavery. The value of the epoch during which the curse was cast off is that, in reading about it, we can see thought move, and can find ourselves in sympathy with all shades of reform. Let us take an example at random, as one might take a drop of water for a sample of the ocean. In the dawn of the Abolition movement its ad herents in New York State, who were re sponsible, educated and propertied persons, 147 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON were a fittk a fa. id of die Gamsomans of Barton. The principles of the New York grotip are wefl stated bjr William Jay in tlie first nnnzfoer of die Emancipator, and arc in striking contrast to the declarations cf Garrison in the first number of the Lt- crater, wbkh I have qt*3ted on a previous page. Taj writes: * The disty and pclky of irrr^eciit * errareip&ti/^ti, altfarjcgh dear to ts, arc so to TTTgltitories of people who assd ficcsrclj wish its takt it for grarte/i, no rnatt^r why or wherefore, that if the slave* were D^TT liberated they wc-cM instantly cti die ai? acd re tbs cweHing? of their ben- Ker^ce thesse good pec-pk kx)k the a/irocates of exaancipaty^t: as a set c <-2rger-/55 fanatks, wrxi are jeep- arCzirg tr/t p*sce cf the Sotah^rn States a^i rrretr^? the fe~*r of the Jave* by the rery artsrrpt to break them. In th^ir opts- ioc th dave* are sr^t ct for fre?td^j therefore it i* sftce^^r to wait whiten cas be brctsgtx o*rer to ct:r th/rsr are . :_ v : .-. :_ : . : cmr ..-.-: ;_- ;_ -. : WILLIAM tLOYD GARRISON are concerned, from that of slavery in the Southern States. "As a member of Congress, I should think myself no more authorized to legis late for the slaves in Virginia than for the serfs of Russia. But Congress has full authority to abolish slavery in the District, and I think it to be its duty to do so. The public need information respecting the abominations committed at Washington with the sanction of their Representatives abominations which will cease whenever those Representatives please. If this sub ject is fully and ably pressed upon the at tention of our electors, they may perhaps be induced to require pledges from candi dates for Congress for their votes for the removal of this foul stain from our National Government. As to the Colonization So ciety, it is neither a wicked conspiracy upon the one hand nor a panacea for slavery on the other. Many good and wise men be long to it and believe in its efficacy." These New York men are in a more ra tional state of mind than Garrison was. When in 1833 Samuel J. May begged Wil liam Jay to join in forming a national An ti-Slavery Society, Jay paused. I suppose he had been reading the Liberator. He de- 150 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT clined to join, on the ground that the local Societies could do the work as well for the time being, and that the great objection to Anti-slavery societies was that they aimed at unconstitutional interference with slavery. He suggested that if a National Society was to be formed, it should show, by its constitution, that the objects were le gal, that is to say, it should acknowledge the exclusive rights of the Southern States to settle the matter of slavery within their own boundaries, and claim only the right to urge Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and the territories. The new Society did, in fact, adopt care fully drawn provisions expressive of Jay s idea, and Mr. Tuckerman, in his memoir of Jay, comments upon the circumstance as follows : " Looked at by the light of sub sequent events, the importance of placing Anti-slavery upon a Constitutional basis cannot be over-rated. Upon the principles thus distinctly avowed rested the moral and political strength of the movement during the struggle of thirty years." It is impos sible not to feel the truth of this reflection. The average American mind could only deal with the slavery matter when presented in legal form. Mr. Garrison, in spite of 151 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON his denunciation of the Union, felt the force of this appeal to law and order. He actu ally signed the declarations of the new So ciety, which put the movement on a con servative basis, and he wrote editorially in the Liberator as follows : " Abolitionists as clearly understand and as sacredly regard the Constitutional powers of Congress as do their traducers, and they know and have again and again asserted that Congress has no more rightful authority to sit in judg ment upon Southern slavery than it has to legislate upon the abolition of slavery in the French colonies." This editorial is en tirely out of key with Mr. Garrison s fun damental beliefs, as we shall see later. We have to remember, in reviewing any con vulsive epoch in history, how frequently men, even great men, have been jolted for ward and back between conflicting points of view. Garrison was subject to these re vulsions, and was totally unconscious of his inconsistencies. The point I would here make is that all these various and contradictory dogmas were necessary. Each one was an inev itable progression, going on in somebody s mind, and each helped to move the argu ment along. It is easy to see that the atti- 152 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT tude of Jay in recommending legal action only, and the attitude of Garrison in de nouncing the Constitution, as he did most of the time, were both of them necessary to the working-out of the problem. There was another element of complica tion which assisted in disintegrating the Anti-slavery cause. As time went on Garrison kept confiding his new de velopments and changes in opinion to the columns of the Liberator. His views upon Peace, No-government, Wom an s Rights, Non-resistance, as they formed themselves within him, were advocated with an incredible volubility which dis quieted many other Abolitionists. After one or two attempts at schism, the more conservative Abolitionists formed a new Society which went by the name of the New Organization. With whom shall we sympathize among all these contending sects? Manifestly with them all. Let us examine the case of Woman s Rights. Women had been working in the Massa chusetts Society and in the National So ciety from the beginning. Women were among the ablest, the most effective, the most saintly, the most distinguished, of the workers in the Abolition cause. Should 153 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON they be admitted to equal fellowship or not? Manifestly they must be so admitted. Yet to do this identified the cause of Abolition with the theory of Woman s Rights, a con clusion most repugnant to many excellent Anti-slavery people. There must follow, then, a multiplication of sects; this was one of the logical necessities of the situation. Now there was no person in the Aboli tion camp who understood these matters from a philosophic point of view. The New Organizationists were struggling to keep the cause pure, to keep it from being mixed up with other causes and ideas, such as Woman s Rights, Non-resistance, etc. Garrison was also struggling to keep the cause pure; to prevent it from being di luted, and from falling into the hands of sectarians, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc. In 1840 we find the Garrisonians chartering a steamboat, and taking several hundred men and women from Massachusetts, in order to " carry " the annual meeting in New York City for his ideas. Jay seems to have understood that the confusion was past cure, though he did not quite perceive that it was inevitable. His personal course was to resign from the Anti-slavery organizations when they veered away from Constitutional iS4 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT methods. He again became a free lance. In 1846 he writes : " Our Anti-slavery so cieties are for the most part virtually de funct. Anti-slavery conventions are what ever the leaders present happen to be ; some times disgustingly irreligious, and very often Jacobinical and disorganizing; and frequently prescriptive of such of their brethren who will not consent to render Abolition a mere instrument for effecting certain political changes having no relation whatever to slavery/ Now let us take one step further and note this: that at the time of the An nexation of Texas, Jay had arrived at Gar rison s views as to the necessity of breaking up the Union. " Should the slaveholders succeed/ says Jay, " in their design of an nexing Texas, then indeed would I not merely discuss, but with all my powers would I advocate an immediate dissolution. I love my children, my friends, my country too well to leave them the prey to the ac cursed Government which would be sure to follow." And again : " A separation will be more easily effected now than when the relative strength of the South shall have been greatly augmented. Hereafter we shall be as serfs rebelling against their WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON bonds. Now, if the North pleases, we may dissolve the Union without spilling a drop of blood." It is impossible not to sympathize with the state of mind revealed in these last sen tences a state of mind to which Jay has been brought by the march of events. The truth is that the whole vast problem was constantly moving forward. Not only Garrison and Jay, but every soul who lived in America during these years held fluctuat ing views about the matter of slavery; and the complex controversy moved forward like a glacier, cracking and bending and groaning, and marking the everlasting rocks as it progressed. In the end, we come to see that the whole struggle was a solid struggle, an ever-changing Unity, an or chestra in which all the various instruments were interdependent and responsive to one another. We see also that each individual then living was somehow a little microcosm which reflected and had relations with the whole moving miracle; and that every ele ment of the great universe was represented in him. We can perceive plainly, to-day, how necessary it was that each error should be made; that Garrison should issue his in consecutive fulminations of dogma, and 156 RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT that Jay should retire in gloom, when the cause entered politics. We see how inev itable it was that the cause should be be trayed and polluted, soiled and kneaded into the mire of the world, woven into the web of American life. Gradually the leaven was invading and qualifying the whole lump. VII THE MAN OF ACTION IN calling up the spirit of Garrison out of the irrecoverable past we must never for get that he was but a part of something; we must call up the whole epoch. Garrison was as much an outcome of slavery as was " Uncle Tom s Cabin " or John C. Calhoun. He is a spiritual product; he is that sup pressed part of man s nature, which could not co-exist with slavery. He is like a fiery salamander, who should emerge dur ing a glacial epoch crawling out from a volcano that was all the time hidden beneath the ice-crust. It is through the hot breath of this salamander that verdure is to be brought back to the earth, and the benign climate of modern life restored to America. To the conservative minds of his own time he appeared to be a monster; and he was a monster a monster of virtue, a monster of love a monster of power. Let us not judge but only examine him. Fortunately the materials are abundant, the 158 THE MAN OF ACTION record is complete. His life in four enor mous volumes has been written by his chil dren; and the children of Garrison sup press nothing. We are brought into ab solute contact with all of Garrison s singu larities. This biography is no{ a critical work : it is, one might say, ja_wpjjc_of^ idol atry, hvery little""EattIeis fought over again, and every word or gesture of the protagonist is deemed sacred. The reader feels oppressed by the one-sidedness of this procedure. One becomes sorry for the other actors in the great drama: for after all, these men could not help it that they were not Garrison; they seem to live out their lives under the pitiful inferiority of not being Garri son. For instance, Cassius M. Clay of Kentucky went to Yale College, and was, as a youth, converted to Anti-slavery by a lecture of Garrison s at New Haven. Clay returned to Kentucky, emancipated his slaves, and thereafter made relentless war on slavery, thus furnishing, say Garrison s biographers, " an example without parallel both of heroism and of the folly of attempt ing to undermine the slave power from within" The italics are mine. But why do Garrison s children think it folly for a WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON Southerner to agitate against slavery in Kentucky? It seems to me that to do so was right. I believe that the agitation of Clay in Kentucky somehow went to a spot in the slavery question that nothing else could have reached. It affected Garrison himself as nothing else ever affected him : it softened him. It was the conduct of Clay and Rankin (another Southerner) which caused Garrison to offer a resolution at the Cincinnati convention in 1853, m which he stated that the Abolitionists of the coun try were as much interested in the welfare of the slaveholders as they were in the ele vation of the slaves. His habitual attitude towards the slaveholders had always been, " We do not acknowledge them to be within the pale of Christianity, of Repub licanism, of humanity. This we say dis passionately, and not for the sake of using strong language." Garrison, then, was touched by the almost miraculous courage of Clay. If there had been a few more such Southern Abolition ists, the bitterness of this whole epoch might have been qualified. It was, however, one of the stock taunts made against Garrison that he did not go South to agitate; and, there fore, these biographers reason that any agita- 160 THE MAN OF ACTION m of slavery in the South must be " folly." ic four great volumes contain frequent tie hacks and side-cuts out of old contro- rsies which are wearying to the modern ader. Nevertheless, the volumes contain >o such mountains of precious ore, such a instaking recovery of everything germane the subject, such an angel-minded pres- tation of the blind side of Garrison, with e record of things said against him at the reader is left with nothing but atitude to these children who are so like e father that their very deficiencies, ^htly taken, illuminate their subject. The lildren of Garrison have not written a phil- lophic history.* But there are other things the world besides criticism, and some ings more rare and more beautiful than the itical intellect. There is praise and wor- lip ; there is reverence and love ; there is the rasole that turns towards the sun and fol- >ws him from the orient to his setting, * "Writing not without bias, surely, but in a spirit nulous of the absolute fairness which distinguished ir father, we have done little more than coordinate aterials to serve posterity in forming that judgment : him which we have no desire to forestall. In a :erary point of view, we have aimed at nothing ore than clearness, sequence and proportion." Life Garrison. Preface, p. xii. 161 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ever in a dream, ever without knowing that he has changed his position, because for her he has not moved or changed; to her he is only himself. Garrison was a man of action, that is to say, a man to whom ideas were revealed in relation to passing events, and who saw in ideas the levers and weapons with which he might act upon the world. A seer on the other hand is a man who views passing events by the light of ideas, and who counts upon his vision, not upon his action, for influence. The seer feels that the mere utterance of his thought, nay the mere vision of it, fulfills his function. Garrison was not a man of this kind. His mission was more lowly, more popular, more vis ible; and his intellectual grasp was re stricted and uncertain. Garrison was a man of the market-place. Language to him was not the mere means of stating truth, but a mace to break open a jail. He was to be the instrument of great and rapid changes in public opinion during an epoch of terrible and fluctuating excitement. The thing which he is to see, to say, and to pro claim, from moment to moment, is as freshly given to him by prodigal nature, is as truly spontaneous, as the song of the 162 THE MAN OF ACTION thrush. He never calculates, he acts upon inspiration; he is always ingenuous, inno cent, self-poised, and, as it were, inside of some self-acting machinery which controls his course, and rolls out the carpet of his life for him to walk on. We must remem ber this; for it is almost impossible not to use words which imply the contrary in de scribing the acts of the practical man the man who utters sharp sayings in order to gain attention, the man who gives no quar ter when in the ring. In reviewing the life of such a man we must take the logic of it as a whole; we must feel the unity of it as an organic proc ess and torrent of force. It will contain many breaks in metaphysical unity; yet through these breaks may be seen the gush ing stream of the spirit. I believe that Gar rison shifted his ground and changed his mind less often than most men of that kaleidoscopic epoch. But we must not try to make him out more consistent than he was. All politics, including reform agita tion, proceeds from day to day and from year to year under the illusion that the thing in hand is more important than it really is. All the actors are at every mo ment somewhat deceived; and to each of 163 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON them the thing in hand ever a little blots out the sky. The agitator lives in a realm of exaggeration, of broadsides and italic types, of stampings of the foot and clench- ings of the hand. He uses the terms and phrases of immortal truth to clamp together his leaky raft. The "belle rponse " of the martyr, the deep apothegm of the sage, and the words of Christ, are ever on his lips. Such things pass muster in politics without exciting comment. And yet, these statements of ideal truth, like the axioms of arithmetic, never quite square with the ma terial world. They can only be felt and be lieved in mentally. You can never find or measure out an exact pound of anything or lay off a true mile; nor can you assign any accurate value to the influence of a good deed. Nevertheless, the inaccuracy which is permissible in the market-place is very much greater than the inaccuracy permissi ble to the historian who sits in his closet endeavoring to think clearly upon the mat ter. The source of Garrison s power was the Bible. From his earliest days he read the Bible constantly, and prayed constantly. It was with this fire that he started his con flagration. Now the Bible is many things. 