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GARRISON 
 
 THE 
 
 NON-RESISTANT 
 
 By 
 ERNEST CROSBY 
 
 Author of 
 
 PLAIN TALK IN PSALM AND PARABLE," "CAPTAIN 
 JINKS, HERO," "SWORDS AND PLOUGHSHARES," 
 "TOLSTOY AND HIS MESSAGE," "TOLSTOY 
 AS A SCHOOLMASTER," "BROAD- 
 CAST," ETC. 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 THE PUBLIC PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 FIRST NATIONAL BANK BUILDINO 
 

 ■n 
 
 LIORARY of CONGRESS 
 Twc Copies Received 
 
 DEC 9 1^05 
 
 Ocpyright tntry 
 
 CLASS Ok. XXc. No. 
 
 COPY A. 
 
 Copyright, 1905, 
 
 by 
 
 The Public Publishing Company 
 
To 
 
 William Lloyd Garrison. Jr. 
 
 A Son 
 
 Worthy of His Father 
 
Author's Note 
 
 The facts relating to the life of Garrison 
 and the anti-slavery struggle recited in 
 this volume were gathered from the monu- 
 mental work, "William Lloyd Garrison, 
 The Story of His Life Told by His Chil- 
 dren " (Four Volumes, Octavo, Houghton, 
 Mifflin and Company, Boston, Mass.), a 
 fascinating book which should be found 
 upon the shelves of every public library 
 in America. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Paee 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 The Liberator -7 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 The Boston Mob i8 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 Non-Resistance, Dissensions - - - - 30 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 Constitution and Conscience ----- 37 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 The Civil War 43 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 The Labor Question 51 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 Garrison the Prophet - 55 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 Garrison the Non-Resistant 62 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 The Delimitation of Non-Resistance - - 74 
 
 CHAPTER X 
 Garrison and the Civil War 84 
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 The Results of the War in the South - - 106 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 Practical Lessons from Garrison's Career - - 124 
 
FROM lips that Sinai's trumpet blew 
 We heard a tender under-song ; 
 Thy very wrath from pity grew, 
 
 From love of man thy hate of wrong. 
 
 — WHITTIER, 'To Garrison." 
 
CHAPTER I 
 THE LIBERATOR 
 
 In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, 
 Toiled o'er the types one poor, unlearned young man; 
 
 The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean ; 
 Yet there the freedom of a race began, 
 
 —LOWELL, "To Garrison." 
 
 Oliver Johnson gives a graphic description 
 of the room under the eaves of Merchants* 
 Hall, Boston, in which Garrison printed the 
 early numbers of his Liberator in January, 
 183 1. "The dingy walls, the small windows 
 bespattered with printer's ink, the press stand- 
 ing in one corner, the composing stands 
 opposite, the long editorial and mailing table 
 covered with newspapers, the bed of the 
 editor and publisher on the floor — all these," 
 he tells us, "make a picture never to be for- 
 gotten." "It was a pretty large room," says 
 a later visitor, "but there was nothing to 
 relieve its dreariness but tv/o or three very 
 common chairs and a pine desk in the far 
 corner at which a pale, delicate and apparently 
 overtasked gentleman was sitting. . . . 
 He was a quiet, gentle and I might say hand- 
 some man." The editor and his partner. 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 Isaac Knapp, lived for more than a year 
 *'chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes and 
 a little fruit, obtained from a baker's shop 
 opposite and a petty cake and fruit shop in 
 the basement, and were sometimes on short 
 commons at that." Here they worked four- 
 teen hours a day at the manual labor of their 
 enterprise. Garrison was at this time only 
 six-and-twenty, and he had just been released 
 from Baltimore jail, where his sympathy for 
 the slave had placed him. He had no money, 
 no subscribers, and scarcely a friend, but he 
 procured some well-worn, second-hand type, 
 and went forward against the Goliath of 
 slavery with the calm assurance of a David 
 "choosing him five smooth stones out of the 
 brook." And indeed the language which he 
 holds differs not essentially from that of the 
 Hebrew shepherd. Thus spake David: "Thou 
 comest to me with a sword and with a spear 
 and with a shield, but I come to thee in the 
 name of the Lord of Hosts; . . . this 
 day will the Lord deliver thee into my hand." 
 In the first number of his journal the penni- 
 less and friendless Garrison delivered himself 
 as follows: 
 
 I determined at every hazard to lift up 
 the standard of emancipation 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 
 
 8 
 
The Liberator 
 
 float, unhurt by the spoUation of time or 
 the missiles of a desperate foe — yea, till 
 every chain be broken and every bondman 
 free! Let Southern oppressors tremble — 
 let their secret abettors tremble — let their 
 Northern apologists tremble — let all the 
 enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble, 
 . . . I will be as harsh as truth and as 
 uncompromising as justice. On this sub- 
 ject I do not wish to think or speak or 
 write with moderation. ... I am in 
 earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not 
 excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — 
 and I <will be heard* . . . Posterity will 
 bear testimony that I was right. 
 
 The picture of this shabby room with the 
 pale young man at the case deserves to hang 
 in the rotunda of the National Capitol, next to 
 those of Columbus landing on the shores of 
 the new world and Washington receiving the 
 sword of Cornwallis. 
 
 Who was this rash and intemperate fellow, 
 who dared for many years to shock every 
 respectable fiber in the character of New 
 Englander and Northerner as well as of 
 Southerner? William Lloyd Garrison was 
 born at Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 
 1805, the eldest of three children. When he 
 was three years old, his father, who "followed 
 the sea" and had taken to drink, deserted his 
 wife and family and was never heard of more. 
 They were left utterly destitute, and the 
 mother, a noble woman, supported her babes 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 by going out as a monthly nurse. She also 
 made candy, which Lloyd peddled about 
 town. He was apprenticed to a boot-maker 
 at an early age, and afterwards to a cabinet- 
 maker, but he had neither the strength nor 
 the mechanical skill necessary for these 
 occupations. At last, when he was thirteen 
 years old, he found his proper place in the 
 printing office of the Newburyport "Herald." 
 He soon became an expert at the types, a 
 fellow printer testifying that he could work 
 faster than anyone he had ever seen with 
 one exception, and that he was far more 
 accurate than this solitary rival. At sixteen 
 he began to write for the paper, sending in 
 his contributions anonymously by the post. 
 His first article arrived in this way while he 
 was engaged in setting up type, and his 
 employer read it aloud approvingly in his 
 presence, and turned it over to its author to 
 set up, little guessing his identity. Long 
 before his apprenticeship of seven years 
 expired. Garrison was practically the sub- 
 editor of the newspaper. At twenty-one he 
 had a journal of his own, the Free Press, in 
 his native town, and he distinguished his six 
 months' interest in this sheet by discovering 
 Whittier. The future poet was then a clumsy, 
 half-taught farmer's lad of eighteen. He had 
 already begun to write verses, and his sister, 
 without his knowledge, sent some of them to 
 
 10 
 
The Liberator 
 
 the Free Press. Garrison at once recognized 
 their merit and published them. He drove 
 over to Haverhill to see the author and found 
 him working in the fields barefoot. It was 
 this encouragement that confirmed Whittier 
 in his career and induced him to seek further 
 education. As Garrison's venture at home 
 was not sufficiently successful, he removed to 
 Boston. Two years later he is editor of the 
 first total abstinence paper ever published, 
 the National Philanthropist, and in its col- 
 umns he also declares his opposition to war. 
 The year 1828 was the turning point of 
 Garrison's life, and his conversion to the 
 cause of the slave was the work of a Quaker 
 who had already devoted thirteen years of 
 his life to that object. Benjamin Lundy had 
 given up a profitable business at a great 
 sacrifice to edit an anti-slavery newspaper 
 and urge the formation of anti-slavery 
 societies. He was now the editor of the 
 Genius of Universal Emancipation, which he 
 conducted at Baltimore, and in which he 
 advocated gradual Abolition and the coloni- 
 zation of freedmen in Hayti. He traveled all 
 over the country on foot in the prosecution 
 of his designs, walking in this way thousands 
 of miles. Visiting Boston in 1828, he hap- 
 pened to board at the house in which Garri- 
 son was living, and the latter was much 
 impressed by the spirit of the missionary. 
 
 II 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 Lundy tried to rouse the Boston clergy to an 
 interest in his plans, and to induce them to 
 form an anti-slavery society. He invited 
 them to a private meeting, but only a few 
 responded, and of these only eight would 
 go so far as to recommend his paper. One 
 or two expressed their readiness to take part 
 in an active movement, but they were men of 
 small weight in the community. All of those 
 who attended the meeting were opposed to 
 slavery, but with one consent most of them 
 made excuse. "It would enrage the South to 
 know that an anti-slavery society existed in 
 Boston." "It would do harm to agitate the 
 subject." The project of a society had to be 
 abandoned. 
 
 But if Lundy had failed with the clergy, 
 he had inspired one more powerful than they 
 were. Garrison was at the meeting, and was 
 scandalized at the cowardice of these, the 
 bravest representatives of the churches. A 
 sudden enthusiasm for the cause of Negro 
 freedom seized him. He began at once to 
 attack slavery in his temperance paper, and 
 announced as his triple aim the abolition of 
 slavery, intemperance and war. Soon after this 
 he went to Bennington, Vermont, to take 
 charge of a newspaper which was sup- 
 porting the re-election of President John 
 Quincy Adams. In this journal Garrison con- 
 tinued to denounce slavery, to insist on its 
 
 12 
 
The Liberator 
 
 abolition in the District of Columbia, and 
 to suggest the formation of anti-slavery 
 societies. The hunting of escaped slaves was 
 common at this time in the North, and occa- 
 sionally they preferred death to capture. Yet 
 with such things taking place before their 
 eyes, the population was blind to the iniquity 
 of the system which rendered them possible. 
 Garrison's management of the new paper was 
 most successful. We have Horace Greeley's 
 authority for the statement that it was "about 
 the most interesting newspaper ever issued 
 in Vermont." 
 
 Lundy at Baltimore had watched the course 
 of his disciple with pleasure, and in 1829 he 
 came to Bennington, walking much of the 
 way, to persuade him to join him in editing 
 the Genius. Garrison did not hesitate for a 
 moment to follow his friend's example and to 
 give up a promising career for the certain 
 want and hardship of a life consecrated to the 
 liberation of the slave. He proceeded to 
 Baltimore, and in September his name appears 
 with Lundy's in the latter's paper. His 
 experiences at Baltimore accentuated his 
 hatred of slavery. He saw the auction of 
 Negoes continually in progress, for many poor 
 wretches were sold here and shipped to the 
 New Orleans market. With his own ears he 
 heard, while walking in the streets of the city, 
 ''the distinct application of a whip and the 
 
 13 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 shrieks of anguish" of the victim. One slave ex- 
 hibited to him his back bleeding from thirty- 
 seven terrible gashes inflicted by a cowhide 
 thong. The courage of both editors in these 
 surroundings knew no bounds, and in their 
 columns they openly rebuked the worst 
 offenders by name. On one occasion Garri- 
 son heard of slaves being shipped in a vessel 
 belonging to a prominent citizen of Newbury- 
 port. He immediately began an attack upon 
 him in the Genius, printing his name in capi- 
 tals. He branded him and men like him as 
 "the enemies of their own species— highway 
 robbers and murderers." The result of this 
 plain speaking was an indictment for mali- 
 cious libel. Garrison was tried by a jury, 
 found guilty, and sentenced to the payment 
 of a fine of fifty dollars and costs, amounting 
 in all to over one hundred dollars, a sum far 
 greater than he could raise, if he felt disposed 
 to. In consequence he passed seven weeks in 
 jail, and while there he prepared a pamphlet 
 giving an account of his trial, which attracted 
 attention far and wide, and also devoted him- 
 self to his fellow-prisoners, drawing petitions 
 for pardon for several of them. He was 
 finally released through the liberality of a 
 New York merchant, Arthur Tappan, and he 
 came out of prison undaunted and in buoyant 
 spirits. Meanwhile the Genius had ceased to 
 appear on account of lack of support, and the 
 
 14 
 
The Liberator 
 
 partnership with Lundy was of necessity dis- 
 solved. 
 