164 THE MAN OF ACTION It is a key to metaphysical truth, it is a compendium of large human wisdom, it is a code of ethics, it is the history of a race, and many other things beside. To Garri son, the Bible was the many-piped organ to which he sang the song of his life, and the arsenal from which he drew the weapons of his warfare. I doubt if any man ever knew the Bible so well, or could produce a text to fit a political emergency with such startling felicity as Garrison. Take for example, the text provided by him for Wen dell Phillips s speech on the Sunday morn ing following Lincoln s call for troops in 1861. " Therefore thus saith the Lord ; Ye have not hearkened unto me in proclaiming liberty everyone to his brother, and every man to his neighbor: behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the Lord, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine." I doubt whether Cromwell or Milton could have rivaled Garrison in this field of quotation; and the power of quotation is as dreadful a weapon as any which the human intellect can forge. From his boyhood up ward Garrison s mind was soaked in the Bible and in no other book. His " Causes " are all drawn from the Bible, and most of them may be traced to the phrases and 165 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON thoughts of Christ, as for instance Peace (Peace I give unto you), Perfectionism (Be ye therefore perfect), Non-resistance (Resist not evil), Anti-sabbatarianism (The Lord is Lord of the Sabbath). So also, a prejudice against all fixed forms of worship, against the authority of human government, against every binding of the spirit into conformity with human law all these things grew up in Garrison s mind out of his Bible reading; as they have done in the minds of so many other men before and after him. He, himself, was not going to be bound, and never was bound, by any declaration nor by any document. He even arrived at distrusting the Bible itself, per ceiving that the Bible itself was often a tyrant much as Christ saw the tyranny of the law of Moses. All this part of Garri son s mental activity is his true vocation. Here he rages like a lion of Judah. By these onslaughts he is freeing people from their mental bonds : he is shaking down the palaces of Babylon. His age was the age of social experi ments, and he was ever ready to take on a new one. This hospitality to new dogmas annoyed his associates, and led, as we have seen, to revolts, schisms, and heresies in 166 THE MAN OF ACTION the Anti-slavery ranks. Garrison seems to have been assailed by such multitudinous revelations from on high that he was obliged to publish one dispensation in order to clear the wires for the next. There is one of these manifestoes which reveals the impromptu character of them all. " De spite its length/ say the biographers, " the greater part of this important document must be given here." There follow several pages of fine print, concerning the causes uppermost in Garrison s mind, which evi dently had filled up all the space in the Liber ator, or used up all the ink in the office ; and yet it appears at the close, that Garrison has forgotten to say anything about woman s rights. And so he calls out, like a man upon a departing stage-coach : " As our ob ject is universal emancipation, to redeem women as well as men from a servile to an equal condition we shall go for the RIGHTS OF WOMEN to their utmost extent." In those days societies were founded for everything. No one ever paused to con sider what things could or could not be accomplished through organization, nor how far the sayings of Christ were parts of one another, nor whether at the bottom of all these questions there lay some truth 167 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON which enveloped them all. Every one rushed to utterance, and Garrison more than all men put together. So long as we con sider his utterances in the large, as part of the upturning of that age, as the sine qua non of a new epoch, we love and value them. It is only when we collocate them, analyze them, and try to find something for our own souls in them, that they turn out to be emergency cries. They were de signed towards local ends, they were prac tical politics, they do not always cohere with one another. The great thesis to which he devoted his life, however, was unquestionably sound. He thus announced it in the Liberator in 1832: " There is much declamation about the sacredness of the compact which was formed between the free and slave States, on the adoption of the Constitution. A sacred compact, forsooth ! We pronounce it the most bloody and heaven-daring ar rangement ever made by men for the con tinuance and protection of a system of the most atrocious villainy ever exhibited upon the earth. Yes, we recognize the compact, but with feelings of shame and indignation ; and it will be held in everlasting infamy by 168 THE MAN OF ACTION the friends of justice and humanity throughout the world. It was a compact formed at the sacrifice of the bodies and souls of millions of our race, for the sake of achieving a political object an un blushing and monstrous coalition to do evil that good might come. Such a compact was in the nature of things, and according to the law of God, null and void from the beginning. No body of men ever had the right to guarantee the holding of human be ings in bondage. " Who or what were the framers of our Government that they should dare confirm and authorize such high-handed villainy such a flagrant robbery of the inalienable rights of man such a glaring violation of all the precepts and injunctions of the Gos pel such a savage war upon a sixth part of our whole population? They were men, like ourselves as fallible, as sinful, as weak, as ourselves. By the infamous bar gain which they made between themselves, they virtually dethroned the Most High God, and trampled beneath their feet their own solemn and heaven-attested Declara tion, that all men are created equal, and en dowed by their Creator with certain in alienable rights among which are life, 169 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They had no lawful power to bind themselves or their posterity for one hour for one mo ment by such an unholy alliance. It was not valid then it is not valid now. Still they persisted in maintaining it and still do their successors, the people of Mas sachusetts, of New England, and of the twelve free States, persist in maintain ing it. A sacred compact! a sacred compact! What, then, is wicked and igno minious ? "It is said that if you agitate this ques tion you will divide the Union. Believe it not; but should disunion follow, the fault will not be yours. You must perform your duty, faithfully, fearlessly and promptly, and leave the consequences to God: that duty clearly is, to cease from giving coun tenance and protection to Southern kid nappers. Let them separate, if they can mus ter courage enough and the liberation of their slaves is certain. Be assured that slavery will very speedily destroy this Union if it be let alone; but even if the Union can be preserved by treading upon the necks, spilling the blood, and destroying the souls of millions of your race, we say it is not worth a price like this, and that it is in the 170 THE MAN OF ACTION highest degree criminal for you to continue the present compact. Let the pillars thereof fall let the superstructure crum ble into dust if it must be upheld by rob bery and oppression." This statement of Garrison s is, to my mind, the best thing ever said about slavery in the United States. There is no exag geration in the statement: it is absolutely true. It is a complete answer to the Con- > stitutional point; and makes all our ante bellum public men (including Lincoln) ap pear a little benighted. They are like men who have been born in a darkness and have lived always in a twilight. They all have a slight, congenital weakness of the eye, which prevents them from taking the day light view of this whole matter. We ourselves to-day are so habituated to \ the historic obfuscation of our ancestors that we make allowance for it more al lowance, indeed, than we ought to make. We have, by inheritance, rather weak eyes on this subject ourselves. The true cause der as to i - h< a ^cyp cj\ Atin^rfTfti i ^ M 4^"^**^ not that Garrison. only^onejperson_m Amer ica, with^a 9 tearfieST "Eet us now turn forward over ten years of history in- 171 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON eluding all the pictures of struggle and in cidents referred to in the earlier pages, and let us read Garrison s most famous exposi tion of his theme uttered in 1842: " We affirm that the Union is not of heaven. It is founded in unrighteousness and cemented with blood. It is the work of men s hands, and they worship the idol which they have made. It is a horrible mockery of freedom. In all its parts and proportions it is misshapen, incongruous, un natural. The message of the prophet to the people in Jerusalem describes the exact char acter of our * republican Compact : Hear the Word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this people. Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with Death, and with Hell are we at agreement; when the over flowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us : for we have made lies our refuge, and under falsehood have we hid ourselves: Therefore thus saith the Lord God, Judgment will I lay to the line, and righteousness to the plummet: and the hail shall sweep away the refuge of lies, and the water shall overflow the hiding-place. And your covenant with Death shall be annulled, and your agreement with Hell shall not stand; when the overflowing scourge shall 172 THE MAN OF ACTION pass through then ye shall be trodden down by it. " Another message of the same inspired prophet is equally applicable : Thus saith the Holy One of Israel, Because ye despised this word, and trust in oppression and per- verseness, and stay thereon : Therefore, this iniquity shall be to you as a breach ready to fall, swelling out in a high wall, whose breaking cometh suddenly, AT AN INSTANT. And he shall break it as the breaking of a potter s vessel that is broken to pieces; he shall not spare: so that there shall not be found in the bursting of it, a sherd to take fire from the hearth, or to take water withal out of the pit. " Slavery is a combination of Death and Hell, and with it the North have made a covenant and are at agreement. As an ele ment of the Government it is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. As a component part of the Union it is necessarily a national interest. Divorced from Northern protec tion it dies ; with that protection, it enlarges its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and extends its ravages." These passages are too direct to be called extravagant. They are appalling. They are magnificent. And they came much 173 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON nearer to expressing the general opinion of the country in 1842 than the milder words quoted above came to expressing the con temporary opinion of 1832. Education was marching, the case was beginning to be un derstood. Within three years after Garri son s denunciation of the Constitution as an agreement with Hell, the Annexation of Texas brought thousands of the most con servative minds in the country, including Channing, to the point of abandoning the Constitution; and when in 1854 Garrison publicly burned the Constitution on the Fourth of July, the incident was of slight importance. Civil War was already inevi table: the dragon s teeth had been sown: the blades of bright bayonets could be seen pushing up through the soil in Kansas. We see, then, the profound unity of Garri son s whole course, and may examine with indulgence some minor failures in logic which are very characteristic of him very characteristic, indeed, of all practical-minded men who, after making one fault of logic, proceed to joggle themselves back again to their true work by committing a second. It is apparent that a man who assumes Gar rison s grounds as to the importance of the spirit, and the unimportance of everything THE MAN OF ACTION . else, can never turn aside and adopt any institution, without doing violence to his own principles. To disparage all government because it is "the letter that killeth," and thereafter to swear fealty to some party, or adopt a symbol, or advise a friend to vote with the Whigs is inconsistent. One who believes in standing for absolute principle can never indorse some political scheme on the ground that " this time it doesn t count." One who believes it wrong to meet force with force cannot retain the privilege of ap proving some particular war or some par ticular act of self-defense, which seems to him to be useful. Garrison had not the mental training to perceive this, and to do so would have involved his retirement from the camp to the closet: it would have in volved his being someone else. Suffice it to say that from time to time his nature drew a veil over his theories, and so obscured them that he was able to support the Consti tution of the United States, to rejoice in bloodshed, to take active part in political contests, both in the great occasional Na tional elections (as when he came out for Lincoln or Fremont), and in the continuous petty politics of the Anti-slavery cause. After having supported one of these hu- WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON man institutions with zeal, and having justi fied his conduct with facile and self-deceiv ing casuistry, he would again ascend the mountain, the veil would be withdrawn from his intellect, and he would see his true vision once more and proclaim it with renewed fer vor: the vision, namely, that no institution should be held sacred. Let us now look upon Garrison s dealings with Anti-slavery societies, newspapers, and meetings by the light of the foregoing views. When a new religious movement begins to stir in a community, its members are drawn together through the spiritual likeness of one to the other. They are few : they are held together by persecution: they have all things in common. They need no creed; they all feel as one. This stage can not endure; for someone arises who wishes to hold office. The Apostles began quarrel ing as to who should be greatest even during Christ s lifetime. As soon as any organiza tion is formed, there arise differences of opinion, and the era of politics is reached. With our modern ideas of club organization for everything, a political element enters into any cause whenever two or three are gath ered together in it. It ought to be a les son to us to observe how completely all men, 176 THE MAN OF ACTION even great men, are the children of their age. Garrison took up the propagation of the Anti-slavery cause by means of Demo cratic societies a means which ties up any cause into little tight knots as it goes along, much as certain forms of crochet work prog ress by adding little groups of hard knots to other groups of hard knots. The machinery of his movement made vigilance essential. He might be outvoted, his newspaper might be taken from him, his control might be de stroyed at any juncture. He is obliged, at intervals, to throw himself into the intrigue of Anti-slavery government, with the words of Moses on his lips and some vote-getting, hall-packing device in his mind. This was not true of the earliest years of the move- jC ment; but came about through the mighty logic of natural law as the movement spread. Persecution purifies any new religion. As the wave of persecution which had held the Abolitionists together from 1830 to 1837 began to subside, quarrels broke out. It was not until 1850 when the triumph of the Slave Power in the passage of the Compro mise Bill, gave rise to a new and short perse cution, that the Anti-slavery people enjoyed again a short period of unity and peace. The inevitable quarrels over creed and 177 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON dogma set in in 1839. Anti-slavery de veloped a complex and bitter political ac tivity. This is the epoch of mutual pro scriptions. The purity of the faith is ever at stake, New Organization is branded by Old Organization " as the worst form of pro- slavery. " The Tocsin of Liberty main tained : " The simple truth is, the American A. S. Society has linked itself to pro-slavery, to get friends and, like the Colonization Society, it has become an obstacle to prog ress which must be removed." Mr. Garri son reported from the business committee, " that we cannot regard any man as a con sistent Abolitionist who, while holding to the popular construction of the Constitution, makes himself a party to that instrument, by taking any office under it requiring an oath, or voting for its support." We can see to-day that it was through these very struggles that the new thought was penetrating the community. It is at first through the multiplication of new agen cies, and later through an attack upon ex isting agencies, and an absorption into the older organs of society, that new thought always sinks and spreads, touching and changing society both visibly and invisibly. This process is inevitable, but Garrison 178 THE MAN OF ACTION quarreled with it. He was ever wanting to keep the faith pure. He saw that no one else cared so much about the subject as he him self did; and he thought that he must keep the precious ichor from pollution. As late as 1857, he moaned that if it had not been for the split in the Anti-slavery ranks in 1840, slavery might have been abolished be fore then. It was not given to him to see that he could have kept himself and all his following clear of all entanglements, and could have exerted the maximum of influ ence with the minimum of effort, if he had simply formed no organization, but had merely taken in subscriptions for the cause, in his own name, and to do with as he pleased. His organization and his Liberator were in any case, and always, mere personal \t organs of his own : they followed his mental vagaries, they stuck to him, they were him self; and this same result could have been accomplished with infinite heart s ease in stead of infinite heart s anguish, had Garri son but seen how to do it. In adopting a formal organization he was adopting part of the very element that his thought re jected: he was fighting the cause of no- government by means of a "machine"; he was supporting the spirit by votes. 179 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON Hence Garrison s share in all the weari some, little, and at times, degraded bicker ing between Anti-slavery societies; hence much personal vilification and heated talk over trifles. We see here also that these de fects in Garrison proceed from a want of philosophic continuity of thought. Philo sophic insight he had, but philosophic conti nuity he had not. There came a time in the forties when he seems to have half -perceived the nature of his own mission to have half-seen, at least for a moment, that there were to be no simon-pure Abolitionists ex cept himself, and that his function was to in fluence the world from where he stood. This insight was probably the result of watching the same phenomena occur again and again, of seeing his Cause move con stantly forward through an infinite series of failures : " As fast as we, the Old Organi zation, make Abolitionists, the new converts run right into the Liberty Party, and become almost wholly hostile to us. This results from the strong leaning of our National character to politics. ... It is dis heartening to see that every blow we strike thus tells in a degree against ourselves, and yet duty bids us keep on striking." It is Wendell Phillips who in this passage is ac- 180 THE MAN OF ACTION curately describing the operation of a great law of influence, and who yet seems to see in it merely evidence of human perversity. Later on, and especially during the war, Gar rison became reconciled to that law, which his own life had ever blindly obeyed and ex emplified. I must now speak of the matter of strong language. The prophet, great or small, is not so much an individual, as a part of the consciousness of all men. He acts in a par ticular way upon the force of life, just as a prism acts in a particular way upon light. He is formed by pressure of some sort, and appears at critical times, just as a prism is created by pressure in the womb of the mountain. His understanding of his own function is uncertain, and there have been many plain-minded prophets who could suf fer martyrdom, but not explain. I cannot find that even Socrates exactly understood the theory of agitation. The. world some times thinks of these men as stupid people who know not what they would be at. We should think of them as spirits who enact a lesson rather than as moralists who read a lecture. Let every man carry home what he can from the auto-da-fe. The prophets are hot volcanic lava, rolling out of some 181 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON hidden furnace which is really a distribu tive furnace, and overflows to a lesser de gree in other men. The aerolites which fall in Terra del Fuego show much the same chemical nature as those of Iceland. So of these accusing, flaming aerolites of politics. The Jewish prophet is the most soft-hearted of them all, and it is to this variety that Garrison be longs. These men see the suffering of the world, and they see or feel the relation be tween the suffering of one man and the selfishness of the next. The greatest of them all speaks thus : " For they bind heavy burdens and griev ous to be borne, and lay them on men s shoulders ; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers. But all their works they do for to be seen of men : they make broad their phylacteries, and en large the borders of their garments, and love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues, and greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi. " But woe unto you, scribes and Phari sees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye 182 THE MAN OF ACTION them that are entering to go in. Woe unto ye, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows houses, and for a pre tence make long prayers : therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one prose lyte; and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than your selves. Woe unto you, ye blind guides, which say, Whosoever shall swear by the temple, it is nothing; but whosoever shall swear by the gold of the temple he is a debtor! " Ye fools and blind : for whether is greater, the gold, or the temple that sancti- fieth the gold? Woe unto ye, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint, and anise, and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ought ye to have done and not leave the other undone. Woe unto ye, scribes and Pharisees, hypo crites! because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, and say, If we had been in the days of our fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore ye be witnesses unto 183 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON yourselves, that ye are the children of them which killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? Wherefore, behold, I send unto you proph ets, and wise men, and scribes: and some of them ye shall kill and crucify, and some of them ye shall scourge in your syna gogues, and persecute them from city to city: that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel unto the blood of Zacharias, son of Barachias, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation. O Jerusalem, Jeru salem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chick ens under her wings, and ye would not! Behold your house is left unto you desolate. For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. 