 As Garrison had no longer any reason for 
 remaining in Baltimore, he returned to Bos- 
 ton, and in August, 1830, he issued proposals 
 there for a paper of his own. He also began 
 to lecture on slavery. When he advertised 
 for a free hall in Boston for an anti-slavery 
 address not a church volunteered, although 
 it was the custom of the time to hold all 
 kinds of meetings in churches, but a favor- 
 able response was received from an "infidel" 
 society. It was actually a fact that at that 
 period Garrison was almost the only man in 
 New England whose eyes were entirely open 
 to the sin of slavery. 
 
 On January ist, 1831, the first number of 
 the Liberator made its appearance. At the 
 head of its columns was the motto, "Our 
 country is the World. Our countrymen are 
 Mankind ;" and it was further ornamented by 
 a wood-cut representing a slave-auction block 
 and whipping post with the dome of the 
 Capitol at Washington in the background. 
 This initial number struck one note which 
 distinguished it at once from all other anti- 
 slavery publications. It called for immediate 
 and unconditional emancipation. Until recently 
 Garrison had believed in the gradual freeing 
 of the slaves, but on thinking the matter over 
 he came to the conclusion that it was immoral 
 
 15 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 to favor the continuance for an hour of a 
 system which is morally wrong. This novel 
 *'immediatism," as it was dubbed, coupled 
 with the intentional harshness of the editor's 
 vocabulary, which was in striking contrast 
 with his manner in private life — these two 
 peculiarities of the Liberator made it a 
 mighty force almost from the beginning. The 
 slave-holders themselves did much to make 
 the paper widely known, proving once again 
 that nothing helps a cause so much as a 
 strong opposition. Taunted with being "man- 
 stealers," they were soon goaded into a fury. 
 The legislature of Georgia offered a reward 
 of five thousand dollars for Garrison's capture. 
 Throughout the South demands were made 
 that the State of Massachusetts should put a 
 stop to the incendiary publication and arrest 
 the editor with or without the law. The 
 public officials of the slave states inaugurated 
 a system of examining the mails and throw- 
 ing out all pamphlets and circulars reflecting 
 on slavery, and this plan was followed for 
 many years in flagrant violation of the postal 
 laws. The high-handed conduct of the South 
 produced a double effect in the North. A 
 large portion of the community was in favor 
 of humbly submitting to all the claims made 
 upon them, either from sympathy with slav- 
 ery or from a craven desire for peace; but 
 there were many who, while by no means 
 
 i6 
 
The Liberator 
 
 approving of Abolition, still cherished some 
 prejudices in favor of the freedom of white 
 men, and were forced by the overbearing 
 insolence of the slave-holders in some degree 
 to sustain Garrison in the right of free 
 speech. The Abolitionists themselves, whose 
 cause had dragged on without result for 
 many years, in spite of the sincerity, ability 
 and vigor of Lundy, for want of a definite 
 programme, at once recognized the fact that 
 their true leader had appeared; and most of 
 them flocked to his banner, although Lundy 
 himself, who died in 1839, never became an 
 immediatist. 
 
 17 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE BOSTON MOB 
 
 Woe uRto you! for ye build the sepulchres of the prophets, 
 and your fathers killed them.— St. Luke, xi:47. 
 
 In 1 83 1 Garrison founded the New England 
 Anti-Slavery Society at Boston, and began 
 to lecture in its behalf. This was followed 
 by the formation of a great number of such 
 bodies, state and local, including the national 
 society founded at Philadelphia in 1833. For 
 some years associations were established at 
 the rate of more than one a day, and a single 
 society sometimes numbered its members by 
 the thousand. Garrison's talents for public 
 speaking stood him in good stead in promot- 
 ing the formation of these bodies. He was 
 not an orator, but the force, earnestness and 
 logic of his addresses almost always carried 
 his audiences with him. The first great con- 
 test in which Garrison had to engage was 
 between the "immediatists" and the American 
 Colonization Society, an institution whose 
 chief function was to put the conscience of 
 the people at rest under the delusion that the 
 
 18 
 
The Boston Mob 
 
 Negroes could be deported to Hayti or 
 Liberia, but which in reaUty was only effect- 
 ive in removing freedmen whose efforts on 
 behalf of their brethren in bonds were feared 
 by the slave-holders, and the latter were by 
 no means unfriendly to this movement. Gar- 
 rison exposed the plan thoroughly in a 
 pamphlet published in 1832, and a twelve- 
 month later, on a special mission to England, 
 he won over the principal Abolitionists there 
 to immediatism as opposed to colonization, 
 including the venerable Wilberforce. Six 
 years afterwards, on another visit to Great 
 Britain, he had the satisfaction of securing 
 the adhesion of Clarkson, who hitherto had 
 been induced by misrepresentation to support 
 the colonizationists. In America it soon 
 became clear, owing to Garrison's exposure 
 of it, that colonization meant the indefinite 
 continuance of slavery. Among the humors 
 of his first stay in London was a dinner- 
 party at which his host on receiving him and 
 hearing his name lifted up his hands and 
 exclaimed, "Why, my dear sir, I thought that 
 you were a black man, and I have conse- 
 quently invited this company of ladies and 
 gentlemen to be present to welcome Mr. 
 Garrison, the black advocate of emancipation 
 from America!" He had in fact supposed 
 that no white American could plead for the 
 slave as he had done in the Liberator. This 
 
 19 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 was a compliment to the editor indeed ! Gar- 
 rison attended Wilberforce's funeral at West- 
 minster Abbey, an humble follower in a dis- 
 tinguished throng, but destined to do even 
 more for the African race than the great 
 Englishman. 
 
 On landing at New York on his return 
 from England in 1833, Garrison was present 
 at a meeting called for the purpose of organ- 
 izing a City Anti-Slavery Society. The 
 enemies of the movement had issued circu- 
 lars calling for a pro-slavery demonstration 
 at the same time and place, with the object 
 of breaking up the meeting, and a mob of 
 drunken blackguards came together in conse- 
 quence and succeeded in bringing the meeting 
 to a violent close. The Courier and Enquirer 
 had much to do with fomenting the riot on 
 this occasion and the Commercial Advertiser 
 and other "respectable" newspapers joined in 
 denouncing Garrison. The Evening Post 
 said : "We should be sorry that any invasion 
 of his personal rights should occur to give 
 him consequence and to increase the number 
 of his associates." When Garrison reached 
 Boston, he found that there, too, circulars 
 had preceded him, calling upon the public to 
 meet in front of his office on a given evening 
 armed with plenty of tar and feathers, but 
 although a dense mob breathing threatenings 
 
 20 
 
The Boston Mob 
 
 which foreboded a storm came together, they 
 dispersed without doing any damage. 
 
 The angry temper of the Northern public 
 had also been shown elsewhere. In Connecti- 
 cut, in 1833, Prudence Crandall, who had 
 established a school for colored girls, was 
 shut out of the churches, shops and public 
 conveyances ; her well was filled with manure, 
 and her house smeared with filth and at last 
 set on fire. At Boston the directors of the 
 Athenaeum library excluded Mrs. Child from 
 using it because she was an Abolitionist. 
 When anti-slavery sentiment made itself 
 audible at Lane Theological Seminary, the 
 trustees, with the assent of the president. Dr. 
 Lyman Beecher, suppressed all debate on the 
 subject. The Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon accused 
 candidates for elective office who were willing 
 to array themselves under the banner of the 
 Abolitionists, with being "political desper- 
 adoes ;" and the American Bible Society actu- 
 ally refused a gift of five thousand dollars 
 which was to be devoted to the distribution 
 of Bibles among the slaves! The great 
 church assemblies showed their friendship for 
 slavery in many ways, and a Presbyterian 
 elder did not hesitate to say in the General 
 Assembly of that denomination at Pittsburg, 
 in 1835, that the church was the patron of 
 slavery and responsible for its cruelties. 
 Throughout the whole period of agitation 
 
 21 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 against slavery not a Catholic priest nor an 
 Episcopal clergyman came forward as a 
 friend of the oppressed, with one possible 
 exception. They were engaged in the time- 
 honored pastime of passing by on the other 
 side. 
 
 Pro-slavery meetings were held in New 
 York and other cities and pro-slavery riots 
 broke out in many parts of the North. A 
 great meeting was held at Faneuil Hall, Bos- 
 ton, on August 2ist, 1835, to protest against 
 Abolition. The principal men of the city took 
 part and the mayor was in the chair. One of 
 the orators turned to the portrait of Wash- 
 ington and invoked his example on behalf of 
 the slave-holders. The sum of three thousand 
 dollars vvas offered in the South for the 
 apprehension of Arthur Tappan, the New 
 York philanthropist. At Concord (auspicious 
 name!) Whittier v/as pelted with stones and 
 mud. A Harvard professor lost his chair on ac- 
 count of his Abolition sentiments, and leading 
 Northern publishers took pains to assure the 
 South that they would print nothing hostile 
 to slavery. This ignominious subservience to 
 the slave power seemed to be almost universal. 
 
 Amid such opposition and although "all 
 pandemonium was let loose," Garrison became 
 only more confident and determined. Four 
 men, he tells us, are enough to revolutionize 
 the world. Financial difficulties continually 
 
 22 
 
The Boston Mob 
 
 beset his path, but he always succeeded in 
 surmounting them, and despite many a gale, 
 the Liberator was able to proceed on its way. 
 But the most conspicuous pro-slavery demon- 
 stration was in the event directed against 
 Garrison himself, and was the immediate 
 result of the antagonism of the enemies of 
 Abolition towards George Thompson, a dis- 
 tinguished English Abolitionist, who was 
 lecturing in America, and whose interference 
 with our ''domestic" institutions was most 
 offensive to them. It was announced that he 
 would address a meeting of ladies on the 
 afternoon of October 21st, 1835, at a hall 
 adjoining the offices of the Anti-Slavery 
 Society and the Liberator, at 46 Washington 
 street, Boston. Placards were posted in pub- 
 lic places urging good citizens to bring the 
 "infamous foreign scoundrel to the tar-kettle 
 before dark." In response to this several 
 thousand angry men gathered in the street 
 at the time set for the meeting, but Thomp- 
 son had been wisely kept away. The women 
 showed the greatest coolness and courage and 
 went quietly on with their proceedings, 
 although the door of the hall and the stair- 
 ways of the building were thronged by a 
 threatening and unruly mob. The mayor 
 arrived upon the scene and endeavored to 
 disperse the crowd outside by announcing 
 that the Englishman was not in the city, but 
 
 23 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 they soon showed that they did not care on 
 whom they vented their wrath, provided only 
 that it was on an AboHtionist. At last they 
 broke in through the door of the Anti-Slavery 
 Society office, where Garrison was calmly 
 writing a letter. Some constables succeeded, 
 however, in getting the rioters out of the 
 house before further violence was done, and 
 the mayor, going to the meeting-room, ordered 
 the ladies to leave the building, as he would 
 be unable to protect them longer. They 
 adjourned accordingly to the house of one of 
 their number, marching out two and two, 
 each white woman taking a colored one with 
 her. "When we emerged into the open day- 
 light," says one of the number, ''there went 
 up a roar of rage and contempt. They slowly 
 gave way as we came out. As far as we 
 could look either way the crowd extended— 
 evidently of the so-called 'wealthy and 
 respectable,' 'the moral worth,' the 'influence 
 and standing.' " 
 