55 The tone of these denunciations is not an accidental characteristic of Christ s. It is an organic product, a concomitant of the 184 THE MAN OF ACTION hottest, most personal love of men that has ever been known upon the earth. Here then is an outpouring of lava. Vainly might we call this passion, idle, unphilo- sophical, lacking in courtesy; or say that it fails to distinguish between the sinner and the sin. Granted : granted. Yet this is the way a man speaks who feels as Christ felt. If Christ s way of feeling be right, there is something right about his mode of expres sion. Somewhere, somehow, this heat is valuable. In some sense these whirling words are true, just, adequate and scientific. They do something which nothing else will do. You say there is evil in them. You are mistaken : there is no evil in them : there is nothing uncharitable in them. They are the terrible music of social agony. You would speak thus yourself, could you see as clearly, feel as keenly, as did Christ. Your calmness is only possible because your heart is cold, or your eyes dim. Let us now remember what mild gentle men those Pharisees were, to whom Christ used such strong language. How inoffen sive their vices a little usury, some busi ness villainy, perhaps, a good deal of con ventional hypocrisy, front pews in church, public charity-giving. That old Jewish so- 185 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ciety was probably the most moral society that ever existed. If we consider its thou sand years of prophets, its literature of ethics and of devotion, its popular passion for the ology, its passion for those discussions which went on constantly in temple and market place, and which show a deeper clutch upon truth than Athens at her best could show if we consider what sort of men those scribes and Pharisees probably were, we shall have to confess that Christ s rebuke fell on men whose faults were mild com pared to the atrocities visible in the modern world. Examine the morning newspaper and you will find fiendish cruelties unknown in Judsea. At the back of the prophet s emotion is his vision of a relation between innocent suf fering and half-innocent selfishness. If you should see a man being burned alive by re spectable rate-payers, you would cry out, you yet not you but something in you would burst into agonized protest, accusing those rate-payers ; and your language would be harsh. Such is the explanation of the strong language of Anti-slavery. The Ab olitionists were the only people in the coun try who effectually saw what was going on. They saw the slave-block, they saw the child 186 THE MAN OF ACTION reft from the mother, they saw the floggings and the despair. A hundred volumes might be compiled out of old newspapers by cull ing advertisements like the following from the Charleston Courier in 1825 : " Twenty dollars reward. Ran away from the subscriber, on the I4th instant, a negro girl named Molly. She is 16 or 17 years of age, slim made, lately branded on her left cheek, thus, * R, and a piece is taken off her left ear on the same side; the same letter is branded on the inside of both her legs " ABNER Ross " Fairfield District, S. C." Let any serious-minded man read a few pages of the Key to " Uncle Tom s Cabin," or of Theodore D. Weld s book on American Slavery, before he decides to discountenance strong language. The people of the South did not know about the horrors of slavery, and taught their children not to see them; they glossed them over, as the inevitable un pleasantnesses of life are always glossed over. John S. Wise was a typical child of the South, save that he had a Northern mother. He was the son of Henry A. Wise, the famous Governor of Virginia, and he has given us a book of memoirs, " The 187 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON End of An Era," which will be read as long as the Civil War is remembered. John S. Wise had never heard of a slave-auction, till a Northern uncle, whom he met or visited in Philadelphia, took him to see " Uncle Tom s Cabin " on the stage. This was in the fif ties, and when John S. Wise was a young lad. On returning to Richmond he visited a slave-auction, and was as much horrified as a Northern boy would have been. The horrors of slavery were unknown to the South, and ten times more unknown to the North, when the Abolitionists discovered them. I have noticed in recent years one or two denunciations of business wickedness, in which a fierce invective seemed to tear the skin from the victim s body. One writer pictured the descent of disease upon the bad man how his hair fell from his scalp. Now in all these cases in the case of Christ, of the Abolitionists, and of the de nouncers of business wickedness the deli cate mind is shocked. It is shocked because it reads in cold blood what is merely the in stinctive expression of hot feeling. It sees malice where there is no malice. The truth is that instinctive expression does something which philosophic analysis can- 188 THE MAN OF ACTION not do : it reaches the soul, it raises the tem perature and lets in light. The danger of denunciation lies in the temptation to use denunciation as a method of reform. The spontaneous cry of pity ought never to be transformed into a lash; nor should the flames of righteous indignation be ex ploited politically, and used to cook up re form. There is nothing of this kind in the New Testament, but there was a good deal of it in Anti-slavery history. Garrison made a method of personal vilification; he would cover the wicked with " thick in famy." He was a gadfly and a fury in his own conception. His utterances are not al ways, like Christ s, lyrical utterances; they are calculated attacks. This is hardly a matter, however, upon which one can make a general statement that will cover all cases. The particular thing uttered by Garrison must, in each case, be considered by itself. There are moments when Garrison is in spired. His faith is perfect. In reviewing the first year of the Liberator s activity, he wrote : " Last year I felt as if I were fight ing single-handed against the great enemy; now I see around me a host of valiant war riors, armed with weapons of an immortal temper, whom nothing can daunt, and who 189 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON are pledged to the end of the contest. The number is increasing with singular rapidity. The standard which has been lifted up in Boston is attracting the gaze of the nation, and inspiring the drooping hearts of thou sands with hope and courage. " As for myself, whatever may be my fate whether I fall in the spring-time of man hood by the hand of the assassin, or be im mured in a Georgia cell, or be permitted to live to a ripe old age I know that the suc cess of your cause depends nothing upon my existence. I am but as a drop in the ocean, which, if it be separated, cannot be missed. My own faith is strong my vision, clear my consolation, great. * Who art thou great mountain? Before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain : and he shall bring the headstone thereof with shoutings, cry ing, Grace, grace unto it ! Surely this is beautiful : it is inspired; it is unconscious. The following description of the Coloniza tion Society seems to me to be truly Hebraic in its celestial rage " Upon this pamphlet 1 shall be willing to stake my reputation for honesty, prudence, benevolence, truth, and sagaciousness. If I do not prove the Colo nization spirit to be a creature without heart, without brains, eyeless, unnatural, hypocriti- 190 THE MAN OF ACTION cal, relentless, unjust, then nothing is capable of demonstration." The reader may turn over Garrison s utterances and pick out the lyrical from the political by the light of his own feeling. In doing so he will find him self forgiving more, the more he becomes ac quainted with Garrison s world. The fol lowing words about Henry Clay seem cruel : " Henry Clay with one foot in the grave, and just ready to have body and soul cast into Hell as if eager to make his damna tion doubly sure, rises in the United States Senate and proposes an inquiry into the ex pediency of passing yet another law, by which every one who shall dare peep or mut ter against the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law shall have his life crushed out." When we learn, however, that the Fugi tive Slave Law of 1850 provided that the negro in Massachusetts might be identified through the mere affidavit of the slave holder agent; that the slave could not testify himself; that there was no trial by jury; that the commissioner s fee was doubled if the slaveholder prevailed ; that the bystander could be summoned to aid in preventing an escape, and that, in case any person assisted the escape, such person should be fined a thousand dollars, or imprisoned not exceed- 191 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ing six months ; when we learn that modern historians have accounted for its diabolical provisions by suggesting that this Fugitive Slave Bill was intended to involve such hu miliation to the North that the North would not swallow it, but would reject it and thereby give the South grounds for seces sion; when we reflect that the North did swallow this law, and that thousands of free colored people throughout the Northern cities, innocent and industrious citizens, were at that time fleeing to Canada ; when we remember these facts, we begin to feel that Garrison s language was by no means too strong. When all has been said in his favor, there remains a certain debauchery of language in Garrison, which came from his occupation: he was a journalist. If a man writes all the time, his mannerisms become intensified. Garrison became a common scold and yet not a common scold, because his inner temper was perfect, and his subject the great subject of the age. He is ever driving his Cause, and feels he must evoke immediate response at every instant. His lack of good taste is not unconnected with his weakness in abstract thinking. To him Slavery in the concrete was the evil. He had not the 192 THE MAN OF ACTION philosophic power to perceive that sin was the real evil. The evils were injustice, cruelty, murder, lust, egoism. These things he believed to be the outcome of Slavery. It is not, however, the harshness of lan guage that we are quarreling with. What rh gp1pacu>g ^g fry Garrison is the element of x v/ policy, the wholesale element in his method. I But let us beware lest in straining at a gnat we swallow a camel; and let us remember that what is offensive to us, physicked the nation. The young Garrison, the man of twenty-four, when he discovered Immediate Emancipation, was the vortex of an unseen whirlpool. Through his brain spun the tur- billion. Something was to break forth; for the power was bursting its envelope. The flood issued in the form in which we know it with purposed vilification, with exco riating harshness, with calculated ferocity. Only in this manner could it issue : the dam could hold the flood no longer, nor lift it into poetic expression. If you take the great political agitators of the world like Luther, Calvin, Savonarola, Garibaldi, or certain of the English church reformers, you will find that these men al ways live under a terrible strain, and they generally give way somewhere. No one can 193 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON imagine how fierce is the blast upon a man s nervous system, when he stands in the midst of universal antagonism, solitary and at bay. The continuousness of the trial is apt to wear upon the character of reformers. Through vanity, or love of power, or through sheer nervous exhaustion, they be come guilty of cruelty or tainted with ambi tion. There is generally something to for give in the history of such men. Now Gar rison is almost perfect: he is perfect in his lack of personal ambition, in his indifference to power, in his courage, his faith, his per sistence, his benevolence. When he breaks down it is in driblets, and every day in the bad taste and self-indulgence of a dis gusting rhetoric, in his inability to " shut up " about anything, in his use of the per sonal pronoun. Through these channels his nervous exhaustion is worked off, and the inner heart of the creature is left free from the great temptations. All this armor of language was the para phernalia of the arena, which was, as it were, handed to Garrison from without from on high, from within. He puts it on, and enters the lists : he puts it off, and takes supper with his family. As for the kind of man which he really was, the testimony is 194 THE MAN OF ACTION universal and uniform. I copy one or two phrases almost at random, from among the innumerable descriptions of him. Richard D. Webb, an Irish Abolitionist, and a very old friend of all the Anti-slavery people, wrote: "I . . . spent three weeks with the Garrisons in Paris and Switzerland. It was a time of intense enjoyment, for I ex ceedingly liked my companions. . . . As to Mr. Garrison himself, he is the most delightful man I have ever known mag nanimous, generous, considerate, and, as far as I can see, every way morally excellent. I can perceive that he has large faith, is very credulous, is not deeply read, and has little of the curiosity or thirst for knowledge which educated people are prone to. But, take him for all in all, I know no such other man. His children are most affectionate and free with him yet they have their own opinions and express them freely, even when they differ most widely from his. . . . People who travel together have an excellent opportunity of knowing and testing one an other. ... I have never on the whole known a man who bears to be more thor oughly known, or is so sure to be loved and reverenced." Harriet Martineau has left us a record of 195 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON her first impressions in all their freshness : " At ten o clock he came, accompanied by his introducer. His aspect put to flight in an instant what prejudices his slanderers had raised in me. I was wholly taken by sur prise. It was a countenance glowing with health, and wholly expressive of purity, ani mation, and gentleness. I did not wonder at the citizen who, seeing a print of Garrison at a shop window without a name to it, went in and bought it, and framed it as the most saintlike of countenances. The end of the story is, that when the citizen found whose portrait he had been hanging up in his par lor, he took the print out of the frame and huddled it away/ The lion and the lamb dwelt together in Garrison ; but the lion was a peculiar lion, he was never really in control of Garrison, as the lion in Luther was sometimes in control of Luther. The following anecdote from Mr. May s reminiscences gives us a glimpse of the social side of Garrison and shows the perplexities into which his methods of agita tion naturally led the public. The scene is upon a steamboat. " There was much earnest talking by other parties beside our own. Presently a gentle man turned from one of them to me and 196 THE MAN OF ACTION said, What, sir, are the Abolitionists going to do in Philadelphia? I informed him that we intended to form a National Anti- Slavery Society. This brought from him an outpouring of the commonplace objections to our enterprise, which I replied to as well as I was able. Mr. Garrison drew near, and I soon shifted my part of the discussion into his hands, and listened with delight to the admirable manner in which he expounded and maintained the doctrines and purposes of those who believed with him that the slaves the blackest of them were men, entitled as much as the whitest and most exalted men in the land to their liberty, to a residence here, if they chose, and to acquire as much wisdom, as much property, and as high a position as they may. " After a long conversation, which at tracted as many as could get within hearing, the gentleman said, courteously : I have been much interested, sir, in what you have said, and in the exceedingly frank and tem perate manner in which you have treated the subject. If all Abolitionists were like you, there would be much less opposition to your enterprise. But, sir, depend upon it, that hair-brained, reckless, violent fanatic, Gar rison, will damage, if he does not shipwreck, 197 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON any cause. Stepping forward, I replied, * Allow me, sir, to introduce you to Mr. Gar rison, of whom you entertain so bad an opin ion. The gentleman you have been talking with is he. " The gayety of temperament and a certain bubbling power of enjoyment which Garri son possessed he shared with all, or almost all, the Abolitionists ; their work made them happy. " I have seen him intimately," said Wendell Phillips, " for thirty years, while raining on his head was the hate of the com munity, when by every possible form of ex pression malignity let him know that it wished him all sorts of harm. I never saw him unhappy. I never saw the moment that serene abounding faith in the rectitude of his motive, the soundness of his method, and the certainty of success did not lift him above all possibility of being reached by any clamor about him." VIII THE RYNDERS MOB THE Anti-slavery meeting at the Broadway Tabernacle on May 7, 1850, which goes by the name of the Rynders Mob, has an inter est quite beyond the boundaries of its epoch. It gives an example of how any disturbance that arises in a public meeting ought to be handled by the managers of the meeting. It has a lesson for all agitators and popular speakers. It gives, indeed, a picture of humanity during a turbulent crisis, a pic ture that is Athenian, Roman, Mediaeval, modern a scene of democratic life, flung to us from the ages. I shall copy the ac count of this meeting almost verbatim from the large Life of Garrison. No comment can add to the power of it. We have to remember that Webster had made his famous Compromise speech just two months before this meeting; and that the phalanxes of all conservative people, from George Ticknor, in Boston, to the row dies on the Bowery in New York, were be- 199 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ing marshalled to repress Abolition as they had not been marshalled since 1835. It must be noted also that this attempt suc ceeded on the whole. In spite of the tri umph which the Abolitionists scored at this particular meeting, it became impossible for them to hold meetings in great cities for some time afterwards. The complicity of the Churches with Slavery is now almost forgotten. Among the Abolitionists dur ing the critical epoch there was to be found no Episcopal clergyman (save the Rev. E. M. P. Wells, of Boston, who early withdrew from the Cause) and no Catholic priest. The Abolition leaders were, never theless, drawn largely from the clerical ranks ; but they were Unitarians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Baptists, etc., and were generally driven from their own pulpits in consequence of their opinions about Slavery. The Ecclesiastical Apologists for Slavery founded their case upon the New Testament. A literature of exegesis was in existence of which the "View of Slavery" by John Henry Hopkins, D.D., LL.D., Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Vermont, is a late example. At this time Zachary Taylor, a slaveholder and a devout Episcopalian, was president of the United States. 200 THE RYNDERS MOB The situation was a difficult one for the Evangelical, anti-sectarian mind to deal with. What was the use of quoting the New Testa ment to slaveholders, who were already for tified out of that very volume? The effect of the situation on Garrison s temperament may be seen in the meeting at the Taber nacle. There is a demonic element in what he says : his utterance is forced out of him : it is not calculated. You could not repro duce the spirit of this utterance except at the cost of two centuries of human passion. There is a demonic element also in Garri son s courage. He displays, on this occa sion, at least two kinds of genius, the genius of satire, Voltaire might have uttered the scathing slashes about " Christ in the presi dential chair," and the all but antipodal genius of infinite sweetness of temperament. The New York Herald in advance of the meeting denounced Garrison for many days in succession, and advised the breaking up of the meeting by violence. According to the Herald, " Garrison boldly urges the ut ter overthrow of the churches, the Sabbath, and the Bible. Nothing has been sacred with him but the ideal intellect of the negro race. To elevate this chimera, he has urged the necessity of an immediate overthrow of 201 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON the Government, a total disrespect for the Constitution, actual disruption and annihila tion of the Union, and a cessation of all order, legal or divine, which does not square with his narrow views of what constitutes human liberty. Never, in the time of the French Revolution and blasphemous atheism, was there more malevolence and unblushing wickedness avowed than by this same Gar rison. Indeed, he surpasses Robespierre and his associates, for he has no design of build ing up. His only object is to destroy. . . . In Boston, a few months ago, a convention was held, the object of which was the overthrow of Sunday worship. Thus it appears that nothing divine or sec ular is respected by these fanatics. . . . When free discussion does not promote the public good, it has no more right to exist than a bad government that is dangerous and oppressive to the common weal. It should be overthrown. On the question of useful ness to the public of the packed, organized meetings of these Abolitionists, socialists, Sabbath-breakers, and anarchists, there can be but one result arrived at by prudence and patriotism. They are dangerous as semblies calculated for mischief, and treasonable in their character and purposes. 