 "Garrison! Garrison!" was now the cry. 
 "We must have Garrison! Out with him! 
 Lynch him !" The mob demanded that the anti- 
 slavery society signboard be removed. The 
 mayor at once ordered it to be taken down, 
 and it was speedily torn to pieces. The mayor 
 now besought Garrison to escape by the rear 
 of the building, and the latter, preceded by a 
 friend, dropped from a back window on the 
 
 24 
 
The Boston Mob 
 
 roof of a shed and sought refuge in a carpen- 
 ter shop on the street behind ; but his retreat 
 was already cut off. The workmen in the 
 shop did what they could for him, shutting 
 the front door and keeping the crowd back 
 until Garrison could hide himself upstairs, 
 but in a few minutes the ruffians broke in 
 and had no difficulty in finding his place of 
 concealment. They seized him and dragged 
 him to the window, intending to throw him 
 out, but someone below in the street shouted, 
 "Don't kill him outright," and, changing 
 their minds, they tied a rope round him and 
 let him down by a ladder. Fortunately he 
 was received at the bottom by two strong 
 men who were determined that the fame of 
 Boston should not be stained by a lynching. 
 They succeeded, with superhuman efforts, in 
 guiding him through the crowd, in which it 
 was evident now that Garrison had some 
 sympathizers, to the door of the neighboring 
 city hall, over the very ground where the 
 first martyrs of the Revolution were slain in 
 the Boston massacre of 1770, and where their 
 degenerate descendants were now taking the 
 part of the oppressors. The mayor had already 
 reached the building. "On my way from the 
 Liberator office to the city hall," he says, 
 "several people said to me, 'They are going 
 to hang him! For God's sake, save him!'" 
 Garrison was conducted with much difficulty 
 
 25 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 to the mayor's office, and as he was now bare- 
 headed and half naked, the friends of the 
 mayor were obliged to lend him clothes to 
 cover him. They decided that the only way 
 to save him was to commit him to jail as a 
 disturber of the peace ! A carriage was sent 
 to the door to deceive the mob, and while 
 they waited, another carriage bore him from 
 a door in the rear to the city jail. But the 
 people, when they discovered the ruse, rushed 
 upon the vehicle and tried to drag him out. 
 They clung to the wheels, dashed open the 
 doors, seized hold of the horses and tried to 
 upset the carriage. But the police did their 
 best, the driver plied his whip on the horses 
 and on the rioters, and by some miracle Gar- 
 rison v^as deposited at the jail in safety and 
 locked up in a cell. On the morrow he left 
 Boston and did not return until the fury of 
 the storm had spent itself, but even then he 
 was forced to change his residence, as his 
 former landlord feared that his house might 
 be destroyed. 
 
 The biographers of Garrison call attention 
 to the attitude of the authorities during this 
 episode. "Law officers in abundance over- 
 looked the scene of the mob; the legislators, 
 in special session at the state house — John G. 
 Whittier among them — hastened down to 
 become spectators. Law was everywhere, but 
 justice was fallen in the streets 
 
 26 
 
The Boston Mob 
 
 Wendell Phillips, commencing practice in his 
 native city, and not versed, perhaps, in the 
 riot statutes, wondered why his regiment was 
 not called out." An alderman, when ques- 
 tioned while the riot was in progress, "inti- 
 mated that, though it was the duty of the 
 mayor to put down the riot, the city govern- 
 ment did not very much disapprove of the 
 mob to put down such agitators as Garrison 
 and those like him." The editor of the New 
 England Galaxy overheard a justice of the 
 peace remark: "I hope they will catch him 
 (Garrison) and tar and feather him; and 
 though I would not assist, I can tell them 
 five dollars are ready for the man that will 
 do it." 
 
 The press, secular and religious, unani- 
 mously showed its opposition to the Aboli- 
 tionists in this matter. The Daily Advertiser 
 considered "the whole transaction as the 
 triumph of the law over lawless violence," 
 and the Christian Watchman (save the 
 mark!), a Baptist journal, declared that the 
 Abolitionists were as culpable as the mob. 
 
 In the pages of the Liberator Garrison 
 described the riot, and attacked its promoters 
 and sympathizers with his customary force 
 and ability. During the danger he had not 
 for a moment lost his composure, as all who 
 saw him bore witness, friend and foe alike. 
 "Throughout the whole of the trying scene," 
 
 27 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 he testifies himself, "I felt perfectly calm — 
 nay, very happy. It seemed to me that it 
 was indeed a blessed privilege thus to suffer 
 in the cause of Christ. Death did not pre- 
 sent one repulsive feature. The promises of 
 God sustained my soul, so that it was not 
 only divested of fear, but ready to sing for 
 joy." This same courage enabled him to 
 stigmatize the outrage in his paper according 
 to its deserts, and never for an instant did 
 he alter his tone from any sense of fear. 
 Harriet Martineau, who was visiting America 
 at this time, gives her impressions of Garri- 
 son's appearance and manner. ''It was a 
 countenance glowing with health, and wholly 
 expressive of purity, animation and gentle- 
 ness." She found ''sagacity the most strik- 
 ing attribute of his conversation," which was 
 "of the most practical cast." 
 
 The year 1837 showed a marked improve- 
 ment in New England sentiment. While it 
 is true that the Congregational Church pro- 
 tested against the discussion of "certain top- 
 ics" in meeting-houses, and that the Massa- 
 chusetts Anti-Slavery Society could not find 
 a suitable hall or church to meet in at Bos- 
 ton and was obliged to organize over a stable, 
 still the legislature went so far as to permit 
 it to make use of the state house. This was 
 a strong indication that the Abolitionists had 
 become a power to reckon with. Twelve 
 
 28 
 
The Boston Mob 
 
 hundred anti-slavery societies were nov/ in 
 operation, and the foul murder of the Rev. 
 E. P. Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, by a mob 
 which thus exhibited its disapproval of his 
 anti-slavery journal, did much to stir up Aboli- 
 tion sentiment, already stimulated by many 
 similar outrages in the South. Lovejoy's 
 assassination brought Wendell Phillips into 
 the ranks of the Garrisonians, and he declared 
 himself in an eloquent speech at Faneuil Hall 
 at a meeting called to express the indignation 
 of all that was best in Boston. But still the 
 low passions of the friends of slavery con- 
 tinued to show themselves at the North. In 
 1838, during a convention of Abolitionists, 
 Pennsylvania Hall, a building recently erected 
 in Philadelphia for these and other philan- 
 thropic meetings, was burned to the ground 
 by a pro-slavery mob; and it was only by 
 calling out the militia that a similar crime 
 was prevented in Boston, where another hall 
 had been built for the same purposes. 
 
 29 
 
CHAPTER III 
 NON-RESISTANCE, DISSENSIONS 
 
 Integer vitae scelerisque purus 
 Non eget Mauris jaculis neque arcu 
 Nee venenatis gravida sagittis, 
 Fusee, pharetra. 
 
 —HORACE, Odes, 1:22, 
 
 Any account of Garrison which failed to 
 give due emphasis to his beUef in "non-re- 
 sistance" would be most imperfect, for he 
 regarded this principle as the very root of all 
 his convictions. He seems very early to have 
 had an instinctive repugnance to the use of 
 physical force. In the declaration of senti- 
 ment which he drew for the American Anti- 
 Slavery Society in 1833, and v/hich was 
 adopted, he says: "Our principles forbid the 
 doing of evil that good may come, and lead 
 us to reject, and to entreat the oppressed to 
 reject, the use of all carnal weapons for 
 deliverance from bondage. . . . Our 
 measures shall be such only as the opposition 
 of moral purity to moral corruption — the 
 destruction of error by the potency of the 
 truth — the overthrow of prejudice by the 
 
 30 
 
Non-Resistance, Dissensions 
 
 power of love — and the abolition of slavery 
 by the spirit of repentance." In the midst 
 of the Boston mob he exhorted his friends 
 not to resort to violence, and he expressed 
 his regret that Lovejoy fell fighting. The 
 question of the moral character of war was 
 much agitated about this time, and Garrison 
 contended that if peace was invariably incum- 
 bent on nations, it must be no less so between 
 individuals. 
 
 As was the custom of the day, a conven- 
 tion was called to consider non-resistance as 
 the true basis of peace. Some hundred and 
 fifty delegates met in September, 1838, at 
 Boston, and Garrison as usual dominated the 
 deliberations, and drew up a declaration 
 which was carried and afterwards signed by 
 a large majority, and which he fondly hoped 
 would "make a tremendous stir, not only in 
 this country, but in time throughout the 
 world." "Mankind shall hail the 20th of 
 September with more exultation and grati- 
 tude than Americans now do the 4th of July." 
 The document is a long one, but the salient 
 paragraphs are as follows : 
 
 We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any 
 human government; neither can we oppose 
 any such government by a resort to phy- 
 sical force. We recognize but one King 
 and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of 
 mankind. We are bound by the laws of a 
 
 31 
 
Garrison the Nan-Resistant 
 
 Kingdom which is not of this world, the 
 subjects of which are forbidden to fight. 
 
 As every human government is upheld by 
 physical strength and its laws are enforced 
 virtually at the point of the bayonet, we 
 cannot hold any office which imposes upon 
 its incumbent the obligation to compel men 
 to do right on pain of imprisonment or 
 death. We therefore voluntarily exclude 
 ourselves from every legislative and judicial 
 body, and repudiate all human politics, 
 worldly honors and stations of authority. 
 If we cannot occupy a seat in the legisla- 
 ture or on the bench, neither can we elect 
 others to act as our substitutes in any such 
 capacity. 
 
 It follows that we cannot sue any man at 
 law to compel him by force to restore any- 
 thing which he may have wrongfully taken 
 from us or others; but if he has seized our 
 coat, we shall surrender up our cloak rather 
 than to subject him to punishment. 
 
 We believe that the penal code of the old 
 covenant, "An eye for an eye and a tooth 
 for a tooth," has been abrogated by Jesus 
 Christ, and that under the new covenant, 
 the forgiveness instead of the punishment 
 of enemies has been enjoined upon all his 
 disciples in all cases whatsoever. 
 
 The history of mankind is crowded with 
 evidences proving that physical coercion is 
 not adapted to moral regeneration ; that the 
 sinful disposition of men can be subdued 
 only by love ; that evil can be exterminated 
 from the earth only by goodness. 
 
 But while we shall adhere to the doctrine 
 
 32 
 
Non-Resistance, Dissensions 
 
 of non-resistance and passive submission to 
 enemies, we purpose, in a moral and spirit- 
 ual sense, to speak and act boldly in the 
 cause of God; to assail iniquity in high 
 places; to apply our principles to all ex- 
 isting civil, political, legal and ecclesiastical 
 institutions. 
 
 The triumphant progress of the cause of 
 temperance and abolition in our land 
 encourages us to combine our means and 
 efforts for the promotion of a still greater 
 cause. 
 
 This "greater cause" (an admission indeed 
 for Garrison) held its own for some years. 
 The convention founded a Non-resistance 
 Society, and published a semi-monthly paper, 
 with Edmund Quincy as editor, who showed 
 his sincerity by returning to the governor 
 his commission of justice of the peace. His 
 journal was issued for several years and paid 
 expenses. But the demands of Abolition and 
 non-resistance upon the same individuals 
 proved too great, and gradually and imper- 
 ceptibly the movement subsided, destined 
 doubtless at some future day to reassert its 
 claim upon the conscience of mankind, al- 
 though it may present itself in a different 
 and more philosophical form. 
 
 During these years signs of disaffection 
 began to show themselves in the Abolitionist 
 ranks. The scandalous inhumanity and 
 cowardice of the churches had kindled against 
 
 33 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 them the just indignation of Garrison and 
 many of his followers. They retorted that he 
 was an "infidel" and that his harsh language 
 was unchristian. Five Abolitionist clergy- 
 men led a revolt against him and insisted 
 upon the formation of a new organization 
 with a new journal of its own. It would be 
 tedious to trace the history of these dissen- 
 sions. They continued for many years, but 
 Garrison stood to his guns without flinching, 
 and in the end his course was fully justified. 
 He also aroused opposition by refusing to 
 countenance political action and by preach- 
 ing non-resistance in the Liberator. His 
 opponents urged that any Abolitionist who 
 failed to vote was a traitor to the cause. 
 Garrison, however, had conscientious scruples 
 against voting, and in the whole course of 
 his life only voted once for a political officer, 
 and that was when he was a very young man. 
 The seceders nominated candidates for presi- 
 dent and vice-president in the national elec- 
 tion of 1840, a course which only revealed 
 their weakness, as party spirit ran so high 
 that most of the anti-slavery voters followed 
 their old party leaders to the polls. The 
 "third party" Abolitionists, who supported 
 their own candidates in 1840, eventually 
 drifted into the Free Soil Party, and in 1852 
 were contented with a declaration against 
 the extension of slavery and the enforcement 
 
 34 
 
Non-Resistance, Dissensions 
 
 of the fugitive slave law — so far had political 
 compromise allured them from the principle 
 of immediate emancipation. It was fortunate 
 that they never got the upper hand in the 
 American Anti-Slavery Society. The ques- 
 tion of woman's rights was also a burning 
 one among the Abolitionists, and the cause 
 of divisions. Should they or should they not 
 take an equal part with men in conventions 
 and committee v/ork? Garrison stoutly up- 
 held their right on all occasions; and when 
 at the world's anti-slavery convention in 
 London in 1840 they were excluded from, the 
 floor, he declined to present his credentials 
 as a delegate and took his seat among the 
 spectators in the gallery. 
 
 Garrison's policy against slavery was 
 chiefly directed toward the creation of senti- 
 ment, but he had several minor measures at 
 heart which he strove to forv/ard with his 
 customary persistence. He was active in 
 petitioning Congress to abolish slavery in 
 the District of Columbia. For years, as is 
 well known, the Southern members tried to 
 deny the right of petition in this regard, and 
 John Quincy Adams bravely withstood them. 
 The course of the South in opposing this 
 clear Constitutional right disgusted all fair- 
 minded people in the North and helped to 
 spread and consolidate anti-slavery opinion. 
 Another aim of Garrison's was to persuade 
 
 35 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 England to buy her cotton from the free 
 labor of India and thus strike a blow at the 
 pockets of the slave-holders. Commercial 
 reasons had much to do with Northern pro- 
 slavery feeling, for the merchants of the free 
 States did not wish to have their markets 
 disturbed. General Dix, afterwards governor 
 of New York, records that in 1850 he found 
 merchants of high standing in the metropolis 
 who declared their readiness to advocate the 
 re-establishment of the foreign slave trade 
 and the reintroduction of slavery at the 
 North, 
 
 36 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 CONSTITUTION AND CONSCIENCE 
 
 Were you looking to be held togtthi r by lawyers? 
 Or by an agreement on a paper? Or by arms? 
 Nay, nor the world nor any living thing will so cohere. 
 —WALT WHITMAN, "Drum-Taps." 
 
 The Constitution of the United States rec- 
 ognized the legality of slavery, and an idola- 
 trous regard for that document and for the 
 Union maintained by it between the States 
 closed the eyes of many Americans to the 
 iniquity of the institution. Webster was the 
 high priest of this fetish-worship, and his mis- 
 erable capitulation to the slave power was in 
 part due to this false patriotism, and in part 
 to his presidential aspirations. But he hu- 
 miliated himself in vain. Even Lincoln, who 
 knew that " if slavery is not wrong, nothing 
 is wrong," felt justified as late as August, 
 1862, in saying, "If I could save the Union 
 without freeing any slaves I would do it; if 
 I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I 
 would do it; and if I could do it by freeing 
 some and leaving others alone, I would also 
 do that." Garrison never allowed the Con- 
 
 37 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 stitutional argument to obscure the moral ob- 
 ligation. He frankly acknowledged that he 
 preferred the dissolution of the Union to the 
 recognition, express or implied, of slavery in 
 any form. It is rather difficult to understand 
 at this distant day why the people of the 
 North were so anxious for union with States 
 whose inhabitants visited upon them indis- 
 criminately the most opprobrious epithets, 
 and I am inclined to believe that the South- 
 erners must have had more respect for the 
 outspoken anathemas of Garrison than for 
 the truckling subserviency of time-serving 
 politicians and tradesmen. The non-resist- 
 ant was more of a man than his fellow citi- 
 zens who saw nothing wrong in war. "No 
 Union with Slave-Holders" became his 
 motto, and in 1844 he began to print it weekly 
 at the head of the columns of the Liberator. 
 The Constitution was now for him a "cove- 
 nant with death and hell." The annexation 
 of Texas in the teeth of the most solemn ob- 
 ligations, for the sole purpose of extending 
 slavery over a territory in which it had been 
 abolished, strengthened the feeling of hos- 
 tility to the government among the Aboli- 
 tionists, and the passage of the Fugitive 
 Slave Law was almost more than they could 
 bear. The South was steadily pursuing a 
 policy which was bound to swell the Aboli- 
 tion ranks and to rouse the enmity of many 
 
 38 
 
Constitution and Conscience 
 
 who had hitherto been friendly to them. In 
 the light of history nothing could have been 
 more futile than the course of their boasted 
 statesmen. Even Boston could hardly stand 
 the sight of a fugitive slave marching down 
 to the wharf between files of soldiers to be 
 returned to the questionable mercies of his 
 master. Webster besought his State to 
 "conquer her ov/n prejudices," and declared 
 that "anyone can perform an agreeable duty; 
 it is not every man who can perform a disa- 
 greeable duty," a remark which measures the 
 depth of Northern hypocrisy, and shows that 
 on the whole the North was more contemp- 
 tible, if not more wicked, than the South 
 throughout these wretched years. President 
 Fillmore disgraced his State, New York, by 
 signing the Fugitive Slave Bill in 1850, al- 
 though, if he had vetoed it, there was a 
 chance of defeating it on its second passage. 
 Six thousand Negroes at once fled from the 
 miscalled free States across the border into 
 Canada and found freedom on British soil. 
 When Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker 
 addressed a mass-meeting at Faneuil Hall 
 to protest against the return of a captured 
 slave, Judge B. R. Curtis, who hoped to ob- 
 tain the post of chief justice from the slave 
 power, and was in fact one of the greatest 
 of living jurists, urged the grand jury to in- 
 dict them as "obstructing the process of the 
 
 39 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 United States;" and that honorable body 
 complied with his request. President Pierce, 
 a New Hampshire man, ordered out the 
 troops to make sure the delivery of the un- 
 fortunate captive. Congress, bent upon prov- 
 ing that it was as much enslaved to the 
 slave-holders as the Negroes themselves, in 
 obedience to its task-masters, swept aside the 
 Missouri Compromise, and passed the 
 Nebraska Bill, which opened to slavery a 
 vast region which had been solemnly dedi- 
 cated by the same body to freedom. True in- 
 deed were Whittier's lines: 
 
 And Lawr, an unloosed maniac, strong, 
 Blood-drunken, through the blackness trod, 
 Hoarse-shouting in the ear of God 
 The blasphemy of wrong. 
 
 We may readily imagine the frame of 
 mind in which these events left Garrison. 
 At the 4th of July celebration of the Aboli- 
 tionists at Framingham, Massachusetts, in 
 1854, he made an address in the open air, 
 in the course of which he produced a copy 
 of the Fugitive Slave Law, and setting fire 
 to it, burned it to ashes. "And let all people 
 say. Amen," he cried ; and a shout of "Amen" 
 went up from the vast crowd. Then he 
 burned the decision of the commissioner 
 ordering the surrender of a slave, and also 
 the charge of Judge Curtis to the grand jury. 
 "And let all the people say. Amen." Then 
 
 40 
 
Constitution and Conscience 
 
 he held up the Constitution of the United 
 States, and declaring it to be the source 
 and parent of the other atrocities, he com- 
 mitted it too to the flames. "So perish all 
 compromises with tyranny, and let all the 
 people say, Amen." And the audience again 
 responded from their hearts, "Amen!" In 
 1857 he went so far as to take part in a State 
 convention, called to urge the separation of 
 the free from the slave States. 
 
 It must not be supposed that throughout 
 these years the Abolitionists were less per- 
 secuted than formerly by their enemies. If 
 public sentiment in some quarters was 
 becoming more favorable to them, that very 
 fact aroused the base passions of their oppo- 
 nents. In 1850 James Gordon Bennett, in the 
 Herald, deliberately stirred up a mob to put 
 down the anniversary meeting of the Ameri- 
 can Anti-Slavery Society at New York. He 
 described the speakers as "William H. Fur- 
 ness, of Philadelphia, white-man, from 
 Anglo-Saxon blood; Frederick Douglass, of 
 Rochester, black-man, from African blood; 
 William Lloyd Garrison, of Boston, mulatto- 
 man, mixed race; Wendell Phillips, of Bos- 
 ton, white-man, merely from blood." He 
 added that "Garrison surpasses Robespierre 
 and his associates," and borrowing his lan- 
 guage apparently from a future generation, 
 calls the members of the society "Abolition- 
 
 41 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 ists, socialists, Sabbath-breakers and anar- 
 chists." The Globe quite distinctly advised 
 the murder of Douglass. The mob assem- 
 bled promptly, and although on the first day 
 the firm dignity of the speakers held them 
 at bay, the further continuance of the con- 
 vention was rendered impossible. "Thus 
 closed anti-slavery free discussion in New 
 York for 1850," said the Tribune. Similar 
 events occurred in Boston, and the crowd 
 silenced Phillips himself in Faneuil Hall. 
 Even after Lincoln's election, anti-slavery 
 meetings were broken up by rioters in Bos- 
 ton, and on one occasion Phillips' life was 
 for a time in danger. In Brooklyn Henry 
 Ward Beecher had to be guarded by the 
 police in Plymouth Church. 
 
 42 
 
CHAPTER V 
 THE CIVIL WAR 
 
 War is a condition of hate subsisting between persons, and 
 paace is a condition of good-will subsisting between persons. 
 
 —ERASMUS. 
 
 Garrison's doctrine of non-resistance was 
 put to the test throughout this period and to 
 the end of the Civil War itself, but he never 
 wavered. In 1856, during the early struggle 
 for freedom in Kansas, Theodore Parker and 
 Henry W^ard Beecher had not hesitated to 
 hold meetings in their churches with the 
 object of raising money to buy rifles for the 
 anti-slavery volunteers. Mr. Beecher said: 
 "You might just as well read the Bible to 
 buffaloes as to those fellows who follow 
 Atchison and Stringfellow." Garrison ex- 
 pressed his emphatic dissent from this asser- 
 tion. To class human beings as wild beasts 
 was, he said, merely to adopt the theory 
 which the slaveholders applied to their 
 slaves. The "border ruffians" of Kansas were 
 less blameworthy than their respectable 
 backers. "Convince us that it is right to 
 shoot anybody, and our perplexity would be 
 
 43 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 to know where to begin — whom first to des- 
 patch as opportunity might oflFer. We should 
 have to make clean work of the president 
 and his cabinet" — and he goes on to enu- 
 merate various distinguished men who must 
 be considered as accomplices. 
 
 We know not where to look for Chris- 
 tianity if not to its Founder, and taking the 
 record of his life and death, of his teaching 
 and example, we can discover nothing 
 which even remotely, under any conceiv- 
 able circumstances, justifies the use of the 
 sword or rifle on the part of his followers; 
 on the contrary, we find nothing but self- 
 sacrifice, willing martyrdom (if need be), 
 peace and good-will, and the prohibition of 
 all retaliatory feelings enjoined upon all 
 those who would be his disciples. When he 
 said, "Fear not those who kill the body," 
 he broke every deadly weapon. When he 
 said, "My kingdom is not of this world, 
 else would my servants fight that I should 
 not be delivered to the Jews," he plainly 
 prohibited war in self-defense and substi- 
 tuted martyrdom therefor. When he said, 
 "Love your enemies," he did not mean 
 "kill them when they go too far." When 
 he said, while expiring on the cross, "Father, 
 forgive them, for they know not what they 
 do," he did not treat them as a "herd of 
 buffaloes," but as poor, misguided and lost 
 men. We believe in his philosophy; we 
 accept his instruction; we are thrilled 
 by his example ; we rejoice in his fidelity. 
 