202 THE RYNDERS MOB Though the law cannot reach them, public opinion can; and as, in England, a peaceful dissent from such doctrines as these fellows would promulgate a strong expression of hisses and by counter statements and exposi tions, so here in New York we may antici pate that there are those who will enter the arena of discussion, and send out the true opinion of the public. . . ." The meeting of May 7, at the Tabernacle, was a vast assembly which contained many respectable people, intermingled with whom was an organized element of impending mob. The leader of the mob was a well- know ruffian called Isaiah Rynders, " a na tive American, of mixed German and Irish lineage, now some forty-six years of age. He began life as a boatman on the Hudson River, and, passing easily into the sporting class, went to seek his fortunes as a profes sional gambler in the paradise of the South west. In this region he became familiar with all forms of violence, including the in stitution of slavery. After many personal hazards and vicissitudes, he returned to New York city, where he proved to be admirably qualified for local political leadership in con nection with Tammany Hall. A sporting- house which he opened became a Democratic 203 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON rendezvous and the headquarters of the Em pire Club, an organization of roughs and desperadoes who acknowledged his cap taincy. His campaigning in behalf of Polk and Dallas in 1844 secured him the friendly patronage of the successful candidate for Vice-President, and he took office as Weigher in the Custom-house of the me tropolis. He found time, while thus em ployed, to engineer the Astor Place riot on behalf of the actor Forrest against his Eng lish rival Macready, on May 10, 1849, an d the year 1850 opened with his trial for this atrocity and his successful defense by John Van Buren. On February 16 he and his Club broke up an anti-Wilmot- Proviso meet ing in New York a seeming inconsistency, but it was charged against Rynders that he had offered to give the State of New York to Clay in the election of 1844 for $30,000, and had met with reluctant refusal. In March he was arrested for a brutal assault on a -gentleman in a hotel, but the victim and the witnesses found it prudent not to appear against a ruffian who did not hesitate to threaten the district-attorney in open court. Meanwhile, the new Whig Administration quite justifiably discharged Rynders from the Custom-house, leaving him free to pose 204 THE RYNDERS MOB as a savior of the Union against traitors a savior of society against blasphemers and infidels wherever encountered. . . ." When the meeting was brought to order Mr. Garrison, as an opening exercise, read certain passages of the Bible, chosen with reference to their bearing upon the slave trade : " The Lord standeth up to plead, and standeth to judge the people. . . . What mean ye that ye beat my people to pieces, and grind the faces of the poor? saith the Lord God of Hosts. . . . Associ ate yourselves, O ye people, and ye shall be broken in pieces; gird yourselves, and ye shall be broken in pieces. . . . They all lie in wait for blood; they hunt every man his brother with a net. . . . Hide the outcasts, bewray not him that wandereth; let mine outcasts dwell with thee ; be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler." " To Dr. Furness, who sat beside Mr. Garrison, these selections (in full, not in our abstract) seemed most admirably adapted to the existing state of our country. His read ing, however, was not remarkably effective. It was like the ordinary reading of the pul pit, and hence not calculated to stir the wrath of the ungodly. " The reading of the Treasurer s report 205 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON followed, and then Mr. Garrison, resigning the chair to Francis Jackson, proceeded to make the first speech of the day. " He began," says Dr. Furness, " with stating that they, the members of the Anti- Slavery Society, regarded the Anti-slavery cause as emphatically the Christian move ment of the day. Nothing could be more explicit than his recognition of the truth and divine authority of the Christianity of the New Testament. He went on to examine the popular tests of religion, and to show their defectiveness. In so doing, his man ner was grave and dignified. There was no bitterness, no levity. His manner of speak ing was simple, clerical, and Christian. His subject was, substantially, that we have, over and over again, in all the pulpits of the land the inconsistency of our profession and practice although not with the same appli cation. . . . Mr. Garrison said great importance was attached to a belief in Jesus. We were told that we must believe in Jesus. And yet this faith in Jesus had no vitality, no practical bearing on conduct and char acter. He had previously, however, passed in rapid review the chief religious denomina tions, showing that they uttered no protest against the sins of the nation. He spoke 206 THE RYNDERS MOB first in this connection of the Roman Catho lic Church, stating that its priests and mem bers held slaves without incurring the re buke of the Church." Up to this time the only symptoms of op position had been some ill-timed and sense less applause or what seemed such. And as it came from one little portion of the audi ence, Dr. Furness asked Wendell Phillips at his side what it meant. It means, he said, t that there is to be a row/ The reference to the Catholic Church gave the first opening to the leader of the gang." The following is from the New York Her ald s account of the meeting : " Captain Ryn- ders (who occupied a position in the back ground, at one side of the organ-loft, and commanding a bird s-eye view of the whole scene beneath) here said : Will you allow me to ask you a question? (Excitement and con fusion.) " Mr. Garrison Yes, sir. " Captain Rynders The question I would ask is, whether there are no other churches as well as the Catholic Church, whose clergy and lay members hold slaves? " Mr. Garrison Will the friend wait for a moment, and I will answer him in reference to other churches." (Cheers.) 207 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON (Dr. Furness says that Mr. Garrison ex pressed no surprise at the interruption. There was not the slightest change in his manner or his voice. He simply said : " My friend, if you will wait a moment, your ques tion shall be answered," or something to that effect. There instantly arose a loud clapping around the stranger in the gallery, and from the outskirts of the audience, at different points.) Captain Rynders then resumed his seat. Mr. Garrison thus proceeded : " Shall we look to the Episcopal Church for hope ? It was the boast of John C. Calhoun, shortly before his death, that that church was im pregnable to Anti-slavery. That vaunt was founded on truth, for the Episcopal clergy and laity are buyers and sellers of human flesh. We cannot, therefore, look to them. Shall we look to the Presbyterian Church? The whole weight of it is on the side of op pression. Ministers and people buy and sell slaves, apparently without any compunc tious visitings of conscience. We cannot, therefore, look to them, nor to the Baptists, nor the Methodists ; for they, too, are against the slave, and all the sects are combined to prevent that jubilee which it is the will of God should come. . . . 208 THE RYNDERS MOB " Be not startled when I say that a belief in Jesus is no evidence of goodness (hisses) ; no, friends. " Voice Yes it is. " Mr. Garrison Our friend says yes ; my position is no. It is worthless as a test, for the reason I have already assigned in reference to the other tests. His praises are sung in Louisiana, Alabama, and the other Southern States just as well as in Massachusetts. " Captain Rynders Are you aware that the slaves in the South have their prayer- meetings in honor of Christ? " Mr. Garrison Not a slaveholding or a slave-breeding Jesus. (Sensation.) The slaves believe in a Jesus that strikes off chains. In this country, Jesus has become obsolete. A profession in him is no longer a test. Who objects to his course in Ju daea? The old Pharisees are extinct, and may safely be denounced. Jesus is the most respectable person in the United States. (Great sensation, and murmurs of disap probation.) Jesus sits in the President s chair of the United States. <A thrill of horror here seemed to run through the as sembly.) Zachary Taylor sits there, which is the same thing, for he believes in Jesus. 209 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON He believes in war, and the Jesus that gave the Mexicans hell/ (Sensation, uproar, and confusion.) " The name of Zachary Taylor had scarcely passed Mr. Garrison s lips when Captain Rynders, with something like a howl, forsaking his strategic position on the border-line of the gallery and the platform, dashed headlong down towards the speaker s desk, followed, with shouting and impreca tions and a terrifying noise, by the mass of his backers. The audience, despite a natural agitation, gave way to no panic. The Abolitionist leaders upon the platform re mained imperturbable. * I was not aware, writes Dr. Furness, * of being under any ap prehension of personal violence. We were all like General Jackson s cotton-bales at New Orleans. Our demeanor made it im possible for the rioters to use any physical force against us. Rynders found himself in the midst of Francis and Edmund Jack son, of Wendell Phillips, of Edmund Quincy, of Charles F. Hovey, of William H. Furness, of Samuel May, Jr., of Sydney Howard Gay, of Isaac T. Hopper, of Henry C. Wright, of Abby Kelley Foster, of Fred- erick Douglass, of Mr. Garrison against whom his menaces were specially directed. 210 THE RYNDERS MOB Never was a human being more out of his element." The following, according to the Herald, was what greeted Mr. Garrison s ear: " Captain Rynders (clenching his fist) I will not allow you to assail the President of the United States. You shan t do it (shaking his fist at Mr. Garrison). " Many voices Turn him out, turn him out! " Captain Rynders If a million of you were there, I would not allow the President of the United States to be insulted. As long as you confined yourself to your sub ject, I did not interfere; but I will not per mit you or any other man to misrepresent the President." Mr. Garrison, as fhe Rev. Samuel May testifies, " calmly replied that he had simply quoted some recent words of General Tay lor, and appealed to the audience if he had said aught in disrespect of him." " You ought not to interrupt us," he continued to Rynders in the quietest manner conceiv able, as Dr. Furness relates. " We go upon the principle of hearing everybody. If you wish to speak, I will keep order, and you shall be heard." The din, however, in creased. " The Hutchinsons," continues Dr. 211 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON Furness, " who were wont to sing at the Anti-slavery meetings, were in the gallery, and they attempted to raise a song, to soothe the savages with music. But it was of no avail. Rynders drowned their fine voices with noise and shouting." Still, a knock down argument with a live combatant would have suited him better than mere Bedlam- itish disturbance. He was almost gratified by young Thomas L. Kane, son of Judge Kane of Philadelphia, who, seeing the rush of the mob upon the platform, had himself leaped there, to protect his townsman, Dr. Furness. They shall not touch a hair of your head," he said in a tone of great ex citement; and, as the strain became more intense, he rushed up to Rynders and shook his fist in his face. "He said to me [Dr. Furness] with the deepest emphasis: If he touches Mr. Garrison Til kill him. " But Mr. Garrison s composure was more than a coat of mail. The knot was cut by Francis Jackson s formal offer of the floor to Rynders as soon as Mr. Garrison had finished his remarks; with an invitation meanwhile to take a seat on the platform. This, says Mr. May, he scoutingly refused ; but, seeing the manifest fairness of the president s offer, drew back a 212 THE RYNDERS MOB little, and stood, with folded arms, waiting for Mr. Garrison to conclude, which soon he did offering a resolution in these terms : " Resolved, That the Anti-slavery move ment, instead of being * infidel/ in an evil sense (as is falsely alleged), is truly Chris tian, in the primitive meaning of that term, and the special embodiment in this country of whatever is loyal to God and benevolent to man; and that, in view of the palpable enormity of slavery of the religious and political professions of the people of the age in which we live, blazing with the con centrated light of many centuries indif ference or hostility to this movement indi cates a state of mind more culpable than was manifested by the Jewish nation in rejecting Jesus as the Messiah, eighteen hundred years ago."_ With these words the speaker retired, to resume the presidency of the meeting. " The close of Mr. Garrison s address," says Dr. Furness, " brought down Rynders again, who vociferated and harangued, at one time on the platform, and then pushing down into the aisles, like a madman followed by his keepers. Through the whole, noth ing could be more patient and serene than the bearing of Mr. Garrison. I have al- 213 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ways revered Mr. Garrison for his devoted, uncompromising fidelity to his great cause. To-day I was touched to the heart by his calm and gentle manners. There was no agitation, no scorn, no heat, but the quiet ness of a man engaged in simple duties." After some parleying, it appeared that Rynders had a spokesman who preferred to speak after Dr. Furness. " Accordingly," says the latter, " I spoke my little, anxiously prepared word. I never recall that hour without blessing myself that I was called to speak precisely at that mo ment. At any other stage of the proceed ings, it would have been wretchedly out of place. As it was, my speech fitted in almost as well as if it had been impromptu, although a sharp eye might easily have discovered that I was speaking memoriter. Rynders interrupted me again and again, exclaiming that I lied, that I was personal ; but he ended with applauding me ! " No greater contrast to what was to follow could possibly be imagined than the genial manner, firm tones, and self-possession, the refined discourse, of this Unitarian clergy man, who was felt to have turned the cur rent of the meeting. There uprose, as per agreement, one " Professor " Grant, a seedy- 214 THE RYNDERS MOB looking personage, having one hand tied round with a dirty cotton cloth. Mr. Garri son recognized him as a former pressman in the Liberator office. His thesis was that the blacks were not men, but belonged to the monkey tribe. His speech proved dull and tiresome, and was made sport of by his own set, whom Mr. Garrison had to call to order. There were now loud cries for Frederick Douglass, who came forward to where Ryn- ders stood in the conspicuous position he had taken when he thought the meeting was his, and who remained in it, too mortified even to creep away, when he found it was somebody else s. " Now you can speak," said he to Douglass; " but mind what I say: if you speak disrespectfully (of the South, or Washington, or Patrick Henry) I ll knock you off the stage." Nothing daunted, the ex-fugitive from greater terrors began: (< The gentleman who has just spoken has undertaken to prove that the blacks are not human beings. He has examined our whole conformation, from top to toe. I cannot follow him in his argument. I will assist him in it, however. I offer myself for your examination. Am I a man ? " The audience responded with a thunder ous affirmative, which Captain Rynders 215 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON sought to break by exclaiming: " You are not a black man; you are only half a nig ger." " Then," replied Mr. Douglass, turn ing upon him with the blandest of smiles and an almost affectionate obeisance, " I am half-brother to Captain Rynders!" He would not deny that he was the son of a slaveholder, born of Southern " amalgama tion " ; a fugitive, too, like Kossuth " an other half-brother of mine" (to Rynders). He spoke of the difficulties thrown in the way of industrious colored people at the North, as he had himself experienced this by way of answer to Horace Greeley, who had recently complained of their in efficiency and dependence. Criticism of the editor of the Tribune being grateful to Rynders, a political adversary, " he added a word to Douglass s against Greeley. * I am happy/ said Douglass, f to have the as sent of my half-brother here/ pointing to Rynders, and convulsing the audience with laughter. After this, Rynders, finding how he was played with, took care to hold his peace; but someone of Rynders company in the gallery undertook to interrupt the speaker. It s of no use/ said Mr. Doug lass, I ve Captain Rynders here to back me! " We were born here," he said 216 THE RYNDERS MOB finally, " we are not dying out, and we mean to stay here. We made the clothes you have on, the sugar you put into your tea. We would do more if allowed." " Yes," said a voice in the crowd, " you would cut our throats for us." " No," was the quick re sponse, " but we would cut your hair for you." Douglass concluded his triumphant re marks by calling upon the Rev. Samuel R. Ward, editor of the Impartial Citizen, to succeed him. " All eyes," says Dr. Fur- ness, " were instantly turned to the back of the platform, or stage rather, so dramatic was the scene; and there, amidst a group, stood a large man, so black that, as Wendell Phillips said, when he shut his eyes you could not see him. As he approached, Rynders exclaimed : Well, this is the orig inal nigger. I ve heard of the magnanim ity of Captain Rynders/ said Ward, but the half has not been told me! And then he went on with a noble voice and his speech was such a strain of eloquence as I never heard excelled before or since." The mob had to applaud him, too, and it is the high est praise to record that his unpremeditated utterance maintained the level of Doug lass s, and ended the meeting with a sense 217 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON of climax demonstrating alike the hu manity and the capacity of the full-blooded negro. " When he ceased speaking, the time had expired for which the Tabernacle was en gaged, and we had to adjourn. Never," continues Dr. Furness, " was there a grander triumph of intelligence, of mind, over brute force. Two colored men, whose claim to be considered human was denied, had, by mere force of intellect, overwhelmed their maligners with confusion. As the audience was thinning out, I went down on the floor to see some friends there. Ryn- ders came by. I could not help saying to him : How shall I thank you for what you have done for us to-day? Well/ said he, * I do not like to hear my country abused, but that last thing that you said, that s the truth/ That last thing was, I be lieve, a simple assertion of the right of the people to think and speak freely/ IX GARRISON AND EMERSON THESE two men were almost exactly the same age; for Emerson was born in 1803 and Garrison in 1805. The precocity of Garrison, however, who became one of the figure-heads of his day at the age of twenty- four, and the tardy, inward development of Emerson, who did not become widely known till almost twenty years later, seem to class them in separate generations. Each of the men was a specialist of the ex- tremest kind; Garrison, devoted to the vis ible and particular evils of his times, Emer son, seeking always the abstraction, and able to see the facts before his face only by the aid of general laws; Garrison all heart, Emerson all head; Garrison determined to remake the world, Emerson convinced that he must keep his eyes on the stars and wait for his message. Each of these men was, nevertheless, twin to the other. Their spirit was the same, and the influence of each was a strand in the same reaction, a 219 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON cry from the same abyss. Emerson, no less than Garrison, was the voice of Abolition, and the dying Theodore Parker names him as a prophet. I should sum up Garrison s whole life-work in one word, Courage. And I cannot find another word, except Courage, to sum up Emerson. The function of Garrison was to crack up, to dissolve. He cannot bear to see two men agree about anything, he cannot tol erate assent; toleration is the enemy, tol eration is the sin of the age. In like man ner is Emerson a sphinx who puts questions to his age. His thought cannot be under stood without a thorough pulling-down of extant prejudices. Both men are dissolv ents. With Emerson, this was idea; with Garrison, it was function. Garrison does, he knows not what he talks foaming, he cannot fit two conceptions together; but he is generally, and on the whole, the agent of dissolution and re-crystallization. Emer son has only one note. He sits helplessly on his perch and utters his note ; waits a while, and again utters his note ; and he is everywhere and always the agent of disso lution and re-crystallization. To compare the relations of these men to each other brings out very vividly the strong and the 220 GARRISON AND EMERSON weak sides of each of them; for each seems to split the age, and show the sutures in the skull of the world; each is the key to the puzzle, and each is the missing half of the other s nature. That they did not under stand one another, that there was no plane on which they could meet (except for a flash), is a sort of proof, by paradox, that they stood for the same thing expressed in different symbols. Never in all literature has there been such a passionate proclamation of the individual as Emerson makes ; and one of the few men that ever lived, who best fulfills Emerson s ideal picture of the influential individual, is Garrison. It is indeed strange to reflect that Emerson s life was given up to pictur ing the strong man who sheds all positive influence upon his age, and receives nothing from it, and yet to remember that Garri son s activity in real life was unsympathetic and even repulsive to Emerson. The fame of the two men is unequal ; be cause Emerson had about him a dry glint of the eternal, and his mind was a unity; whereas Garrison was a professional agi tator and his mind was sometimes at odds with itself. The power that counts to wards fame seems to be the power of vision. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON A man with vision leaves behind him a clear picture, consistent with itself, easily under stood, popular, enduring; and though there be but few strokes in the sketch, his thought carries. The practical man, though he have the heart of the Samaritan, and do the work of a Titan, deals in more ephemeral sym bols and is sooner forgotten. There was no single contemporary whose nature cov ered the divergent fields of both of these men. The Anti-slavery cause was always badly crippled for lack of a philosopher; and Emerson s influence has always stood in need of more animal life as a vehicle to float it towards mankind. Let us review the points at which the careers of the two men touched each other; remembering all the time that any age is a unity, that all men who live in it are members of each other, and that the Unconscious is the important part of life. Emerson, after the loss of his first wife, followed by a breakdown in health and a year of gloomy travel in Europe, returned to Boston in 1833, a frail man of thirty, with a theological training, the tastes of a recluse, and an immense, unworldly ambi tion. To live in a village, to write in his journal, to walk in the woods and ruminate, 222 GARRISON AND EMERSON such was to be his existence. The or ganic reticence of Emerson has all but con cealed the strong current of purpose that ran beneath the apparent futility of his ex ternal life. He was indeed a man of iron ; and both he and Garrison might be com pared to Ignatius Loyola in respect to their will. Emerson writes in his journal in 1834: The philosophy of Waiting needs some times to be unfolded. Thus he who is qualified to act upon the public, if he does not act on many, may yet act intensely on a few; if he does not act much upon any, but, from insulated condition and unfit com panions, seems quite withdrawn into him self, still, if he know and feel his obliga tions, he may be (unknown and uncon sciously) hiving knowledge and concentrat ing powers to act well hereafter, and a very remote hereafter." " A remote hereafter," this was ever in Emerson s mind. He feels himself to be an outpost or advance guard of future wisdom. " It is a mani fest interest which comes home to my bosom and every man s bosom," he continues a page or two later, " that there should be on every tower Watchers set to observe and report of every new ray of light, in what 223 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON quarter soever of Heaven it should appear, and their report should be eagerly and rev erently received. There is no offense done, certainly, to the community in distinctly stating the claims of this office. It is not a coveted office: it is open to all men." Never for one moment was Emerson s mission far from his thought. His fear of approaching it, his excessive reverence for it, is due to his artistic instinct ; just as Gar rison s blatancy about his mission the same mission is a part of Garrison s lack of artistic instinct. With that gleam of practical sagacity which distinguished him, Emerson had resigned from the Church at the first whisper of coercion. He was a free man. He was freer than Channing. He was freer even than Garrison ; for Gar rison kept founding Societies which gave him endless trouble. Emerson s early and unobtrusive retirement from office shows us an amusing exchange of roles between the two; for in this instance Emerson, the recluse, knew the world better than Garri son, the man of action. But Emerson knew the world only in spots. His diary shows us a mind that is almost callow. " Never numbers," he writes, " but the simple and wise shall judge, not the Whar- 224 GARRISON AND EMERSON tons and Drakes, but some divine savage like Webster, Wordsworth, and Reed, whom neither the town nor the college ever made, shall say that we shall all believe. How we thirst for a natural thinker/ Emerson s " natural thinking " leads him to collocate the names of great men very un expectedly and somewhat mysteriously. Entries like the foregoing seem more like the work of a man of twenty than of thirty. We must note in the following not only the lack of emotional life which is implied: we must note also its perfect intellectual poise. " You affirm," says Emerson in his jour nal, "that the moral development contains all the intellectual, and that Jesus was the perfect man. I bow in reverence un feigned before that benign man. I know more, hope more, am more, because he has lived. But, if you tell me that in your opinion, he hath fulfilled all the conditions of man s existence, carried out to the ut most, at least by implication, all man s pow ers, I suspend my assent. I do not see in him cheerfulness: I do not see in him the love of natural science: I see in him no kindness for art: I see in him nothing of Socrates, of Laplace, of Shakespeare. The perfect man should remind us of all great WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON men. Do you ask me if I would rattier resemble Jesus than any other man? If I should say Yes, I should suspect myself of superstition." This passage is like the stalk of the pie plant without the sap. But nature had gifts in her lap for the youth that penned it; and imagination can detect some sort of power even here. Here is at least a crea ture who will test other persons by him self, and not himself by others. The lack ing element seems to be experience ex perience of persons, experience of litera ture, experience of emotion. He has the coldness of crystal, but also its transparent purity. You would not suspect the man who writes thus of holding a pastorate over souls of secretly regarding himself as a bishop and an apostle to lost sheep. Yet such was the fact. A care for men, a love of mankind, is the motive power in him. Emerson is a man whom we are obliged to understand all the time by the light of what only breaks out of him once in seven years and endures but for two seconds. By the spark of this betrayal we know him : witness the opening of his Cooper Union address which I shall quote shortly. The Abolitionists, of course, made a de- 226 GARRISON AND EMERSON scent upon Emerson in their diocesan rounds for they visited and proselytized everyone. May and Thompson, two of Garrison s lieutenants, called upon Emerson. Their mission was incomprehensible to Emerson, who writes in his journal : " Our good friend, Samuel J. May, may instruct us in many things." He admired May but not Thompson, of whom he says : " He belongs I fear to that great class of the Vanity- stricken. An inordinate thirst for notice cannot be gratified until it has found in its gropings what is called a cause that men will bow to ; tying himself fast to that, the small man is then at liberty to consider all objections made to him as proofs of folly and the devil in the objector, and, under that screen, if he gets a rotten egg or two, yet his name sounds through the world and he is praised and praised." Any one who has followed May and Thompson through good and evil report, who has felt the heat and depth of their devotion to truth, must almost wince at see ing what effect a visit from them produced upon the chill-blooded young parson who sat in his meager study, reading his thread bare library in the village of Concord. We are brought to see by such anecdotes 227 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON as this that Anti-slavery was a sort of spe cial illumination. The greatest saints lived without an understanding of Abolition till, suddenly one day, Abolition broke out in their hearts and made them miserable. Abolition was a disease the disease caused by the flooding of withered natures with new health. The infection jumped from one man to another. Genius and tal ent had nothing to do with it ; learning and piety seem to have been immune to it. Emerson was no nearer to an understanding of it than if he had been a clerk in a drug- shop. He had, moreover, a dry disposi tion, a cold wind seemed to blow out of him, and the sweat and unction of emo tion were always antipathetic to him. Nevertheless Emerson thought about the Abolitionists. It cannot be said that he thought about slavery. He neither saw nor knew much about slavery. But he looked out of his window and saw Garrison and the Abolitionists shouting in the streets. They invaded his musings : they troubled his solitude. He tries to shelve them in his mind by a final analysis ; but he never quite suits himself, and so tries again. His lec ture on " The Times " in 1841, is in reality a lecture upon Garrison and Garrison s mul- 228 GARRISON AND EMERSON titudinous causes. The rather old-maidish young Emerson was disgusted by the mis cellaneous and ramping enthusiasm of Gar rison. He says, for instance, in the lecture on "The Times": " These reforms are our contemporaries ; they are ourselves ; our own light and sight, and conscience; they only name the relation which subsists between us and the vicious institutions which they go to rectify." This is complimentary to the reformers: they have at any rate, discovered the evils. But Emerson goes on almost immediately: " The young men who have been vexing so ciety these last years with regenerative methods, seem to have made this mistake; they all exaggerated some special means, and all failed to see that the Reform of Re forms must be accomplished without means. . . . Those who are urging with most ardor what are called the greatest benefits to mankind, are narrow, self-pleasing, con ceited men, and affect us as the insane do. They bite us and we run mad also. I think the work of the reformers as innocent as other work that is done around them; but when I have seen it near I do not like it better." It appears, then, through these last-quoted 229 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON phrases, that Emerson thinks the reformers are quite off the track, after all. But in the final sentence of the essay there is another phrase to the effect " that the highest com pliment man receives from Heaven is the sending to him its disguised and discred ited angels." So Garrison, it appears, was a disguised angel, after all. The essay on " The Times " is a glacial attempt to explain the function of the Reformer. It contains valuable ideas, and beautiful ideas; but it leaves unbridged the chasm between the ap parent odiousness of the reformer and his real utility. It explains nothing: it demon strates only that Emerson did not under stand these particular " times " but was greatly puzzled by them. Dr. Holmes has said " that it would have taken a long time to get rid of slavery if some of Emerson s teachings in this lecture had been accepted as the whole gospel of liberty." " But," he adds, " how much its last sentence covers with its soothing tribute ! " Sometimes in reading this essay on " The Times," it has seemed to me as if the whole of it were tinctured with condescension ; just as the paragraph about Christ quoted above is unpleasant through its crudity of feeling. There is, however, no condescen- 230 GARRISON AND EMERSON sion in either passage. Emerson was the last man in the world to feel condescension. If he had had an inkling of what Garrison s activity signified he would have shouted ap proval. Emerson s humility was abun dantly approved in the outcome. Let this be noted : Emerson was a perfectly coura geous person ; regard for appearance has nothing to do with the ineffectually of his perceptions. Upon Lovejoy s murder, in 1837, Emerson " sternly rejoiced," says Dr. Edward W. Emerson, " that one was found to die for humanity and the rights of free speech and opinion " ; and soon thereafter Emerson delivered a lecture in Boston in which " he suddenly looked the Boston audi ence in the eyes " as he said these words about Lovejoy, " and a shudder seemed to run through the audience, yet unprepared for this bold word, for a martyr of an un popular Cause." Dr. Emerson cites this episode twice over, once in the Journals, and once in the Works, and he adds, " of course Lovejoy had other defenders in Bos ton." Yes, Lovejoy certainly had other de fenders in Boston; and it is fortunate for us that he had. Emerson s words of approbation for Lovejoy seem to have been carefully 231 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON weighed, and he does not mention slavery. He belonged, in fact, to that large class of people who were shocked because free speech was murdered in Love joy s murder. Now, inasmuch as Emerson was lecturing before very conservative people, even this reference to " free speech and opinion " called up before the imagination of the audi ence the spectre of the Abolition Cause; and a shudder warmed the room. Even so remote an approval of Abolition as this, was thought to be very bold in Mr. Emerson. I believe that had it not been for Garrison and his crew, Mr. Emerson would have seen nothing in the street as he looked out of his window in the years 1833-1840. He would, therefore, have turned his eyes upon the heavens, and continued to develop a neo- platonic philosophy. The thing which he did develop during these years, and while he was thinking a good deal about Garrison, and wondering what was the matter with Garrison, the outcome of Emerson s re flections upon Garrison, was that picture of the Just Man which runs through Emer son s thought; that theory of the perfect man, the Overman, the Apollonian saint, who accomplishes all reforms without using any visible means. 232 GARRISON AND EMERSON In 1844, Emerson gives us a glimpse of this Overman in an essay entitled " The New England Reformers." The essay records a lack of progress in Emerson s thought, and shows that he had as yet no idea of the difference between Anti-slavery and the other many and clamoring reforms of the day. Like the essay on " The Times " it contains beautiful ideas, but be trays ignorance of this particular matter Anti-slavery. "The man who shall be born," he says, " whose advent men and events prepare and foreshow, is one who shall enjoy his connection with a higher life, with the man within man; shall de stroy distrust by his trust, shall use his native but forgotten methods, shall not take counsel of flesh and blood, but shall rely on the Law alive and beautiful which works over our heads and under our feet." " If," he says on another page, " we start objections to your project, oh, friend of the slave, or friend of the poor or of the race, understand well it is because we wish to drive you to drive us into your measures. We wish to hear ourselves con futed. We are haunted with a belief that you have a secret which it would highliest advantage us to learn, and we would force 233 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON you to impart it to us, though it should bring us to prison or to worse extrem- ity." This last passage is an echo of the ad mirable fooling of Plato s dialogues. But it is not in phrases like these that men show their understanding of a subject like slavery. The time shall come when the fire shall descend on Emerson and he shall tear his mantle and put dust upon his head. If you would see how a man speaks when the virus of Anti-slavery has really entered his veins, you must turn to the address that Emerson delivered at Cooper Union in New York on March 7th, 1854. It is the Fugi tive Slave Law that has aroused the seer and wrenched him from his tripod. He hates to leave his study, yet must leave it. His voice is strident; he forgets the ameni ties, and begins speaking almost without making a bow to his audience, and while he is still removing his overcoat. " I do not often speak to public questions; they are odious and hurtful, and it seems like meddling or leaving your work. I have my own spirits in prison ; spirits in deeper prisons, whom no man visits if I do not. And then I see what havoc it makes with any good mind, a dissipated philan- 234 GARRISON AND EMERSON thropy. The one thing not to be forgiven to intellectual persons is, not to know their own tasks, or to take their ideas from others. From this want of manly rest in their own and rash acceptance of other peo ple s watchwords, come the imbecility and fatigue of their conversation." He contin ues to speak in haste, making use of the personal pronoun belligerent, reckless. " I have lived all my life without suffering any known inconvenience from American Slavery: I never saw it; I never heard the whip; I never felt the check on my free speech and action, until, the other day, when Mr. Webster, by his personal influence, brought the Fugitive Slave Law on the country. I say Mr. Webster, for though the Bill was not his, it is yet notorious that he was the life and soul of it, that he gave it all he had : it cost him his life, and under the shadow of his great name inferior men sheltered themselves, threw their ballots for it and made the law. I say inferior men. There were all sorts of what are called brilliant men, accomplished men, men of high station, a President of the United States, Senators, men of eloquent speech, but men without self-respect, without char acter, and it was strange to see that office, 235 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON age, fame, talent, even a repute for honesty, all count for nothing. " Emerson next discovers that Webster (formerly one of his gods) has never said anything of any consequence anyway. " If his moral sensibility had been proportioned to the force of his understanding, what lim its could have been set to his genius and beneficent power? But he wanted that deep source of inspiration. Hence a sterility of thought, the want of generalization in his speeches, and the curious fact that, with a general ability which impresses all the world, there is not a single general remark, not an observation on life and manners, not an aphorism that can pass into literature from his writings." Emerson now has the disease of Anti- slavery. The proof is that he feels obliged to take some sort of personal action. He feels responsible to the community for the educated classes. " The way in which the country was dragged to consent to this (the Fugitive Slave Law), and the disastrous de fection (on the miserable cry of Union) of the men of letters, of the colleges, of educated men, nay, of some preachers of religion was the darkest passage in the history." And again: "Yet the lovers of 236 GARRISON AND EMERSON liberty may with reason tax the coldness and indifferentism of scholars and literary men. They are lovers of liberty in Greece and Rome and in the English Common wealth, but they are lukewarm lovers of the liberty of America in 1854. The Uni versities are not, as in Hobbes s time, the core of rebellion, no, but the seat of inert ness." We find no avoidance of the word " slavery " in this address. Every other word seems to be "Slavery, slavery!" " A man who steals another man s labor steals away his own faculties; his integrity, his humanity is flowing away from him. The habit of oppression cuts out the moral eyes, and, though the intellect goes on sim ulating the moral as before, its sanity is gradually destroyed. It takes away the presentiments." And finally in the last paragraph, comes a fierce, frank, almost in coherent, acknowledgment of the country s debt to the Abolitionists. " I respect the Anti-Slavery Society. It is the Cassandra that has foretold all that has befallen, fact for fact, years ago ; foretold all, and no man laid it to heart. It seemed, as the Turks say, * Fate makes that a man should not believe his own eyes. But the Fugitive Slave Law did much to unglue the eyes of 237 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON men, and now the Nebraska Bill leaves us staring. The Anti-Slavery Society will add many members this year. The Whig Party will join it : the Democrats will join it. The population of the Free States will join it. I doubt not, at last, the Slave States will join it. But be that sooner or later and whoever comes or stays away, I hope we have reached the end of our unbelief, have come to a belief that there is a divine Providence in the world, which will not save us but through our own cooperation." Happy Emerson, who has lived to be so moved! Now what is it that has brought Emerson to this pass? It is Daniel Web ster s defection. Webster s defection was like the falling of a mighty tower that jarred whole classes and categories of men into an understanding of the Slave Power. It did what neither Lovejoy s murder, nor the Annexation of Texas was able to do: it waked up " the better element." To this group, the better element, Emerson be longed by education and tradition. He crossed the Jordan along with the rest of his caste. This was just twenty-five years after Garrison s discovery of Immediate Emancipation: for these things were hid den from the wise and prudent and were 238 GARRISON AND EMERSON revealed unto babes. The Abolitionists had been studying Daniel Webster for fifteen years. They had seen the menace in sticks and straws; Emerson sees it in the earth quake. They had then left their desks and hearths as he does now, and had talked on street corners to any one who would listen about "slavery, slavery, slavery!" Now it seems to me clear that Emerson had, from the beginning, been dealing with souls in slavery. This was the vision he saw, a vision which was consequent upon the Slave Epoch, a vision of moral slavery. And the man of Emerson s imagination, who is to set free these slaves is Emerson himself. This Overman is certainly a beautiful person. He does suggest truths, this Apollo-like person of Emerson s, he is valuable and he is beautiful. All of Emerson s abstractions and summaries of moral idea bear somewhat the same sort of relation to the real world that this Overman bears to Garrison. They are spirit-pictures, drawn from the life, a life never fully un derstood in its throb and passion; yet the pictures are given with such accuracy, such nobility, such power, that they speak for ever. They are the artistic outcome of our Anti-slavery period. Garrison set a great 239 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON brazen trumpet to his lips and blew; and the walls of Jericho fell. Garrison dies, and his trumpet sounds no more. Never theless, the small, inner, silver trumpet of Emerson caught and sounded the same note; and it continues to sound the note, shaking down the walls of inner Jerichoes in men of later and ever later generations. X FOREIGN INFLUENCE SUMMARY IN every great fluctuation that takes place in human society, whether it be a moral, a political, or even an industrial phenome non, force converges upon some one man. and makes him the metaphysical center and thought- focus of the movement. The man is always a little metamorphosed by his of fice, a little deified by it. He is endued with supernatural sagacity, or piety, or resiliency. He is fed with artificial life, through the fact that thousands of men are sustaining him by their attention and in their hope. Thus in 1858, Lincoln suddenly became the great general-agent of political Anti- slavery in America; because his brain was exactly fitted for this work, which deified him quite rapidly. So of a hundred other cases of deification or demonization : leaders seem to be grabbed, used and flung aside by immaterial and pitiless currents of force, which had as lief destroy as benefit their darlings. Witness the career of Stephen A. Douglas. 