 44 
 
The Civil War 
 
 Such was the argument of the man whom 
 the churches, crying "Lord! Lord!" de- 
 nounced as an infidel. It was in this very 
 year that the Independent, one of the best 
 known religious papers of the country, and 
 on whose editorial board were such dis- 
 tinguished clergymen as Dr. Leonard Bacon 
 and Dr. Storrs, called Garrison an infidel "of 
 the most degraded class!" 
 
 When at last war became inevitable, Gar- 
 rison deplored the martial spirit of many of 
 the Abolitionists. "When the anti-slavery 
 cause was launched," he said, "it was bap- 
 tized in the spirit of peace." 
 
 We proclaimed to the country and the 
 world that the weapons of our warfare 
 were not carnal, but spiritual, and we be- 
 lieved them to be mighty through God to 
 the pulling down even of the stronghold of 
 slavery, and for several years great moral 
 power accompanied our cause wherever 
 presented. Alas! ... We are growing 
 more and more warlike, more and more 
 disposed to repudiate the principles of peace. 
 . . . Just in proportion as this spirit pre- 
 vails, I feel that our moral power is 
 departing and will depart. ... I be- 
 lieve in the spirit of peace and in sole and 
 absolute reliance on truth and the applica- 
 tion of it to the hearts and consciences of 
 the people. I do not believe that the wea- 
 pons of liberty ever have been, or ever can 
 be, the weapons of despotism. I know that 
 
 45 
 
Uarrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 those of despotism are the sword, the re- 
 volver, the cannon, the bombshell, and 
 therefore the v/eapons to which tyrants 
 cling and upon which they depend are not 
 the weapons for me, as a friend of liberty. 
 . . . Much as I detest the oppression 
 exercised by the Southern slaveholder, he is 
 a man, sacred before me. He is a man, not 
 to be harmed by my hand nor with my con- 
 sent. He is a man who is grievously and 
 wickedly trampling upon the rights of his 
 fellow-man; but all I have to do with him 
 is to rebuke his sin, to call him to repent- 
 ance, to leave him without excuse for his 
 tyranny. He is a sinner before God — a 
 great sinner; yet, while I will not cease 
 reprobating his horrible injustice, I will let 
 him, see that in my heart there is no desire 
 to do him harm,— that I wish to bless him 
 here, and bless him everlastingly, — and 
 that I have no other Vv7eapon to wield 
 against him but the simple truth of God, 
 which is the great instrument for the over- 
 throw of all iniquity and the salvation of 
 the world. 
 
 In speaking of John Brown after his raid 
 at Harper's Ferry, he says: 
 
 Judging him by the code of Bunker Hill, 
 we think he is as deserving of high-wrought 
 eulogy as any w^ho ever wielded sword or 
 battle-axe in the cause of liberty ; but we do 
 not and we cannot approve any indulgence 
 of the war spirit. John Brown has perhaps 
 a right to a place by the side of Moses, 
 
 46 
 
The Civil War 
 
 Joshua, Gideon and David, but he is not 
 on the same plane with Jesus, Paul, Peter 
 and John. 
 
 But these principles of Garrison did not 
 prevent him, v/henever war was actually 
 raging, from wishing success to those who 
 fought on the side of liberty. 
 
 As an ultra-peace man, I am prepared to 
 say: Success to every slave insurrection in 
 the South and in every slave country. 
 
 I thank God when men who believe in 
 the right and duty of v/ielding carnal wea- 
 pons are so far advanced that they will take 
 those weapons out of the scale of despotism 
 and throw them into the scale of freedom. 
 It is an indication of progress and a positive 
 moral growth; it is one way to get up to 
 the sublime platform of non-resistance ; and 
 it is God's method of dealing retribution 
 upon the head of the tyrant. Rather than 
 see men wearing their chains in a cowardly 
 and servile spirit, I would, as an advocate 
 of peace, much rather see them breaking 
 the head of the tyrant with their chains. 
 Give me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill 
 and Lexington and Concord, rather than 
 the cowardice and servility of a Southern 
 slave plantation. 
 
 Garrison applied these rules to the Civil 
 War, and gave his entire sympathy to the 
 cause of the North, while disapproving alto- 
 gether of the resort to arms. Although for some 
 time after the election and inauguration of 
 
 47 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 Lincoln the Abolitionists had reason to doubt 
 his intentions with reference to slavery, and 
 especially after he had summarily revoked the 
 orders of General Fremont and General Hun- 
 ter liberating the slaves in their respective 
 military districts, still Garrison saw deeper 
 than most of his fellow reformers, and almost 
 from the first gave him his support. Lin- 
 coln's oath of office, indeed, obliged him to 
 accept the Constitution, and to that extent 
 he was not a free man or a free moral agent. 
 Occupying this false position, he felt bound 
 in his inaugural address indirectly to stigma- 
 tize John Brown's undertaking as the "great- 
 est of crimes." He also insisted, in the same 
 address, upon the rendition of fugitive slaves, 
 and appealed to the oaths of members of 
 Congress to sustain this obligation. Could 
 any more striking example of the baneful 
 effect of oaths be given than these passages 
 which his oath extorted from the future 
 Emancipator? He rose to a higher sense of 
 his duties later when he told Congress in 
 1864 that "If the people should by whatever 
 mode or means make it an executive duty 
 to re-enslave such persons, another, not I, 
 must be their instrument to enforce it." Res- 
 ignation of office is surely the only course 
 for an official who finds himself called upon 
 to do something which offends his conscience. 
 Garrison earnestly urged the renomination 
 
 48 
 
The Civil War 
 
 of Lincoln against the bitter opposition of 
 Wendell Phillips, who always strangely mis- 
 understood the President. 
 
 Now at last the virtues of the Abolitionists 
 began to be generally recognized. In 1864 
 George Thompson, who nearly thirty years 
 before had barely escaped violence from pro- 
 slavery mobs, returned to America. He was 
 given a public reception in Boston, with 
 Governor Andrews in the chair, and at Wash- 
 ington a short time afterwards, he was invi- 
 ted by the House of Representatives to 
 deliver a lecture in their hall. Garrison, too, 
 was treated with great respect when he visi- 
 ted the national capital, and in the last month 
 of the war, at the invitation of Secretary 
 Stanton, he was present at the raising of the 
 flag on Fort Sumter on the fourth anniver- 
 sary of its capture. Dr. Cuyler, of Brooklyn, 
 records that while he was standing with 
 Garrison in the streets of Charleston, a band 
 passed them playing "John Brown's Body." 
 "Only listen to that in Charleston streets!" 
 exclaimed Garrison, and they both broke 
 into tears. The Negroes received him in a 
 large church building, several thousand of 
 them being crowded into it. One of them 
 addressed him in an eloquent oration on 
 behalf of his race and two little slave girls 
 presented him with flowers. This occurred 
 on the very morrow of Lincoln's death, the 
 
 49 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 news of which had not yet arrived. One of 
 the party present at Fort Sumter and Charles- 
 ton has informed the present writer that it 
 was most impressive to see the reverence 
 with which the Negroes looked at Garrison, 
 many of them touching his coat as if they 
 expected virtue to come out of it. 
 
 When the adoption of the thirteenth amend- 
 ment to the Constitution, declaring the aboli- 
 tion of slavery, was assured, Garrison made 
 up his mind to bring the Liberator to a close 
 and to retire from the various anti-slavery 
 societies. Their work was indeed ended, the 
 mass of the population had caught up to 
 them, and it was absurd now to pretend to 
 any exclusive virtue. Many of the Aboli- 
 tionists were incensed at his course, and 
 insisted on keeping up the skeleton of their 
 organization for several years; but the life 
 had left them, and their total lack of influence 
 proved how wise Garrison's action had been. 
 He set up the last paragraph of his paper 
 himself in December, 1865, and republished 
 in the last issue the prophetic salutatory of 
 thirty years before. Not one penny of gain 
 had he to show for this lifetime of service. 
 
 50 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 THE LABOR QUESTION 
 
 God speed the hour, the glorious hour, 
 
 When none on earth 
 Shall exercise a lordly power 
 Nor in a tyrant's presence cower, 
 But all to Manhood's stature tower 
 By equal birth ! 
 
 —'WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON, 
 
 "The Triumph of Freedom." 
 
 Garrison lived for thirteen years after the 
 close of the war, and he continued to take 
 an active interest in the freedmen, in woman's 
 rights, in temperance, free trade and other 
 reforms. He protested against the exclusion 
 of the Chinese from America, believing that 
 the yellow man is a brother as well as the 
 black. "No suitable occasion for bearing 
 peace and non-resistance testimonials was 
 neglected" by him, as his biographers tell 
 us. He opposed the introduction of military 
 drill into the public schools, and his conver- 
 sation so impressed a young Japanese student 
 who was preparing himself in America for 
 the army of his country that on his return 
 home he refused to serve for conscience' 
 sake, and was duly cast into prison. 
 
 It is not without regret that we must 
 
 51 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 record Garrison's insensibility to the claims 
 of the working classes outside the ranks of 
 the slaves. Their condition was placed be- 
 fore him by a correspondent in 1875, but it 
 did not appeal to him. He seemed to think 
 that the ballot (which, by the way, he con- 
 sidered it wrong to make use of) was an 
 all-sufficient remedy for their ills, and that 
 the laboring man held his fate in his own 
 hands. "You express the conviction," he 
 adds, "that the present relation of capital to 
 labor is 'hastening the nation to its ruin,* 
 and that if some remedy is not applied it is 
 difficult to see 'how a bloody struggle is to 
 be prevented!' I entertain no such fears. 
 Our danger lies in sensual indulgence, in a 
 licentious perversion of liberty, in the preva- 
 lence of intemperance, and in whatever tends 
 to the demoralization of the people." In the 
 same strain might a Southern planter have 
 answered Lundy in the twenties! Garrison 
 was only a fallible mortal after all, but surely 
 he had already deserved well enough of his 
 kind for us to overlook the natural conserva- 
 tism of his old age. It is not everyone that 
 can preserve to the end the freshness and 
 alertness of vision of his youth, a quality 
 which distinguished Wendell Phillips from 
 his colleagues and outweighed the trivial 
 defects of his character. 
 
 The workingman, it should be said in this 
 
 52 
 
The Labor Question 
 
 connection, at one time at least had shown 
 his devotion to the cause of the slave, and 
 placed all Abolitionists under lasting obliga- 
 tions. In 1863 a friend writing to Garrison 
 from England says: 
 
 The working classes also have proved to 
 be sound to the core, wherever their opinion 
 has been tested. Witness the noble demon- 
 stration of Manchester operatives the other 
 day, when three thousand of these noble 
 sons of labor (many of whom were actual 
 sufferers from the cotton famine) adopted 
 by acclamation an address to President 
 Lincoln sympathizing with his proclama- 
 tion. A friend of mine who was present on 
 the occasion tells me that the heartiness 
 and enthusiasm of the workingmen was 
 something glorious ; that he heard them say 
 to one another that they would rather re- 
 main unemployed for twenty years than 
 get cotton from the South at the expense 
 of the slave. Mr. Thompson has been in 
 other parts of Lancashire, and the meetings 
 he has addressed have been attended with 
 the same results. Our experience in Lon- 
 don has been equally satisfactory. It would 
 have done you good if you had ... at- 
 tended the great meeting of the working 
 classes which we held on the 31st of De- 
 cember — the eve of freedom. 
 
 Mr. Thompson himself corroborated this 
 account in a letter written a month later: 
 
 On New Year's Day I addressed a 
 crowded assembly of unemployed operatives 
 
 53 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 in the town of Heywood, near Manchester, 
 and spoke to them for two hours about the 
 slaveholders' Rebellion. They were united 
 and vociferous in the expression of their 
 willingness to suffer all the hardships con- 
 sequent upon a want of cotton, if thereby 
 the liberty of the victims of Southern des- 
 potism might be promoted. All honor to 
 the half million of our working population 
 in Lancashire, Cheshire and elsewhere, who 
 are bearing with heroic fortitude the griev- 
 ous privations which your war has entailed 
 upon them ! The four millions of slaves in 
 America have no sincerer friends than the 
 lean, palefaced idle people, who are recon- 
 ciled to their meager fare and desolate 
 homes by the thought that their trials are 
 working out the deliverance of the op- 
 pressed children of your country. Their 
 sublime resignation, their self-forgetfulness, 
 their observance of lav/, their whole-souled 
 love of the cause of human freedom, their 
 quick and clear perception of the merits of 
 the question between North and South, and 
 their appreciation of the labor question in- 
 volved in the ''irrepressible conflict," are 
 extorting the admiration of all classes of 
 the community and are reading the nation 
 a valuable lesson. 
 
 54 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 GARRISON THE PROPHET 
 
 Rejoice, and be exceeding glad, . . . for so persecuted 
 they the prophets which were before you.— St. Matthew, v;i2. 
 
 The career of Garrison is in many ways 
 typical of that class of men who in the days 
 of the ancient Hebrews were called prophets. 
 Brought up in a strictly conventional and 
 orthodox manner, he was in his youth a Puri- 
 tan of the Puritans, a firm believer in the 
 infallibility of the Bible and the divine char- 
 acter of the church. Educated in a society 
 which still remembered the days of the Revo- 
 lution, he was taught to look upon that war 
 as one ordained by heaven, and upon Ameri- 
 can institutions as the embodiment of abso- 
 lute justice. Gradually, however, doubts 
 crept into his mind. He felt instinctively that 
 physical combat was beneath the dignity of 
 man. How then could wars be right? And 
 how could governments which depend upon 
 military power be righteous? Slavery was 
 an evident fruit of coercion, the very 
 redudio ad absurdum of it; and yet it was 
 supported by the government, and by its 
 
 55 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 fundamental law, the Constitution, and it 
 was openly abetted and defended by the 
 church. Was it possible to worship institu- 
 tions which brought forth such harvests? By 
 their fruits ye shall know them, and this fruit 
 was rotten to the core. And he began to 
 preach a crusade against coercion, and the 
 government which enforced it, and the church 
 which blessed it. Public opinion in Garri- 
 son's time, and to a lesser degree to-day also, 
 v/as singularly alike in religious and political 
 matters. The pope, a man, had been deposed 
 on the one hand, and the Bible, a writing, 
 set up in his place. The king, a man, had been 
 dismissed on the other, and the Constitution, 
 a writing, enthroned in his place. The infal- 
 libility of the pope had been transferred to 
 the Bible, and the majesty of the king to the 
 Constitution, and protestantism and democ- 
 racy seemed destined to end in the worship 
 of printer's ink. It was the old error which 
 has always called forth the prophet to 
 denounce it — the error of exalting the letter 
 above the spirit. If protestantism and democ- 
 racy have any meaning, they stand for free- 
 dom; and yet Garrison found them approv- 
 ing of military coercion, warfare and slavery. 
 What was he to do? It was a hard wrench 
 for him. It required many months for him 
 to appreciate the true bearings of the situa- 
 tion, but when he once saw clearly that his 
 
 56 
 
Garrison the Prophet 
 
 own standards of ethics were far higher than 
 those of church and state, he took the part of 
 the spirit against the letter, and of the Uving 
 truth against the fossiHzed lie. And the 
 result was that which no prophet has ever 
 escaped. He was persecuted and hounded. 
 He was called an infidel and blasphemer and 
 Sabbath-breaker. He was accused of stirring 
 up the people and stimulating insurrection 
 among the slaves. But he stood firm, remem- 
 bering the injunction to rejoice and be 
 exceeding glad, for so had they persecuted 
 the prophets which were before him. 
 
 Garrison was a prophet, too, in the char- 
 acter of his work. His denunciation of 
 wrong was in the language of Isaiah 
 and Amos; he had their fiery spirit and 
 unmeasured tongue. It is easy to argue 
 that this temper is unkind and unchristian, 
 but I confess that I like it, when it has no 
 personal intent. Take away the "woes" which 
 Jesus pronounced against pharisaism and 
 hypocrisy, and you leave his character 
 enfeebled. Somehow a loving heart and 
 strong language against evil can contrive to 
 thrive together. And in private life Garrison 
 was all kindliness, devoted to his wife and 
 children and friends, and in turn almost 
 adored by them. Nor, so far as I know, 
 did he ever use harsh words towards any 
 man to his face, and if he erred in this respect 
 
 57 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 occasionally in his writing, it was because he 
 took the individual as the incarnation of a 
 wrong. His personal geniality and benig- 
 nancy among his acquaintances were so great 
 that it seemed impossible that he was the 
 man who could, when occasion demanded, 
 thunder against wickedness in high places. 
 There was no limit to his courage when 
 attacking the evils of slavery. While at 
 Baltimore he showed again and again his 
 willingness to run any risk in stigmatizing 
 the conduct of those who were engaged in 
 the slave trade, if necessary by name; and 
 one ruffian who threatened him, he invited to 
 come and meet him. 
 
 He was free, too, from some of the common 
 defects of reformers. There was nothing 
 abnormal about him, except his philanthropy. 
 As a boy he was active in sports, a good 
 swimmer and skater. He sympathized heart- 
 ily with the struggle of the Greeks for inde- 
 pendence, and, having not yet formulated his 
 belief in the immorality of war, he thought 
 seriously of volunteering to fight in their 
 behalf. His constitution was strong, and, so 
 far from suffering from indigestion (which 
 accounts for so much sour criticism of things 
 as they are), he declared that he never knew 
 that he had a stomach. And yet there was 
 something of New England asceticism about 
 him, for which I do not propose to apologize. 
 
 58 
 
Garrison the Prophet 
 
 The example of his father and of a brother 
 who also died a drunkard naturally turned 
 him against strong drink and the coercion of 
 bad habits. He had little patience with smok- 
 ing or loose or self-indulgent habits of any 
 kind. One of his closest followers of a 
 younger generation became in later years a 
 disciple of Henry George and an advocate of 
 equal rights in the raw material of the globe. 
 Upon his first meeting with Mr. George, the 
 great land reformer invited him into a beer- 
 saloon to discuss the question with him, and 
 the new recruit was shocked at the idea. 
 Abolitionists of the true stripe looked upon 
 the saloon as the gate of hell, and nothing 
 else. But in movements of this kind, ascetic- 
 ism, the control of the appetites, the ascend- 
 ancy of the mind above things, has its place, 
 and so, too, does the easy-going acceptance 
 of democratic manners with their sociability 
 and joviality. It is foolish to quarrel with 
 these differences of temperament, for they 
 diversify human nature and make the world 
 a pleasanter place to live in. Certainly it 
 would lack a good deal of backbone if the 
 Puritan ideals were lost for good and all. 
 Garrison was a Puritan to the end, and one 
 of the best specimens of that strong type. 
 
 And above all he was a prophet in his abso- 
 lute merger of himself in his cause. Outside 
 of it he had no personal ambition; and there 
 
 59 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 is something which compels admiration in 
 this attitude. Garrison belonged to a higher 
 class of men than Lincoln, for he forgot him- 
 self in his desire for the triumph of what he 
 regarded as the right. Lincoln's great achieve- 
 ments were incidents in a political career of 
 the ordinary kind, the object of which was 
 the promotion of his own interests and the 
 assurance of his own advancement. As the 
 world goes, we cannot criticize the ambitious 
 lawyer, ready to argue any side of any case, 
 nor the ambitious politician who wishes to 
 be conspicuous; but such occupations and 
 aspirations would be impossible to the noblest 
 type of man. Garrison would at any moment 
 have given his life and devoted his name to 
 oblivion, if by so doing he could have helped 
 his cause. And he was withal the most 
 modest of men, even in conventions of his 
 own people avoiding all appearance of dic- 
 tation. 
 
 And the last mark of prophethood was also 
 Garrison's. Despised and rejected of men 
 during the active part of his career, insulted, 
 mobbed, almost massacred, yet, even sooner 
 than is usually the case, the children of those 
 who would have stoned him have raised 
 monuments to his memory. The fine statue 
 on Commonwealth avenue, Boston, in the 
 very city which once nearly murdered him, 
 bears on its pedestal the words taken from 
 
 60 
 
Garrison the Prophet 
 
 the first editorial in the Liberator, "I am in 
 earnest, . . . and I will be heard," and 
 teaches a profound lesson to the young 
 American as to the possibilities of the career 
 of the prophet, even at this late day. What 
 man walking the streets of Boston in the 
 winter of 1831 would have guessed that the 
 most important bit of contemporary history 
 was being transacted in an obscure garret? 
 Their minds were occupied with the doings 
 of Congress and the dispatches from London 
 and Paris, but the real motive power of 
 society rarely shows itself on the surface. 
 What man who looked on at the Boston mob 
 of 1835 would have supposed for a moment 
 that the hatless, coatless, bewildered victim 
 of the crowd would conquer in the end, and 
 that the men who were threatening him would 
 live to be ashamed of their cause? I think it 
 was Whittier who advised young men to 
 seek for some just and despised cause and 
 attach themselves to it. Even from the stand- 
 point of worldly wisdom, this is not such bad 
 advice. The man who loses his life finds it. 
 Garrison might have become a leading editor, 
 or author, or poet, or statesman (for he 
 possessed the gifts necessary for these call- 
 ings), and he might have left a comfortable 
 fortune to his children; but it is doubtful if 
 in any other way than as a prophet he would 
 have won a monument for himself. 
 
 61 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 GARRISON THE NON-RESISTANT 
 
 Oh, it is excellent 
 To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous 
 To use it like a giant. 
 
 — SHAKSPERE, "Measure for Measure." 
 
 It is not without reason that I am treating 
 Garrison as primarily a non-resistant, and 
 only secondarily as an Abolitionist; for it 
 was only by chance that his attention was 
 turned to the abolition of slavery, while his 
 instinctive dislike of coercion and love of free- 
 dom were wider and earlier. They accounted 
 for his condemnation of war, and they would 
 have led him in his youth to take the side of 
 liberty in any conflict which the condition of 
 the times might have forced upon him. Gar- 
 rison recognized fully the profounder claims 
 of non-resistance and the fact that the aboli- 
 tion of slavery was a mere episode in its 
 history. The coercion of man by man was 
 the root of slavery, and it is also the root of 
 a thousand other ills. Between nations it 
 means war and conquest and imperialism and 
 international misunderstandings and hatreds 
 
 62 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 and tariffs. Massachusetts and Boston have 
 had the honor of leading in many campaigns 
 for freedom. They were the first to resent 
 the tyranny of George III. Under Garrison 
 they were the headquarters of the anti-slavery 
 movement. Recently we have found there the 
 center of protest against the seizure and sub- 
 jugation of the Philippines. But in every 
 case it has been a select minority which has 
 taken up the cause of liberty, and in every 
 case this minority has been reviled and 
 despised. Sam Adams was not respectable. 
 Garrison was an "infidel" agitator. And 
 to-day the anti-imperialists, the logical suc- 
 cessors of Adams and Garrison in claiming 
 freedom for all, are treated with scant cour- 
 tesy. Let them possess their souls in 
 patience. They will have their reward. 
 