241 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON Garrison was the leader of Abolition rom its inception to its triumph. His genius, and his activity kept it a unity, de spite the incessant tearing and crumbling [hat were the normal accompaniment of its reading influence. " I have never met the lan or woman," said Wendell Phillips in 1865, " who had struck any effectual blow at the slave system in this country, whose action was not born out of the heart and conscience of William Lloyd Garrison." There is a certain verbal exaggeration in Phillips statement; but the idea conveyed is true. Garrison s preeminence is incon testable. In agitation, as elsewhere, the great man eats up the little man ; he sets the clock in the little man s bosom by his own chronometer or rather, all this is done for both of them by the stress of the times. There never was a leader of men more completely consumed by his mission than Garrison. His life was sucked up into An ti-slavery. He had no attention for other things. How he obtained food and lodg ing for his family during all these years is a mystery. From time to time, it seems, his friends would relieve his wants, or pay a doctor s bill. He was supported by his Cause: the benevolence which he generated 242 FOREIGN INFLUENCE fed him. At the close of the war Garrison occupied a position of great eminence; and he could have cut a figure in public had he wished it. For, although the Abolitionists and Lincoln s Administration found some difficulty in coming to understand each other at the outset, they were in moral union before long; and they fought the war through together. " It was my privilege once, and once only, to talk with Abraham^ Lincoln,, at Petersburg, Va., April 1%~i86$^ says Daniel H. Chamberlain. " His face, his figure, his attitudes, his words, form the most remarkable picture in my memory, and will, while memory lasts. I spoke to him of the country s gratitude for his great de liverance of the slaves. His sad face beamed for a moment with happiness as he answered in exact substance, and very nearly in words : * I have been only an in strument. The logic and moral power of Garrison, and the Anti-slavery people of the country, and the army have done all. Garrison had no worldly ambition; he even declined to favor Governor Andrew for a cabinet office in the days of the tri umph of Abolition at the close of the war. He neglected and refused to write his own memoirs though offered large sums of 243 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON money to do so. He sank into private life as easily as if he had truly been the benevo lent, self-educated clockmaker of a Pick wickian kind, whose type he physically re sembled. The storm which had engen dered this dragon passed over, and left be hind it a placid old man. We must now revert to certain ante bellum doings of the Abolitionists which had a profound influence upon the diplo matic history of the country during the war. While the demoniac Garrison was, in 1833, stirring his American caldron with his right hand, he reached over with his left and set a-going another vessel in Eng land, which was destined to be of enormous importance to this country. Garrison made five journeys to England, namely in 1833, 1840, 1846 and 1867, and 1877. In the first, he clasped hands with all the philanthropists in England who were, at that time, assembled to witness the final tri umph of the law abolishing Slavery in the West Indies. His immediate object in this journey was to unmask the American Col onization Society before the British public, and to bring the non-conformist conscience of England into true relations with Ameri can Abolition. He visited the venerable 244 FOREIGN INFLUENCE Clarkson, he met Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, Samuel Gurney, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and many other men and women of this kind. At the suggestion of Daniel O Connell he held a meeting in Exeter Hall, where O Connell spoke. Garrison was at one with these warm-hearted people in Eng land as water is at one with water. They loved him; they doted on him, and he on them. As we have seen, George Thompson came to America in 1835, as an apostle to the Abolition Cause. Harriet Martineau came as a traveler in the same year. By her writings, and especially by her " Martyr Age in America/ she explained to the Eng lish mind the Anti-slavery situation in this country. After the year 1835 there existed a bond between the philanthropists of Eng land and of America. Constant inter course, the sending of money and articles from England to the Cause in America, and an affectionate personal correspondence be tween the most unselfish classes in each coun try, led to the consolidation of a sort of Anglo-Saxon alliance of the only desirable kind an alliance between loving and pub lic-spirited persons in each country. As the outcome of this international union, which 245 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON was inaugurated in 1833, a spiritual alliance of private persons succeeded thirty years later in controlling the diplomatic relations between the two countries and in averting war. It was, perhaps, the first time in his tory that such a thing could have occurred ; and the incident shows us that the influence of private morality upon world politics is by no means imperceptible. In 1840 a good many of the Abolitionists went to England to attend a World s Con vention, and to renew their acquaintance with O Connell, Buxton, Elizabeth Fry, the Howetts, Elizabeth Pease and others. The later visit of Garrison to England in 1846, was due to a picturesque episode in Anti- slavery history. A free church in Scotland had accepted money subscribed by slave holders in Charleston; and Edinburgh be came for a few weeks the focus of Anti- slavery agitation. " Send back the money " was placarded upon the streets, while Eng lish and American Abolitionists flocked to the fray. Garrison took this occasion to go to London and attend a World s Temperance Convention, then in session at the London Literary Institute. Immediately thereafter he organized an Anti-Slavery League, and held " a real old-fashioned Anti-slavery 246 FOREIGN INFLUENCE meeting/ the first that had ever been held in London. The astonishing freedom with which he dealt out blows and caresses to the British public, the perfectly popular, jocular, boisterous tone of his speech on this occasion reminds one of Luther, and shows a new side to Garrison s powers. His success with the public was great. Now it happened that there was still an other World s Conference going on in Lon don at that time, namely a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance, which was a union of protestant clergy from various parts of the world. Garrison and Thompson took, of course, no share in the deliberations of these clergymen, but watched their proceedings with interest. The slave question was al ready burning hotly in the Alliance. The contested point was whether slaveholders were to be admitted to fellowship. After much wrangling and reference to commit tees, etc., the Alliance decided for the ad mission of slaveholders. Imagine the state of mind of Thompson and Garrison! They instantly called a meeting at Exeter Hall under the auspices of their own new born League: and they proceeded to de nounce the Evangelical Alliance yes, they denounced it out of existence to the great 247 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON encouragement of the whole Abolition movement in America and elsewhere. This procedure occupied but a few days, and shows how much an active man can do, even upon a foreign soil, when he is dealing with matters peculiarly within his own province of understanding. Garrison s personal relations with the British philanthropists can best be under stood by reflecting upon his social isolation in America and upon the natural warmth of temperament in himself and in these Eng lish friends. " I did not hear without great emotion that you are returned to England, and I look forward with great happiness to meeting you in these better times," writes the Duchess of Sutherland in 1867. Har riet Martineau wrote just before her death in 1876: "I can say no more. My de parture is evidently near, and I hold the pen with difficulty. Accept the sympathy and reverent blessing of your old friend, Har riet Martineau." " I have watched his career with no com mon interest, even when I was too young to take much part in public affairs ; and I have kept within my heart his name and the names of those who have been associated with him in every step he has taken." It 248 FOREIGN INFLUENCE is John Bright who spoke thus, at the great Garrison banquet given in London in 1867. The voice of Bright here spoke for that whole world of liberal sentiment in Eng land which first rose to power through the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832. It spoke for Glasgow and Edinborough, for Lancashire and Yorkshire for the new Burgherdom which came into the world her alding religious freedom, popular education, and the protection of the humbler classes. Garrison was better known to the work ing classes in Great Britain than in his own country. " During my visit to England," said Henry Ward Beecher, speaking in 1863, " it was my privilege to address, in various places, very large audiences, and I never made mention of the names of any of those men whom you most revere and love, without calling down the wildest dem onstrations of popular enthusiasm. I never mentioned the names of Mr. Phillips or Mr. Garrison, that it did not call forth a storm of approbation." It was through all this intercourse be tween the Abolitionists and the liberals of England that there grew up that under standing which the middle classes of Eng land possessed as to the nature of the Amer- 249 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON ican struggle in 1860 to 1865; and which alone averted the recognition of the South ern Confederacy by the British Govern ment In reading the life of Charles Francis Adams, it has always been a sur prise to me to find how well informed the cotton spinners, operatives, and small tradesmen of England were upon the very point which the governing classes were so unwilling to understand. The story of the support given to the Northern cause by the cotton spinners of Lancashire, who were be ing starved to death by the blockade of our Southern ports, is among the most moving stories in history. They could not be in duced to protest or to ask their own Govern ment for relief against that blockade. They would not take sides against the United States Government whose action was crushing them, because that Govern ment stood for the freedom of the slave. The tale resembles the story of some siege at which not merely the safety of a city, but the fate of all humanity is at stake. These humble creatures saved us. It was due to their fortitude that Great Britain did not openly recognize the Confederacy. Had the masses of England sustained the official classes in regard to the American 250 FOREIGN INFLUENCE question, some sort of intervention by Eng land in American affairs would in all prob ability have followed. The Englishmen whose influence edu cated and sustained the working classes upon this whole matter were John Stuart Mill, John Bright, Richard Cobden, Lord Houghton, William E. Forster, George Thompson, Goldwin Smith, Justin Mc Carthy, Thomas Hughes, Herbert Spencer, Professor J. E. Cairnes as well as the Gurneys, Buxtons, Webbs, and Clarksons of the previous generation: that is to say they were the heart and conscience of Eng land of which Garrison had found himself to be a part in the early days, and by which the whole Anti-slavery movement had been comprehendingly followed during thirty years. The lower classes in England saw that the battle raging in America was their own battle, and that upon the maintenance of the cause of free labor the progress of popular institutions all over the world largely depended. When Garrison visited England in 1867 he was greeted as the Giant of an Idea ought to be greeted. Public receptions and lunches were given in his honor in London, Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, and 251 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON Glasgow; and many names of note were to be found subscribed under words of wel come. Charles Darwin wrote, twelve years later, to young Garrison : " Thank you for the memorials of Garrison, a name to be for ever revered." I would not cite the fetes and ovations given to Garrison in London in 1867 as proving more than they do prove. We ought to examine the list of guests at the banquets and read the current newspaper editorials by the light of the events of that day, before deciding that Garrison s virtue was alone responsible for all this enthusi asm. I believe that Great Britain seized upon the London Banquet to Garrison as an opportunity for making a sort of amende for her unfriendly conduct during our cri sis; and that persons attended this break fast in 1867 who would not have been found at such a celebration if it had occurred in June, 1863. But whatever may have been the intentions of the Englishmen who, in 1867, gave Garrison a banquet, they did right to honor him; and their action gives the cue to posterity. It was Garrison who saved this nation. In his youth he gave us the issue through which alone salvation could come; and by his life he created the spirit through which that issue triumphed. - 252 FOREIGN INFLUENCE When the strands of this great web are brought together, they are seen to be as light as gossamer: the whole expanding Cosmos of Slavery may be drawn back ward through a gold ring. Slavery in the North American Colonies was an outcome of that geographical remoteness which has so much hampered our progress. Slavery was a form of outrage which could linger on in outlying corners of the globe, long after it had become impossible in the centers of Western civilization. It had no legal in ception in our Colonies : it was older than law. But it grew with our growth. The arrangement between the Colonies which goes by the name of the " New England\ Confederation of 1643" contained a clause j for the rendition of fugitive slaves. Be- \ fore the year 1862 there was never a mo ment in our history when slavery could have been abolished by the popular will. The\ United States Constitution of 1789 could \ never have been adopted by the Southern / States had it not contained clauses protect-! ing slavery. Slavery was in the blood of/ our people. During the thirty years, from 1830 to 1860, while the system was being driven out of the blood of our people through the power of the New Testament, 253 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON there grew up a natural illusion, that the whole matter was one of municipal law. In reality the matter was one of influence, in which law only played a part. The American temperament had thus been under the harrow of iniquity for two hundred years. During all this time slavery had been commercially an error, in tellectually a blight, in every social aspect a poison. The toxin of it engendered in the Southerner that subtle quality, known and feared by the Greeks an un-awed self- will. This quality is a mere inability to give way, and shows that the inner will of the man is closed to the great creative force of the universe. If he cannot let this force in, he will be destroyed by it. Nature con spires against him; humanity joins hands against him. His fall is certain. The toxin of slavery engendered also in the Northerner the correlative sin to self- will, namely, a mean submission. The Southerner could not give way: he did not know how to yield. The Northerner could not stand fast: he always yielded. If you subtract the slave, who stands between these two samples of damaged temperament, you will still have a symbol of the institution of slavery in these two divergent attitudes of 254 FOREIGN INFLUENCE degradation. Do not seek for the fault in conventions or in Constitutions. There is no fault: there is only a moral situation, having a geographical origin. During all this time the stars were fight ing against slavery. They fought behind clouds and darkly for two hundred years; and at last their influence began to develop visible symptoms of cure. A very small part of life or history is ever visible, and it is only by inference that we know what pow ers have been at work; but in 1829 it is plain that some terrible drug is in operation ( in America. Whether this hot liquid was ; first born in the vitals of the slave we do not know. It seems to me that the origin ^ of it must have been in the slave himself; and that it was mystically transmitted to \ the Abolitionist, in whom it appeared as pity. We know that the drops of this pity \ had a peculiar, stimulating power on the / earth a dynamic, critical power, a sort i of prison-piercing faculty, which sent < voltages of electrical shock through human ity. It is plain that all this conductivity to the ideas of Abolition was a part of Abolition. The sensitiveness of the South to criticism was also a part of Abolition. There began, therefore, in about 1830, a 255 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON course of shuttling passion, which seems ever to repeat itself and to run upon a cir cuit. A wave of criticism from the North arouses violent opposition at the South : this awakens the North to new criticism. As the result of each reaction the South loses /a little and the North gains a little. Now /the relative numbers and resources of the 1 North were, during all this time, increasing \so rapidly that nothing but hypnotism could ceep her in subjection to the Slave Power. And the days of hypnotism were plainly at in end; the days of shock and question were dome. Whatever the South did, turned out TO be shocking, and to be mistaken. What ever the South did, returned to plague the ^ inventor. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 was a Southern victory and jarred upon the Northern conscience a little. Nine years thereafter arises Abolition. i/The offer of a reward for Garrison by the State of Georgia in 1831 weakened the South; the elaborate attempts to suppress i4he Abolitionists in 1835 weakened the ^ South ; the Annexation of Texas weakened I her. The Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, the \s Repeal of the Missouri Compromise in 1854, u-the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the invasion of Kansas by the Border Ruffians, the Dred 256 FOREIGN INFLUENCE Scott Decision each one of these things, though apparently a victory, proved in the end to be a boomerang, which operated to weaken the South and to awaken the North. On the other hand the North seemed to be protected from the consequences of moral error. The greatest illustration of this is the case of John Brown, whose crimes were at first not credited, and later were sanctified by contemporary Northern opinion. Curiously enough, the political control of] the South went on growing stronger and \ stronger while the basis for this control ( its hold on the Northern imagination \ was growing weaker and weaker. In other J words, the Southern leaders always won: their cause always lost. Some Nemesis was working out. The mecanique of each successive step in the process was always the same. The weapon of the South was her threat of disunion. This threat seems to have had the effect of a spell upon our Northern ancestors. Disunion was in their opinion too horrible to be named, and much too terrible to be executed. The mere thought of it shattered Northern nerves. A world without the United States Consti tution seemed to Northern men like a world before God s arrival chaos come again. 