 But each of these movements v/as but an 
 incident in the grand march toward freedom, 
 and Garrison saw the wider aspects of his 
 faith. He was one of the heralds of a new 
 instinct— the instinct that man belongs to a 
 higher plane than that of physical violence, 
 and that he must rise above the methods of 
 brute force in dealing with his fellows. The 
 evolution of the race is a mysterious thing. 
 Whence came the ideas of association, of love 
 of neighbor, and of love of enemies? The 
 new seed-thoughts take root at first in a 
 single mind or in a very few select ones, and 
 
 63 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 centuries pass before the stony hearts of men 
 at large are fructified. These are real 
 instincts, like that which sends the chick 
 after its food before it is quite free of the 
 egg. And the faint promise of that desire in 
 the egg may have induced it to make an 
 immense effort in the dark — to attempt the 
 impossible — to break down its old environ- 
 ment, apparently impervious and eternal, and 
 seek a new world of infinite possibilities. 
 There are two sides to evolution — that usu- 
 ally dwelt upon, of conformity to environ- 
 ment — and that far more significant one of 
 dissatisfaction with environment, determina- 
 tion to rise above it, and the actual effort 
 against all nature to discover or create a new 
 one. Life means not submission to, but mas- 
 tery of, environment, and every seed is at 
 heart a rebel. The parts of chaos were well 
 suited to each other and to the whole. 
 Whence came the whisper that there was 
 something better, and the struggle of the 
 universe to lift itself, as it were, by its own 
 waist-band? It was an effort to do the 
 impossible, and it succeeded. Discontent 
 with environment is a motive power, and 
 Garrison's instinctive aversion to coercion 
 was a new creative principle which will yet 
 have its preponderant part to play in the his- 
 tory of man. Of course, I do not mean to 
 say that he was the first man to feel the 
 
 64 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 novel truth. It had been let loose many 
 centuries earlier, and here and there there 
 had always been witnesses to it; but in his 
 own day and generation Garrison was a 
 pioneer of non-resistance, and he was no 
 imitator or repeater, but he felt its direct 
 claims in his own consciousness. 
 
 And men are governed and must be 
 governed by their feelings. We are in the 
 habit of talking of logic as if it were superior 
 to sentiment; but all logic starts out from 
 sentiment, and every syllogism can be traced 
 back to a feeling — a taste — about which it is 
 not to be disputed. Even mathematics, the 
 most logical of sciences, rests upon axioms, 
 and axioms are feelings. We say that a 
 straight line is the shortest distance between 
 two points, because we "feel" that it is; and 
 in the same way we believe that two parallel 
 lines can never meet, and that one and one 
 always make two. But these are all mere 
 feelings, and the new mathematicians are 
 actually arguing to-day that parallel lines can 
 meet, and that our axiomatic feelings are 
 erroneous. Men often think that they are 
 guided by reason, while as a matter of fact 
 they really feel their v/ay ; and it is not a bad 
 plan when logic leads you to some act which 
 shocks your feelings, to use these latter as 
 tests of logic. It is this humble, instinctive 
 way of behaving which we call common- 
 
 65 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 sense, and common-sense is the natural cor- 
 rective of logic— just as when, sailing by 
 right ascension and declination, we see the 
 breakers ahead, we do not hesitate to fall 
 back on the vulgar assistance of the lead. 
 There is no such thing as pure logic. We 
 are always guided either by feeling or by 
 feeling-plus-logic; and hence logic, so far 
 from adding certainty to our conclusions, 
 rather, by bringing in a new element, adds a 
 new possibility of error. The chief use of 
 logic is not to show me what to do, but to 
 afford me a rational excuse for doing what 
 common-sense dictates. It is not the founda- 
 tion on which I build my wall, but the prop 
 with which I shore it up when it begins to 
 look shaky. All the good and all the evil in 
 the world have been caused by feelings, but 
 probably feelings-plus-logic have done more 
 harm in the long run than undiluted feelings. 
 Logic is relentless. The logic of Torquemada 
 was unanswerable. Heretics were damned. 
 They made converts who were also damned. 
 It was better to torture and kill a few of 
 them than to consign a large portion of the 
 race to hell forever. Q. E. D. The argument 
 is unassailable, but if Torquemada had con- 
 sulted his heart for a moment he would have 
 thrown the whole flimsy sophism; overboard. 
 If I may indulge in a Hibernicism I would 
 say that it is a good thing to keep your heart 
 
 66 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 at your elbow. For the heart is the root of 
 all, and feeling is the mother of logic, though 
 logic often disowns its mother and endeavors 
 to cut loose from her apron strings, ashamed 
 apparently of its low birth. True logic 
 should be proud of its maternal ancestor, and 
 delight in calling in the good old lady when- 
 ever it seems to be coming to grief. 
 
 And clearly the idea that logic can inde- 
 pendently lay down eternal truths is a fallacy, 
 for the human race is living and growing. Our 
 viewpoints vary and change from day to day. 
 Our feelings are different from those of our 
 fathers, and the logical structure which we 
 rear upon them merely adds to the confusion. 
 Garrison and Draco could not have argued 
 intelligibly together because their root-feel- 
 ings were different — they belonged to differ- 
 ent epochs. Axioms alter from age to age, 
 and the Quod erat demonstrandum of one 
 period is the Redudio ad absurdum of the 
 next. And the hard logic of an earUer age 
 often survives into a new generation against 
 whose deepest instincts it offends, and yet 
 we persist in our allegiance to the old truth, 
 become falsehood. There is therefore a grain 
 of truth in the common saying that a rule of 
 action is correct in theory but not in practice. 
 Thus the axiom that it is best to hit a man 
 who differs from you over the head has been 
 fossilized and preserved by the logical insti- 
 
 67 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 tutions founded upon it, into the midst of a 
 period in which men feel instinctively that 
 other less clumsy methods of treatment are 
 better. We owe a lot of trouble to the 
 Q. E. D/s. And Garrison's mistake was not 
 that he adopted a wrong principle, but that 
 he was ahead of his times. He believed that 
 the declaration of the non-resistant conven- 
 tion would sweep over the country as the 
 Declaration of Independence had done, only 
 with a more profound and intense effect, as it 
 was infinitely wider in scope. But two things 
 are necessary to the success of a cause — not 
 only a prophet, but also a people capable of 
 understanding the prophet; and this audience 
 was lacking to Garrison. He would have 
 liked to be a leader to guide the world into 
 the paths of peace. He had to content him- 
 self in this regard with acting as a pioneer 
 to stake out the land which some day man- 
 kind will occupy. His immediate leadership 
 was confined to a cause which in comparison 
 was limited and local. 
 
 But was this non-resistance principle of 
 Garrison's a true one? And is there any 
 prospect that it will triumph in the future? 
 As an axiomatic statement its final sanction 
 must be found in the individual conscious- 
 ness. Answer for yourself. Is there nothing 
 at the bottom of your heart which suggests 
 to you at your best moments that the exer- 
 
 68 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 cise of physical force against your fellows is 
 unworthy of you? Has not the advance of 
 civilization made men more and more skep- 
 tical of the virtues of violence? Many men, 
 at any rate, while repudiating the claims of 
 non-resistance, pay it the indirect compliment 
 of worshiping or honoring supremely the 
 men who have taught it. There can be no 
 doubt about it— violence is played out. The 
 use of physical force in the management of 
 rational creatures is a survival of less enlight- 
 ened times. The tendency is away from vio- 
 lence of all kinds. Most of the evils of the 
 world are caused by violence. Read the his- 
 tory of mankind from the monuments of 
 Assyria and Egypt down to the morning's 
 news, and you v/ill see that it is one long 
 record of violence — man lifting up his hand 
 against man and nation against nation. Mur- 
 der, arson, robbery — robbery, arson, murder — 
 it is the same old story over and over again. 
 And to-day the dead and wounded He all 
 around us, not on the obvious battlefield 
 only, but in city and town and hamlet. Visit 
 the slums of New York or Chicago or Lon- 
 don. See the poverty and crime and disease 
 which come from overcrowding and enforced 
 idleness and excessive labor side by side — 
 the necessary consequences of monopolizing 
 by force the natural opportunities of the 
 earth ; men and women suffering from a rigid 
 
 69 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 and artificial arrangement of things formed 
 and perpetuated in the last resort by the 
 mailed hand of society, held ever in readiness 
 to crush the offender. The physical struggle 
 has never ceased, disguise it as we may 
 endeavor. Society has always been a Donny- 
 brook Fair, and it is high time that we should 
 be ashamed of our manners, for nothing could 
 be more vulgar than this everlasting appeal 
 to the cudgel. 
 
 And the way to stop is to stop ! This seems 
 such a simple remedy that men will have none 
 of it. Yes, violence is an evil, they say; let 
 us put it down by more violence. And we 
 start out, each of us with his own ideas and 
 his own weapons, and we proceed to break 
 each other's heads again, and in so doing we 
 are repeating the old useless conflicts of the 
 Pharaohs. This noisy, bloody business is not 
 the real history of the world. Its real history 
 is the history of ideas. The real battle that 
 counts is in the minds and hearts of men. 
 Let us order our armies up to that plane. 
 And at our best, I repeat it, v/e all feel a call 
 to rise to that higher level. There is some- 
 thing degrading in the use of force against 
 others, and we are all conscious of it at the 
 time. It is impossible to kick anything, I 
 do not care what, and feel human. Catch 
 yourself flagrante delicto the next time and 
 
 70 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 arraign yourself at your own bar, and I 
 predict that you will find yourself guilty. It 
 is a debasing proceeding. It is not our proper 
 method, and if our environment seems 
 to demand it, we must hope and pray 
 and work for a new one; and the best 
 way to create a new one is (so far as in us 
 lies) to behave as if it had already arrived. 
 Overcome evil with good. That is the truly 
 human way. Let others get the better of us 
 in this matter of violence. Forgive them. 
 Let by-gones be by-gones. Stop this eternal 
 bookkeeping of offenses between you and 
 your neighbor, and do what you can to 
 bequeath a clean slate to posterity. 
 
 And the non-resistant is no weakling. Gar- 
 rison himself is proof enough of that. The 
 very renunciation of physical force seems to 
 give a new and loftier power to a man. 
 No, the strenuous man is not the soldier on 
 horseback with saber drawn, but rather the 
 man with folded arms who sees a new truth 
 and utters it regardless of consequences. No 
 one can injure the man who refuses to be 
 hurt. You may kill him but you cannot touch 
 the man in him. In another place I have 
 given some examples' of the power and 
 influence of such men even upon the savages 
 
 i"Tolstoy and His Message," Funk & Wagnalla Company, 
 New York. 
 
 71 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 of America and Africa/ The most influential 
 men in history have eschewed physical force 
 as an instrument. What man of all has 
 exerted the deepest, widest influence upon 
 mankind? Surely Jesus Christ from whom 
 the very term "non-resistant" is derived. And 
 after him? Siddartha, the Buddha, who abso- 
 lutely condemned all violence. What man 
 to-day in the Russian Empire, that home of 
 brute force, has the greatest import for the 
 world? Leo Tolstoy, without doubt, the man 
 who would not lift his hand to compel. And 
 Garrison, how do you explain the fact that he, 
 with his hands tied behind his back, was the 
 main motive power in that movement which 
 has dwarfed all the rest of our history? 
 
 Let us beware, however, of imitations and 
 travesties of non-resistance. It is no colorless, 
 negative quality, and should have no taint of 
 timidity, no suspicion of effeminacy. Let us 
 be quite sure that we are above violence, and 
 not beneath it. It is far better to fight to the 
 death than to decline the combat from 
 cowardice, whatever may be the name behind 
 which we mask it. A soft answer may, too, 
 be turned into an offense, if the wrong 
 emphasis is placed upon it. An apology 
 
 ' De Quincey in one of his articles on "W^alking Stewart," 
 the eccentric traveller, quotes the latter to the following effect: 
 "It was generally supposed, he said, that the civilized traveller 
 among savages might lay his account with meeting unprovoked 
 violence, except in so far as he carried arms for his protection. 
 Now he had found it by much the safer plan to carry no arms." 
 