257 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON It was this threat of disunion that carried the Missouri Compromise in 1820, gave the moral victory to the Nullifiers in 1832, car ried the Compromise measures of 1850, re pealed the Missouri Compromise in 1854, elected Buchanan in 1856, and ruled the fortunes of the Republic in collateral mat ters between these crises. The North was so accustomed to knuck- | ling under at the sound of that threat that when Secession actually took place in 1860, i when the worst had happened and the \Union was irretrievably shattered, the ySForth begged for more compromises : it proposed to woo the South back through new concessions. It offered another Fugi tive Slave Law which should be embodied in the Constitution. The triumphant Re publican Party seems to have been stunned, and could not believe that the long- dreamed-of catastrophe had actually oc curred. It will be observed that both North and South upon this occasion merely played their stock parts. The South, through the habit of self-will, seceded. The North, through the tradition of self-abasement, begged her to come back. f Then occurred a thing which no one ex- ) pected. The submerged courage, the abased FOREIGN INFLUENCE self-assertion of the Northern people broke suddenly into expression. Fort Sumter was fired on, and every one of twenty millions of people received a shock that gave him a new kind of an organ for a heart. The dramatic nature of this climax was greatly enhanced by the slow manner of its coming on, by the dreadful waiting of the previous months, by the cowardice and inefficiency of the politicians, and by the dumbness of all the oracles. Garrison, at this juncture, is as empty as the prophets of Baal : he knows nothing. Earth s remedies have failed. No one is abreast of the situation. Lincoln only waits. At this moment, when the ca tastrophe is in the sky and the thud of Fate s footsteps can be heard, there occurred that thing which Herndon had spoken of in a prophetic letter one year earlier. Hern don wrote his last letter to Theodore Parker on December 15, 1859. "The Republicans in Congress," he says, " are grinding off the flesh from their kneecaps, attempting to con vince the South that we are cowards. We are cowards, that is, our representatives are. . . . The South is now catechising the North. To this question, What is the true end of man? it stands and shiveringly an swers, The chief end of man is to support 259 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON the nigger institutions, and to apologize to despots. The Senators are all on their knees. So are the Representatives. Let them shrive themselves there, and mankind will avenge the humiliation in the future. This is God s constant mode of operation. The race will pull the trigger which the in dividual refused to touch. God will cry to the race Fire and it will fire." Never did the calculating human intellect more completely break down in the whole legal history of America. Never did so much ability prove so impotent to under stand or to assist a social development. Sal vation came in spite of all men through the invisible. Courage came back with the war, a certain great, gross courage, mixed with carnage and barbarity as the courage of war ever must be, yet still courage. This was the precious part of the war; for this courage was but a sample thread of a new kind of life which trusts generous feelings, relies upon the unseen, is in union with the unconscious operations of the spirit. 260 EPILOGUE The harvest is past, the summer is ended and are not saved. Jeremiah 8:20. EPILOGUE THE Anti-slavery epoch presents a perfect example of the rise, progress, and victory of a moral cause. This cause was so obvious, so inevitable, its roots were so deep in human nature and in history, that its victory was assured from the beginning. In studying it, all our wonder and all our attention may be reserved for the manner of its rise, the form of its advance, and the mode of its vic tory. Historians are apt to apportion praise and blame to the Abolitionists, to the Southern leaders, to the Republican Party, to the gen erals during the war, to the troops upon one side or the other in the terrible conflict. But such appraisements are either the aftermath of partisan feeling, or they are the judg ments of men who have not realized the pro fundity and the complexity of the whole movement the inevitability not only of the outcome, but of the process. That Gar rison should have disapproved of the entry of Abolition into party politics, and that he should have raved like a hen upon the river 263 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON bank when he saw the ducklings he had hatched rush into political waters; that the great intellect of Calhoun should have been driven forward by a suicidal logic into theories that were at war with the world s whole inheritance of truth; that Webster should have been now right, now wrong, or the Supreme Court now enlightened by a flickering compassion or again overshad owed by the Spirit of Crime; such facts as these are parts of the great story, and can hardly be handled or sampled by themselves, hardly separated, even for a moment, from their context. The private judgments which we are tempted to utter concerning critical phases or moments in any great cycle and sweep of destiny, are never conclusive, never impor tant. We cannot know the truth about any of these things. No one can be sure that Garrison did not exert greater influence upon practical politics through his dogma of non- resistance than he could have done through an active participation in government. No one can state the precise value of the Liberty Party and the Free Soil Movement ; no one can weigh the influence of " Uncle Tom s Cabin." All that we can be sure of is the great movement itself, which emerges, 264 EPILOGUE winds, coils, progresses, now gleaming and flashing beneath the surface, now emerging above the surface of social and political life in America, like a great golden serpent, a mysterious all-pervading influence, su pernal, mythological, typifying the regen eration of a people. The Legend is so vast, and moves at such a pace from beginning to end, that no two minds can agree about its details. Yet that Legend is at all points illuminated with the inner light of poetry and religion. It has an artistic unity, it moves like a very com plicated sonata; so that we who regard it, somehow see our own souls in it, and draw out of it only what we put into it. The Anti-slavery Legend will reflect the spiritual history of any mind that looks into it; it is a mirror of the soul. It is a sort of the saurus of moral illustration. The reason is that we were deeply diseased; we were in immense danger; we were covered with scales, and our mind was threatened. Our whole civilization was iridescent with the same poison. But we were healed, we were saved. And in the course of our cure every process and function of health was revealed. To talk about the present is always diffi- 265 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON cult. The past is easy; but when in the course of any discussion we approach the present, we approach the unknowable. The present can by no means be brought into his toric focus. If then we look about us in America to-day, having in our minds some reminiscence of history, let us beware of certitude: let us touch upon what we see with merely a hint and a query. I will, then, do no more than name three shapes which I see or seem to see and which may be thought of as apparitions or as passing fancies ; the first is a kind of specter, the second is a visitation from on high, the third is a prophecy. They are namely : the Decay of Learning, the Rise of Love, and the ultimate Revival of Spiritual Interests. The dying-off of our older cultivation, which gives so much concern to all intelli gent persons in America, does not indicate death. It is due to two causes, one of them being the historic and withering in fluence of isolation and of commerce; the other being the present preoccupation of our noblest minds with philanthropic work. New life is at hand, though it exists in forms which the intellect has never grasped, and never can grasp. Before* however, speaking of the future, we must look back 266 EPILOGUE once more upon the discouraging side of life in America on the decay of learning. From an external point of view, the Anti- slavery epoch can be very simply seen as the epoch during which America was returning to the family of European nations from the exile which her connection with slavery had imposed upon her. The struggle over slavery while it lasted left her citizens neither time nor attention for general edu cation. In 1830, we found ourselves iso lated and it took us thirty years of work to break down the barriers between ourselves and the modern world. The intellect and passion of the country was given up during this time to a terrible conflict between pro phetic morality on the one hand and the un profitable sophistries of law, politics and government on the other. Our attitude towards Europe was unintelligent; our ex perience in ideas (other than prophetic ethics and Constitutional Law) was nil. The consequence was that the American fell tremendously behind the European in general cultivation. Now the period after our return to social life the period, namely, between 1865 an( i the present time coincides with the rise of modern commerce, so that we no sooner 267 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON got free from one enemy to the soul than we were fastened upon by another and that other the half-brother and blood rela tion of the first. I will not try to analyze America nor define her relation to Europe. I will only point out our most dreadful de fects, and this only as a prelude to mention ing our hopes of salvation. I confess that a certain hard-eyed, cold- hearted look in the American sometimes causes me to remember that Slavery was al ways Commerce, and that Commerce is to some extent always Slavery. Such great wealth as has been created in America since 1865 would have hardened the eyes of any generation that looked on it. We have in deed been born to calamity in America, and our miseries have come thickly upon us. If you will walk back across the whole history of the world, you will find that respect for learning has never before fallen so low as it has fallen in the United States to-day. If you start anywhere in Europe and trace your way back to ancient Egypt, you will find no age without its savants, its thinkers, men who know something of the past, living some times in caves and sometimes in drawing- rooms, yet always, in a certain sense, the publicists of their times. These are the 268 EPILOGUE men through whom, to some extent, re ligion, education, and the traditions of spiritual life are transmitted from age to age. There have always been enough of such men in every age to secure popular re spect for the idea for which they stand, the idea of continuity. There has been no real break in European culture. During the dark ages the most visible and most powerful influence upon popular imagina tion consisted in the monuments of a gigan tic past. Indeed, for many centuries there after, the overwhelming influence of an tiquity cowed the world. That element has endured in European education in the form of a reverence for the past. It stands behind every man as a sort of sounding- board in his mind, an invisible chamber of consciousness that gives resonance to his voice. If to-day you fall into casual conversation with almost any European, you will feel the influence of these vistas of education. The man s mind is inured to thought. What you say to him is native to his soul. He has heard something like it before. He knows of the existence of the Empire of the Intellect. He is interested in the spiritual history of the world. All this illumination 269 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON is no personal merit in the individual you speak to. He has lived near to the scholar, the musician, the painter, the antiquarian, the philologist, the mathematician. It happened that a series of misfortunes so widowed America that we have all but lost the past. Much baggage was jettisoned in the original transit across the sea, much lost during our colonial and frontier period, and finally we were stripped bare by the pirate Slavery, and marooned for seventy years in a sort of Babylonian captivity. I think there is enough in all this to account for the bleakness of Ameri can life as contrasted with European life. I think that the emotions must in youth be fed upon a sort of pabulum that comes down out of the past songs, aspirations, stories, prayers, reverence for humanity, knowledge of God; or else some dread ful barrenness will set in and paralyze the intellect of a race. The question some times forces itself upon me, Is not the Ger man citizen of the second generation, who walks the streets of New York to-day, more truly a barbarian than his Gothic ancestor who invaded Europe in the fourth century A.D., and whose magnificent vernacular is preserved in Ulfilas translation of the 270 EPILOGUE Scriptures? In piety, in knowledge of poetry, in reverence, the Goth was more advanced than his American descendant. I say, the Suabian peasant of to-day seems to me to be superior to the American farmer in many of those things that make life deep and cause society to endure. To cut loose, to cast away, to destroy, seems to be our impulse. We do not want the past. This awful loss of all the terms of thought, this beggary of intellect, is shown in the unwillingness of the average man in America to go to the bottom of any subject, his mental inertia, his hatred of im personal thought, his belief in labor-saving, his indifference to truth. The state of mind in which commercial classes spend their lives is not that of pure, self-sacrificing spiritual perception. The commercial mind seems, in its essence, to be the natural enemy of love, religion, and truth ; and when, as at the present moment in America, we have com merce dominant in an era whose character istic note is contempt for the past, we can hardly expect a picturesque, pleasing, or harmonious social life. Much is lost sight of, much is forgotten among us; much is unknown that in any European country would be familiar. For 271 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON instance, this very man, William Lloyd Gar rison, is almost forgotten among us. He lived a life of heroism and of practical achievement; the beauty of his whole course was extraordinary, and his type of character is very rare. Had he lived in Europe he would have been classified at once among the great figures of his own generation. Indeed he was so classified from across the sea. His character would have been prized thereafter as a national possession. But in America all that the educated man of to-day knows of Garrison is that he was one who held impractical views and used over-strong language during the Anti-slavery struggle. All this feebleness, whose evidences I have been reviewing, comes, I believe, from a central deficiency of life in the American people. It is not a thing which can be cured in the college, or in the school, or in the drawing-room; though the cure will show in all such places as fast as the great patient improves. During the very epoch (the decade suc ceeding the close of the war) when our intellectual blight was at its worst, there began to appear among us compassionate persons founding newsboys halls in the Five Points, prison angels, and police court 272 EPILOGUE visitors, saints knocking at the doors of the poor men filled with love and pity. This new gospel of love now absorbs whole classes of people in American life, and swallows the young as the Crusades once swallowed them. I hear schoolmasters and learned men complain that their most bril liant classical scholars insist upon doing settlement work the moment they graduate. Why do the young people of both sexes take this course? What planetary influ ence depletes the exhausted ranks of scholarship, and makes traitors of these trained minds to the cause of learning? In their new career their old education goes apparently for nothing. They themselves cannot tell you. And yet they are justified. These young people are being governed by that higher law which governed St. Fran cis the law which he also knew how to obey but could not explain. Our young people express by their conduct a more potent indictment of the cultivation and science of the older, dying epoch than could be written with the pen of Ezekiel. The age has nothing in it that satisfies them: they therefore turn away from it: they satisfy themselves elsewhere. In so doing they create a new age. The deeper needs of 273 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON humanity can only be met slowly. It re quired several hundred years for the mean ing and importance of St. Francis to be come apparent. To his contemporaries he seemed to be a disciple sent to the poor; yet his influence ultimately qualified the art and letters, and tinged the philosophy of life of several centuries. All these new saints of ours. new Christians, and loving persons who crowd the slums, and rediscover Christ in them selves and in others lack power to ex plain; they merely exist. Through them, or rather through the heart which they in fuse, literature and intellect will return, art and mental vigor will be restored to us. It would seem that the bowels and viscera of society must be heated first, and thereafter in time it may be a century or two a warmer life will reach the mind. These new grubs that creep out of the ground, these golden bees that dart by us in the sun shine, going so directly to their work like camp nurses, are more perfect creatures than we are, in that they deal with human ity as a unit. You and I are nothing to them. They have a relation to the whole. They are living in a beam which we do not see, they are the servants of a great 274 EPILOGUE cure which we cannot give, and do not un derstand. So also in regard to the Anti-Slavery Movement; the importance of that Move ment comes from the fact that it meant piety, truth, and love. The rest is illusion. In a certain sense the slaves were freed too soon. That short-sighted element in the philosophy of Abolition, which saw Slav ery as the Antichrist (whereas the spiritual domination of evil was the real Antichrist), ended by putting Slavery to its purgation so quickly and so convulsively that many features and visiting cards of slavery were left behind in the nervous system of the people. This was no one s fault: it was the method of nature. An after-cure was necessary ; and we have been undergoing an after-cure, and need more of it. I regret the loss of the old cultivation; and yet I know that none of our older cul tivation was ever quite right. The Ameri can has never lived from quite the right place in his bosom. Nevertheless if we are but patient the loss will be restored to us tenfold. We are living in the age of a great regeneration. There is hardly a man in whose face I do not see some form of it. New hope is with us. Very different is 275 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON our mission from that of the Abolitionist, though both are forms of the same power. Anti-slavery was the narrow, burning gate of heaven, seen by a few men, who fought their way towards it, paying with their lives for every step in their progress. Crags overhung them : society hated them : every man was their enemy. In our new crusade no one is our enemy. The spirit is felt in all men. In some, it moves in the heart crying, Abba, Father. Others it leaves speechless, but makes their lives beautiful through unselfish labor. Still others it illuminates with visions, so that we see men and women who live like angels, running up and down in the celestial light, passing forward and back between God and man, bringing health to many. In other hearts it has broken the old shackles of prejudice, and shown to them the common bond that lives in all religion. The churches have been growing liberal for the first time in the history of Christianity. Other classes of men glow with an enthu siasm for science which is becoming a form of worship for truth, differing chiefly in name from religion. It is as if a truce had been sounded in that antique war that has raged forever over creed form and 276 EPILOGUE scientific theory, and as if every one were standing in silence, thinking of the realities which lie and which have always lain be hind the noisy dogmas and the certified for mulas of human thought. The wrecks of many creeds are being clashed together like the cakes of ice in the Hudson during a great February thaw; while the strong river bears them all forward in triumph. Great and small, learned and unlearned meet upon that plane of common humility which is their only meeting ground. It is a period when the power and first-hand mystery of life is recognized on every side, and when the conventions and lies that dam and deny that power are for the time being widely broken down. I do not say that the dams will remain down forever. Peo ple are building at them all the time. Trade interests, personal selfishnesses are indefati- gably at work like ants contesting every inch of the damage, inventing new dykes, denying that any permanent change has taken place. Let us be glad that we are born in this age and within the swirl and current of the new freedom. Let us do each our share to leave the dams down, and not build them up in our own bosoms; for it is in 277 WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON peoples bosoms that all these dams exist. We must permit the floods of life to run freely. It is not from any one of our re forms, arts, sciences, and churches but out of all of them that salvation flows. What shall we do to assist in this great process? What relation do we bear to the move ment? That is the question which requires a lifetime for its answer. Our knowledge of the subject changes constantly under ex perience. At first we desire to help vigor ously; and we do all in our power to assist mankind. As time goes on, we perceive more and more clearly that the advancement of the world does not depend upon us, but that we, rather, are bound up in it, and can command no foothold of our own. At last we see that our very ambitions, desires and hopes in the matter are a part of the Su pernal Machinery moving through all things, and that our souls can be satisfied and our power exerted only in so far as we are taken up into that original motion, and merged in that primal power. Our minds thus dissolve under the grinding analysis of life, and leave behind nothing except God. Towards him we stand and look; and we, who started out with so many gifts for men, have nothing left in our satchel for man kind except a blessing. 