 72 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 should not come too easily. It ought to be a 
 sort of self-punishment which will make me 
 hesitate another time before incurring my 
 own displeasure. I have a friend who apolo 
 gizes at the least provocation — "Oh, yes, to be 
 sure. You are quite right. I am awfully 
 sorry;'* and in five minutes he will be doing 
 the same thing again, and rattling off the 
 same formula. An over-issue of apologies is 
 like an over-issue of paper dollars; it makes 
 them altogether valueless. The superficial 
 readiness to forgive comes under the same 
 category. I once read a letter in which the 
 writer apparently inflicted an injury upon the 
 recipient. He closed it glibly as follows: "I 
 know you will resent this, but I forgive you 
 freely beforehand." Of course, this coin was 
 counterfeit on its face. Forgiveness and 
 apology, from sinned against and sinning, 
 must represent positive sympathy with the 
 other party, or they really become affronts. 
 Forgiveness is a sort of self -blame, too; you 
 blame yourself for not having forgiven 
 before — for having to forgive at all — for taking 
 any notice whatever of the offense, and it is 
 the lack of universal sympathy which makes 
 either necessary. You find yourself out of 
 tune, like a violin, and you proceed to screw 
 yourself up to the proper pitch. The chief 
 use of forgiveness and apology is to the for- 
 giver and apologizer. 
 
 73 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 THE DELIMITATION OF NON- 
 RESISTANCE 
 
 That society is the greatest where the highest truths be- 
 come practical. 
 
 -SWAMI VIVEKANANDA. 
 
 Garrison expressed the obligation of non- 
 resistance in its strongest form, and would 
 admit of no exception or qualification. He 
 declared that he would not defend his wife 
 by force in case of an assault, and for such 
 extreme expressions he has been freely criti- 
 cized. For my part I do not object to over- 
 statements (if this is one). They have their 
 dramatic value, and carry their cause when 
 a carefully trimmed shaft falls short. Just 
 as an athlete makes his muscles rigid one 
 at a time, first the right arm and then the 
 left, now the waist muscles and then those 
 of the legs — so mankind may well exercise 
 its various powers to the utmost in turn. 
 The all-round man is the ideal, but until we 
 can produce him we must specialize more or 
 less. I delight in the strong expression of 
 an idea, from Francis of Assisi to Nietzsche, 
 
 74 
 
Delimitation of Non-Resistance 
 
 for I find the same muscle imperfectly devel- 
 oped in myself. Each muscle needs the 
 greatest development, and perfection will 
 come with the equilibrium of the most vigor- 
 ous opposites, and not v/ith their atrophy. 
 Pull your side of the boat and let me pull 
 mine. Too much time is wasted in port's 
 swearing at starboard and starboard at port. 
 Your main duty is to be sincere and to be 
 strong and to pull. 
 
 But I believe that Garrison was right for 
 other reasons than these. He was conscious 
 of a new moral obligation to refrain from 
 violence of all kinds, and it came to him as 
 an abstract unqualified principle of universal 
 application. It is of the very nature of moral 
 principles that they transcend present environ- 
 ments and point to the future. The fact that 
 they are impracticable is the very source of 
 their strength, for the attempt to apply them 
 tends to transform the world. What dead 
 things our principles would be if we could 
 actually live up to them! They create and 
 regenerate because they are impossible. It 
 is impossible to be perfect in an imperfect 
 environment, and yet it is our duty to be 
 perfect; and this inherent contradiction in 
 the moral world is the reason for the para- 
 doxical character of all great teaching and the 
 guaranty of perpetual improvement in the 
 human race. Hence we cannot express our 
 
 75 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 obligations in too strong and absolute terms, 
 and the task of whittling them down to suit 
 emergencies emasculates them and renders 
 them useless. 
 
 Take the obligation of telling the truth. 
 Every man feels the beauty of this principle, 
 and yet we know that there are occasions 
 upon which we might utter falsehoods and 
 justify ourselves in so doing. But is it not 
 still true that the act of lying to an armed 
 enemy, for instance, to save the life of a 
 child would be an unpleasant act — that it 
 would cause us a certain degree of offense — 
 that we would wish to escape the apparent 
 necessity? Is it not difficult to conceive of 
 such a lie on the lips of a Jesus or a Buddha? 
 and do we not instinctively take it for granted 
 that they would find some other way out of 
 the dilemma? And so with courage and 
 cowardice. Where shall the line between 
 them, be drawn? At what degree of danger 
 may the brave man be justified in flinching? 
 Surely there is but one proper rule of action 
 and that is, Never flinch. Nature will draw 
 the line without our assistance. I am con- 
 vinced that the attempts to delimit and 
 define moral laws of this kind is demor- 
 alizing. They will delimit themselves 
 sufficiently in practice. We must accept 
 them in their fullest sense, and then 
 practice them as best we can, being assured 
 
 76 
 
Delimitation of Non-Resistance 
 
 that the mental perplexity which besets us is 
 a part of the growing pains of the race. Not 
 at all that such principles must be accepted 
 as objective, dead, literal laws, but rather as 
 living principles with all the transforming 
 potencies of life. The injunction of the Dec- 
 alogue against slaughter has never been 
 improved upon. "Thou shalt not kill," said 
 the law-giver, and unloosed a living moral 
 principle — a seed with infinite possibilities of 
 growth contained in it. It was not under- 
 stood or applied. It never has been 
 understood or applied. Perhaps it never can 
 be, but therein lies the very secret of its 
 power and immortality. Morality is not a 
 matter of rules but of tendencies. Our own 
 language shows it. (And what wonders of 
 ancient and forgotten wisdom are buried in 
 our language!) "Right" and "wrong" 
 (wrung) mean "straight" and "crooked." 
 Ethics involve the direction which we take 
 to a goal, and are of necessity relative to us 
 and our present position. The goal should be 
 forever beyond us. "Hitch your wagon to a 
 star." "Thou shalt not kill." Turn your 
 prow that way. Avoid killing. Kill just as 
 little as possible. It should go against our 
 grain to pull up a weed or cut down a tree. 
 And some day when this sense of the sacred- 
 ness of life has been fully cultivated by the 
 very necessities of slaughter which surround 
 
 77 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 us, we may find ourselves graduated into 
 some sphere in which we may really live and 
 let live, and find in turn some new, inac- 
 cessible goal held up before us. 
 
 But it is a mistake to assume to behave 
 in accordance with a rigid formula express- 
 ing a principle which is still too far beyond 
 us. Garrison felt the full obligation of non- 
 resistance. Whether he would have felt it 
 in the case of an attack upon his wife or not, 
 it is impossible to say; but we must not 
 m.asquerade upon a plane to which we have 
 not yet attained. I would not advise a man to 
 act counter to his best instincts in such a 
 case, but rather to endeavor to cultivate 
 those instincts. We may be pretty sure that 
 in such a case Jesus would not have killed 
 the aggressor, but until we have his spirit 
 we can hardly justify ourselves in adopting 
 his method. The spirit of violence is an evil 
 spirit, and it can only be effectually cast out 
 by the spirit of love. If we have not that 
 spirit of love which would render acts of 
 violence impossible to us, it is futile to 
 attempt to act as if we had, upon any pre- 
 conceived intellectual theory of what we 
 should or should not do. The doctrine of 
 non-resistance is not a cold principle to be 
 applied like the rule of three to a mathemati- 
 cal problem, but a living power of the soul. 
 Avoid violence. Indulge in it as little as 
 
 78 
 
Delimitation of Non-Resistance 
 
 possible. Do not worry yourself about any 
 possible exceptions to the rule, but press on 
 toward the goal. It seems to me that these 
 are the best precepts. 
 
 I can recall the case of a man who, follow- 
 ing Garrison's example, refrained from voting 
 upon the ground that government reposed 
 upon force, and that force was the wrong 
 method. But after a few years he found that 
 he was trying to live on a plane that was too 
 high for him. Militarism and monopoly were 
 ensconcing themselves ever more securely in 
 the stronghold of office, and his conscience 
 smote him that he did not cast his ballot 
 against them. So he changed his course and 
 began to vote against the wrong, as he con- 
 ceived it, and for the better — there being no 
 opportunity to vote for the best. And straight- 
 way his conscience left him at peace. He 
 was feeling his way, that was all. He did 
 not deny the validity of the law of non- 
 resistance; only he had not grown up to its 
 full size. For him to masquerade in its livery, 
 so far as voting was concerned, was a clear 
 case of false pretenses. He was inconsistent, 
 but, as we have seen, life is by its very nature 
 inconsistent. The absolute logic of the law was 
 qualified by his own personal contribution of 
 common-sense. Logic and common-sense! 
 Between them is stretched taut the throb- 
 bing web and woof of life ! All controversy, 
 
 79 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 conversation, manners and customs, laws, 
 undertakings, progress, labor, craft, art, 
 growth and life issue from their divergence. 
 If ever they shall coincide, then at last will 
 the words, *lt is finished," be written once 
 for all on the tomb of the universe! Mean- 
 while it is our business to strive to bring our 
 common-sense up to the plane of logic, in 
 the blessed certainty that we can never fully 
 succeed. We preach logic and practice 
 common-sense, longing for an environment 
 where they may be lost in each other. We 
 must pull our environments along with us — 
 a long pull and a strong pull and a pull all to- 
 gether; but to act upon the logical conse- 
 quences of a rule which we have ceased to 
 feel would leave us out of touch with our 
 environment, disjointed and unrelated, with 
 nothing but a lifeless, unassimilated law to 
 comfort us, which is clearly absurd. In the 
 last analysis the secret of sane living is to 
 go on compromising, while shouting, *'No 
 compromise!" The would-be abstainer from 
 voting recognized the fact that a perfect man 
 would not vote, but he felt like a hypocrite 
 when he acted like a perfect man, knowing 
 himself to be nothing of the sort. The role 
 did not suit him. I ought of course to be 
 perfect, but I must be perfect before I ad 
 perfect, and it is downright dishonesty to 
 imitate the empty acts of perfection. 
 
 80 
 
Delimitation of Non-Resistance 
 
 This matter of abstention — from voting or 
 violence or anything else — suggests the two 
 opposite ways of regarding any cause directed 
 against any evil. I may have an over- 
 whelming interest in the cause itself, so that 
 I quite forget myself in it. My one effort is 
 to put an end to the evil. Or I may simply 
 try to wash my hands of it— to clear my 
 skirts of it—- and in my efforts to maintain my 
 personal purity I may neglect altogether the 
 question of the progress of the cause. Which 
 is the better vegetarian — the one who starves 
 himself to death by sticking to his diet under 
 unfavorable circumstances, thus making him- 
 self a living, or rather a dying argument 
 against his principles ; or the one who is will- 
 ing to eat meat for the sake of the cause? 
 There is a good deal to be said for the latter 
 individual. And so the non-resistant who 
 votes in the direction of less force may argue 
 that he is doing more for the cause than if 
 he abstained. He would be right; and the 
 man who had risen to a higher plane and 
 abjured voting would also be right. At any 
 rate it is difficult to see how Garrison's 
 scruples about voting affected his influence. 
 As a matter of fact, they kept him clear of 
 the bootless embarrassments of third-party 
 politics, and those who separated from him 
 on this issue were soon lost in the crowd 
 
 8i 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 who were ready to accept any kind of a sub- 
 stitute for immediate emancipation. 
 
 There is a refreshing simplicity in hewing 
 close to the line and in rejecting all tempta- 
 tion to casuistry. We blame the Jesuit writers 
 of "confessional" literature as if they were 
 particularly immoral men; but it was not 
 their fault. The task of trying to determine 
 how near a man may come to doing evil 
 without hurting himself is in itself depraving