278 INDEX Throughout the Index G. stands for the subject of the memoir. tion of, 105 ff.; in Boston, 112, 113; and T. Lyman, 122; and the murder of Lovejoy, 129 ff.; in New York, course of, 147 ff.; con servative , form the New Organization, 153; quar rels among, 177 ff.; discovered the horrors of slavery, 188; and Emer son, 226, 227; certain ante-bellum doings of, 244 ff.; and English liberals, 249, 250. And see Abolition, Anti-slav ery, Lunt Committee, National Anti-Slavery Society, Rynders Mob, Thompson. ADAMS, Charles Francis, ABOLITION, Southern view of, 24, 48; and Anti- slavery societies, 48; new type of, 49, 50; op posed by official classes in North, 50, 51 ; in his tory, 61, 62; J. Q. Adams and, 91, 92; in 1830 and 1840, 97 ; an ac cepted fact, 103; really a servile uprising, 119; progress of, 128, 134 Jf.; and Woman s Rights, T 53 *54 conservative opponents of, 199, 200; leaders in, 200; a disease, 228; G. the leader of, 242. And see Abolition ists, Anti-slavery ,Chan- ning, Emerson, R. W., May, S. J. ABOLITIONISTS, and free speech, 27; W. E. Chan- ning and, 27, 28, 88 ; and Turner s rebellion, 51, 52; paradoxical fate of, 59,60; and G. s Thoughts on African Colonization, 65; attempt to put down, in 1835-6, 99 ff.; how viewed by the aver age man, 105; persecu- 250. ADAMS, John, 49. ADAMS, John Quincy, not an Abolitionist, 88, 89; character of, 89, 90; his service in Congress in old age, 90-92; and Massachusetts, 92 ; 7 , 50. African Repository, The, 63, 64. AGITATOR, what is an? 90. 279 INDEX ALCOTT, A. Bronson, 80. ANDREW, John A., 243. ANTI-SLAVERY, G. and, 97 ff.; G. s conduct during Boston mob an exempli fication of the policy, 1 17 ; political history of, where to be found, 136; meeting at Broadway Tabernacle, 203 ff.; a sort of special illumina tion, 228; agitation in Edinburgh, 246; meet ing in London, 246, 247. And see Abolition, Abo litionists, National Anti- Slavery Society. ANTI -SLAVERY League, or ganized by G. in London, 246, 247. ANTI-SLAVERY societies in 1830, 47, 48; over slaughed by Abolition, 48; 123, 134, 135, 151, I 7 6 ff. ASSOCIATION, theory of ,31 . ATLEE, Edwin P., 73, 74. AUSTIN, James T., 130, BALTIMORE, and the slave- trade, 46; G. jailed at, for libel, 46, 47. BAPTISTS, and Abolition, 208. BARTLETT, Deacon, 41. BEECHER, Harriet, 102. And see Stowe, Harriet Beecher. BEECHER, Henry Ward, quoted, 249. BEECHER, Lyman, 66 and n., 67, 68, 69. BENSON, George, 107. BENSON, Henry, quoted, 106. BENTON, Thomas H., 7. BIBLE, the, the source of G. s power, 164-166. BIRNEY, James G., 103, 108, 118. BOND, George, 128. BOSTON, G. mobbed in, 101, 102, 113 ff.; Abo litionists in, 112, 113; Pro-slavery men in, 120, 121 ; Garrison mob in, the sticking-point of violence in, 118. And see Faneuil Hall, Park St. Church. BOSTON aristocracy, and J. Q. Adams, 92. BOSTON Female Anti- Slavery Society, 113. BOSTON Tea Party, and the murder of Love joy, 130, 131- BOWDITCH, Henry I., quot ed, 19, 20 and .; 21, 108, 123. BRADFORD, Gamaliel, 127, 128. BRIGHT, John, quoted, 249; 96, 251. BRITISH working-classes, and G., 249, 250; and the Civil War, 250. 280 INDEX BROADWAY Tabernacle, Anti-slavery meeting at. See Rynders Mob. BROUGHAM, Henry, Lord, quoted, in Thompson, 92. BROWN, John, and North ern opinion, 257. BUCHANAN, James, 23, 258. BUFFUM, Arnold, 71. BUNYAN, John, 35. BURLEIGH, C. C., quoted, in Boston Mob, 116; 73. BUXTON, Thomas F., 245, 246. CAIRNES, J. E., 251. CALHOUN, John C., 7, 23, 140, 158, 193, 208. CANTERBURY, Conn., Crandall case at, 70 ff. CHAMBERLAIN, Daniel H., quoted, 243. CHANNiNG.William Ellery, and the slavery ques tion, 26 Jf., 87, 88; and Abolition, 27, 28, 81-86; and Pollen, 29, 30; and the theory of associa tion, 31; G. at his church, 31, 32, 100, 129, 133, 174, 224. CHARLESTON, S. C., post- office at, broken into, 104, 105. CHARLESTON Courier, 187. CINCINNATI Convention (1853), 160. CIVIL War, the, 4, 59, 60. CLARKSON, Thomas, 245, 251- CLAY, Cassius M., 159, 1 60. CLAY, Henry, G. s stric tures on, 191; 7. COBDEN, Richard, 251. COLONIZATION Society of 1830, 63 ff.; a sham re form, 63; destroyed by G., 65, 66; 244. COMPROMISE of 1850, 177, 258. CONSTITUTION of U. S., Slavery and, 13, 15, 16, 140 /., i68/., 172, 173; publicly burned by G., 174. CONSTITUTIONAL Conven tion (1787), 9, 13. COOPER Union, Emerson s speech at, 234 ff. COPLEY, Josiah, quoted, 57- COTTAGE Bible, the, 76. CRANDALL, Prudence, case of, 70 ff., indicted and convicted, 72, 73; 80, 106. CRANDALL, Reuben, 106. CROMWELL, Oliver, 165. DARWIN, Charles, quoted, 252. DISUNION, effect of threat of, 257, 258. DOUGLAS, Stephen A., 140, 241. 281 INDEX DOUGLASS, Frederick, in Boston, 19, 20 and n. t 2i , at Rynders Mob meeting, 215, 216, 217; 108, 210. DRESSER, Amos, flogging EMANCIPATION, Immedi ate, G. the apostle of, 47; genesis of, 47, 48; 238. Emancipator, the, quoted, 148-150. EMERSON, Edward W., quotes, 231. EMERSON, R. W., on the relations of North and South, 18; his Phi Beta Kappa address (1835) and G. s at Park St. Church (1829), com pared, 43-45; difference between G. and, 45, 46, 219 jf.; his journal quot ed, 223, 224, 225, 226; and the Abolitionists, 226, 227, 228 ; his lecture on"TheTimes, "quoted, 229, 230; and the mur der of Love j oy , 23 1 , 234 ; his "New England Re formers," quoted, 233, 234; his Cooper Union speech (1854), quoted, 234 J.; 86. ^ ENGLAND, philanthropists of, and the U. S., 245, 246; G. organizes Anti- Slavery League In, 246; why she did not recog nize the Confederacy, 250,251. EPISCOPALIANS, and Abo lition, 200, 208. EvANGELiCALAlliance,the , slave-holders admitted to, 247; denounced by G. and Thompson, 247, 248. EVERETT, Edward, quoted, 25, 26; and Abolition, 102, 103; 124, 138. FANEUIL Hall, meeting of friends of South in, 101, 109 ff.; meeting in, on Love joy murder, 129^". POLLEN, Charles, death of, 28; Channing and pro posed meeting in com memoration of, 29, 30; and the Lunt Commit tee, 124, 125. FORSTER, William E., 96, 251. FOSTER, Abby K., 210. FRANCIS of Assisi, 86. FRANKLIN, Benjamin, 41. FREE States, and slave states, admitted to Un ion in pairs, 9. FREEDOM, and Slavery, nature of contest be tween, 143. FREMONT, John C., 175. FRY, Elizabeth, 246. FUGITIVE Slave Law, 15, 282 INDEX 191, 192, 235, 236, 237, 256. FURNESS, William H., at Rynders Mob meeting, 205, 208, 210 ff., 218. GARIBALDI, Guiseppe, 193. GARRISON, Frances I. See Garrison, William L., Jr., and others. GARRISON, Wendell P. See Garrison, William L., Jr., and others. GARRiON,William Lloyd, his relation t?o the ^ffili- slavery period, 6; his view of slavery and its relation to the history of the U. S. from 1830 to 1860, 6; the strongest man in America, 7; his influence on the nation s course, 7, 8; effect of his first utterances on slav ery, 17; and Channing, 28; at Channing s Church, 31,32 jhisessen- tial quality, 34; aggres siveness, 34^.; first edi torial in the Liberator, 35-41 ; early history, 41, 42 ; persuaded by Lundy to enter on what was to be his life-work, 42, 43; edits Genius of Uni versal Emancipation, 43, 46; address at Park St. Church (1829) 43, 44, compared with Emer- 283 son s Phi Beta Kappa address, 43-45; differ ence between Emerson and, 45, 46, 219 ff.; jailed at Baltimore for libel, 46, 47; founds Liberator, 47 ; apostle of Immediate Emancipa tion, 47; reward offered "Tor his arrest, by Georgia Legislature, 48, 49, 256; and J. Q. Adams, 50; indicted in No. Caro lina, 50; and Hayne, 53, 54; and the Liberator, 57 ; and the Colonization iety, 63 ff.; his houghts on African Colonization, 63, 64, 65; his Thoughts, etc. and the Lane Seminary Con troversy, 68 ff.; his first Boston address, 77 ff.; brings George Thomp son to U. S., 92; his real work done between 1830 and 1840, 97 /., 136, 137; his methods, 98, 99, 192 /.; and the Boston mob, 101, 102, 113 /., 118, 119, 122; his language and conduct, 112; quoted, 123; leaves Boston, 123; his solution of the constitutional puzzle, 140; and the National Anti^Slavery Society, 152; his views on various matters, 153, INDEX DOUGLASS, Frederick, in Boston, 19, 20 and n., 21 ; at Rynders Mob meeting, 215, 216, 217; 108, 210. DRESSER, Amos, flogging of,75jf- EMANCIPATION, Immedi ate, G. the apostle of, 47; genesis of, 47, 48; 238. Emancipator, the, quoted, 148-150. EMERSON, Edward W., quotes, 231. EMERSON, R. W., on the relations of North and South, 18; his Phi Beta Kappa address (1835) and G. s at Park St. Church (1829), com pared, 43-45; difference between G. and, 45, 46, 219 jf.; his journal quot ed, 223, 224, 225, 226; and the Abolitionists, 226, 227, 228 ; his lecture on"TheTimes, "quoted, 229, 230; and the mur der of Love j oy , 23 1 , 234 ; his "New England Re formers," quoted, 233, 234; his Cooper Union speech (1854), quoted, 234 J-; 86. ^ ENGLAND, philanthropists of, and the U. S., 245, 246; G. organizes Anti- Slavery League In, 246; why she did not recog nize the Confederacy, 250,251. EPISCOPALIANS, and Abo lition, 200, 208. EvANGELiCALAlliance,the , slave-holders admitted to, 247; denounced by G. and Thompson, 247, 248. EVERETT, Edward, quoted, 25, 26; and Abolition, 102, 103; 124, 138. FANEUIL Hall, meeting of friends of South in, 101, 109 ff.; meeting in, on Love joy murder, I2gff. POLLEN, Charles, death of, 28; Channing and pro posed meeting in com memoration of, 29, 30; and the Lunt Commit tee, 124, 125. FORSTER, William E., 96, 251. FOSTER, Abby K., 210. FRANCIS of Assisi, 86. FRANKLIN, Benjamin, 41. FREE States, and slave states, admitted to Un ion in pairs, 9. FREEDOM, and Slavery, nature of contest be tween, 143. FREMONT, John C., 175. FRY, Elizabeth, 246. FUGITIVE Slave Law, 15, 282 INDEX 191, 192, 235, 236, 237, 256. FURNESS, William H., at Rynders Mob meeting, 205, 208, 210 ff., 218. GARIBALDI, Guiseppe, 193. GARRISON, Frances I. See Garrison, William L., Jr., and others. GARRISON, Wendell P. See Garrison, William L., Jr., and others. GARRISON, William Lloyd, his relation tfa the ./ffiti- slavery period, 6; his view of slavery and its relation to the history of the U. S. from 1830 to 1860, 6; the strongest man in America, 7; his influence on the nation s course, 7, 8; effect of his first utterances on slav ery, 17; and Channing, 28; at Channing s Church , 3 1 , 32 ; his essen tial quality, 34; aggres siveness, 34 ff.; first edi torial in the Libej&tor, 35-41 ; early history, 41, 42 ; persuaded by Lundy to enter on what was to be his life-work, 42, 43; edits Genius of Uni versal Emancipation, 43, 46; address at Park St. Church (1829) 43, 44, compared with Emer- 283 son s Phi Beta Kappa address, 43-45; differ ence between Emerson and, 45, 46, 219 ff.; jailed at Baltimore for libel, 46, 47; founds Liberator, 47; apostle of Immediate Emancipa tion, 47; reward offered ""Tor his arrest, by Georgia Legislature, 48, 49, 256; and J. Q. Adams, 50; indicted in No. Caro lina, 50; and Hayne, 53, 54; and the Liberator, 57; and the Colonization Society. 63 ff.; his Thoughts on African Colonization, 63, 64, 65; his Thoughts, etc. and the Lane Seminary Con troversy, 68 ff.; his first Boston address, 77 ff.; brings George Thomp son to U. S., 92; his real work done between 1830 and 1840, 97 ff., 136, 137; his methods, 98, 99, 192 ff.; and the Boston mob, 101, 102, H3/., 118, 119, 122; his language and conduct, 112; quoted, 123; leaves Boston, 123; his solution of the constitutional puzzle, 140; and the National Anti^Slavery Society, 152; his views on various matters, 153, INDEX 155, 156; an outcome of slavery, 158; his life, written by his children, J 5 8 ff-! his character, 158 ff.; a man of action, 162 ; the Bible the source of his powers, 164-166; quoted, on the "com pact" concerning slav ery, 168 ff., 172, 173; burns the Constitution, 174; unity of his course, 174; his dealings with Anti-slavery" societies, 176 jf.;"his want of conti nuity of thought, 1 80; his strong language, 181, i89;on Henry Clay, 191 ; what kind of man he really was, 194 ff.; R. D. Webb and others quoted on, 195-198; at Broad way Tabernacle (Ryn- dersMob) , 201 , 205 jf ./the leader of Abolition from inception to triumph, 242; his position at close-of the war, 243 ; his visits to England, 244, 245; organizesAnti-Slav- ery League in London, 246, 247; denounces Evangelical Alliance, 247, 248; relations with British philanthropists, 248, 249; and British workingmen, 249; in England in 1867, 251, 252 ; and the firing on in Fort Sumter, 259. GARRISON, W. L., Jr., and others, Life of G., quot ed, 106-108, 159 ff., 203 ff. GARRISON, Mrs. Fanny Lloyd, G. s mother, 41. GAY, Sydney H., 210. Genius of Universal Eman cipation, the, edited by Lundy, 42; by G., 43, 46. GEORGIA, Legislature of, offers reward for arrest and conviction of G., 48, 49, 256. GOODELL, William, 127. GRANT, "Professor," 214, 2 ?,5- GREELEY, Horace, 216. GREEN, Beriah, 74, 75. GURNEY, Samuel, 245, 251. HARRINGTON, Judge, 140. HARRIS, Miss, colored pupil of P. Crandall, 70, 71. HAYNE, Robert Y., Web ster s reply to, 14; ap peals to Otis against G., 53 ; Liberator, quoted on, 53, 54- HENRY, Patrick, 215. HERNDON, William H., quoted, 259, 260. HOLMES, O. W., 230. HOPKINS, John H., his View of Slavery, 200. HOPPER, Isaac T., 210. 284 INDEX HOUGHTON, Lord, 251. HOVEY, Charles F., 210. HOWITTS, the, 246. HUGHES, Thomas, 251. HUTCHINSONS, the, 211, 212. Impartial Citizen, the, 217. JACKSON, Andrew, quoted, 102; 7, 103,210. JACKSON, Edmund, 210. JACKSON, Francis, 114, 123, 206, 210, 212. JACKSON, Thomas J. (Stonewall), 24. JAY, William, quoted, 148, 150, 155, 156; and Anti- slavery societies, 150, 151, 153; 157- JEFFERSON, Thomas, quot ed, on slavery, 13; ill. JOHNSON, Oliver, his Wil liam Lloyd Garrison and his Times, quoted, 58, 63-65, 66-68, 69, 70,71, 75, 76 G. s right-hand man, 66; editor of Lib erator, 66. KANE, Thomas L., 212. KANSAS- Nebraska Bill, 256. KENDALL, Amos, 105. KNAPP, Isaac, 56, 57. KOSSUTH, Louis, 216. LEE, Robert .,24. Liberator, the, G. s first editorial in, 35-41 ; founded by G., 47, 56; Southern campaign against, 51, 52; and Hayne, 53, 54; office of, 57, 58; office of, closed, 123, 124; 82, 97, 98, 99, 148, 150, 152, 153, 167, 168, 179, 189. LINCOLN, Abraham, assas sination of, 5; and slav ery, 143, 144; his en forced moderation, 145, 146; and emancipation, 147; 97, 140, 165, 171, 175,241,243, 259. LOUISIANA Purchase, 9, 10. LOUISIANA territory, slav ery in, 9. LOVEJOY, Elijah P., mur der of, and its effect, 128 ff.; Emerson on, 231, 232; 117, 119,238. LUNDY, Benjamin, 42, 43, 46. LUNT, George, 124, 125, 127. LUNT Committee, 124 ff. LUTHER, Martin, 35, 193. LYMAN, Theodore, Mayor of Boston, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 121, 122, 123. LANE Seminary, contro- MCCARTHY, Justin, 251. versy over, 66 ff.; his- McDuFFiE, George, 127. tory of, 66, 67. MACAULAY, Zachary, 245. 285 INDEX MARTINEAU, Harriet, quoted, 195, 196, 248; her Martyr A ge in A mer- ica, 245; 105, 124. MASSACHUSETTS, south ern attempt to enslave, 101-103. And see Bos ton. MATTHEW, Saint, Gospel of, quoted, 181-84. MAY, Samuel, Jr., 210, 2lf, 212. MAY, Samuel J., quoted, 73-75, 78-8o, 81-86, 93-95, 196-98; con verted to Abolition by GM 77 // the angel of Anti-slavery, 78; and G., 80, 8 1 ; and the Lunt Committee, 124, 126, 127; 29, 32,71,138,150, 227. METHODISTS, and Aboli tion, 208. MILL, John Stuart, 251. MILTON, John, 165. MISSOURI, admission of, with slavery, 10. MISSOURI Compromise, 10, 25, 256, 258; repeal of, 10, 256, 258. NASHVILLE, vigilance com mittee at, 76. NATIONAL Anti-Slavery Society founded, 73 ff.; 151- National Intelligencer, the, appeals to Otis, 52, 53. NEGRO, the, how related to the beginning of the struggle between North and South, 25 ff. NEW Organization, the, 153, 154- NEW Testament, the, and slavery s apologists, 200, 201. NEW York Herald, de nounces G., 201-203 ; on Rynders Mob, 207 ff. NORTH Carolina, G. in dicted in, 50. O CoNNELL, Daniel, 245, 246. OTIS, Harrison Gray, and Southern attacks on G., SO ff-; quoted, in the Liberator, 54, 55; a sil houette of, 56; at Fan- euil Hall, in, 112. OTIS, James, 49, 56. PARK St. Church, G. s address at, the begin ning of his mission, 43. PARKER, Theodore, 220, 259- PEASE, Elizabeth, 246. PENNSYLVANIA Hall, Phila., burning of, 119, 133. PHARISEES, Christ s re buke to, 181-84; their offenses mild compared with the atrocities of to day, 185, 186. 286 INDEX Philanthropist, the, 108. PHILLIPS, Wendell, at Fanueil Hall, 129, 130- 32; effect of his speech, 132, 133; quoted, 180, 198; 108, 123, 165, 210, 249. PIERPONT, John, 43. POLK, James K., 204. PRESBYTERIANS, and Abo lition, 208. PRO-SLAVERY Democrats, Northern, 23. QUINCY, Edmund, 210. RANKIN, John, 160. REFORMER, the, 54. REPUBLICAN Party, for mation of, 142, 143, 258. RHODES, James F., 142. RICHMOND Whig, quoted, 104, 119. ROMAN Catholics, and Ab olition, 200, 207. Ross, Abner, 187. RYNDERS, Isaiah, his his tory, 203, 204. RYNDERS Mob, the, 203 ff. SAVONAROLA, Girolamo, 193. SCOTT, Dred, case of, 257. SEWALL, Samuel E., 80. SEWARD, W. H., 143, 144. SLAVE, the, beginning of G. s devotion to, cause of, 42. SLAVE-holding classes, manhood crushed out of, 22. SLAVE Power, attempts to put down Abolition, 99 ff.; politics of the North controlled by, 138. And see Slavery. SLAVE states, and free states, admitted to Un ion in pairs, 9. SLAVE trade, constitu tional provision con cerning, 15; what it was, 15. SLAVERY in the U. S., question of, overshad owing from 1830 to 1865, 2 ff.; from G. s point of view, 6, 7; a sleeping serpent in early years of U. S., 9; ad mission of Missouri and, IO; on every man s mind after 1820, 12; national policy of silence con cerning, 13, 14, 15; reaction against that policy, 1 6 ff.; effect of G. s first utterance on, 17 ; W. E. Channing and, 26 ff.; attitudeof North ern merchants toward, 32, 335 vulture quality of, 48; friends of, and Channing s pamphlet, 87, 88; J.Q.Adams and, 91 ; death agony of, be gan in 1830, 137; and Freedom, nature of 287 INDEX contest between, 143; Lincoln and, 143 jf.; and the Constitution, 140 ff., 168 /.; attitude of South toward, 187, 1 88; horrors of, discovered by Abolitionists, 188; complicity of churches with, 200; Emerson and, 228; history of, review, 2 53 ff-; influence of, North and South, 254. And see Colonization Society, Crandall, P., Lane Seminary, Love- joy, E. P. SLAVERY in West Indies, abolition of, 244. SMITH, Goldwin, 251. SOUTH Carolina, 23, 137. SPENCER, Herbert, 251. SPRAGUE, Peleg, quoted, 95, 96; at Faneuil Hall, no, in. STORRS, George, 107, 108. STOWE, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Torrt s Cabin, 120, 187, 188. STURGIS, William, 132. SUMNER, Charles, 123, 140. SUMTER, Fort, fired on, 259- TANEY, Roger B., 140. TAPPAN, Arthur, 47, 67, 72, 106, 107. TAYLOR, Zachary, 200, 209, 210, 211. TEXAS, Annexation of, 138, 139, 155, 174, 238, 256. THATCHER, Judge, 50. THOMPSON, George, in U. S.,92/.;S. J. May and Sprague quoted on, 93- 96; what he stood for, 96 ; plot to tar and feath er, 113; 107, 118, 227, 245, 247, 251. TICKNOR, George, 199. Tocsin of Liberty, the, quoted, 178. TODD, Francis, "libeled" by G., 46, 47. TUCKERMAN, Bayard, Life oj Wm. Jay, quoted, 1 51. TURNER, Nat, heads Slave Rebellion, 51, 52. UNION, the, peaceful dis solution of, advocated, 155, 156. UNITED States, slavery question in, 1830 to 1865, 2 ff., 6, 7; state of, 1850 to 1860, 10, ii ; a slave republic, 17. VIRGINIA, 23. WALKER S appeal, 51. WARD, Samuel R., 217. WASHINGTON, George, 215. WEBB, Richard D., quot ed, 195. WEBSTER, Daniel, his Re ply to Hayne, 14; Channing and, 28; and the Fugitive Slave Law, 288 INDEX 235, 236, 238; Aboli- WISE, Henry A., 187. tionists and, 239; 138, WISE, John S., The End of 140, 199. an Era, 187, 188. WELD, Theodore D., 69, WOMAN S Rights, and Abo- 187. lition, 153, 154; 167. WELLS, E. M. P., 200. WOOLFOLK, Austin, 42. WHITE, James C., quoted, WRIGHT, Elizur, quoted, 56. 65; 107. WHITTIER, John G., 43. WRIGHT, Henry C., 210. 289 I 7 RAL LIBRARY 14 DAY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. This book is due on the last date stamped below, or on the date to which renewed. Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. If 6 RECEIVED 01/28-67-12M 1 1 w -a P * * r larP* , , L<(VN DEPT. U.C. BERKELEY LIBRARIES - :V& UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY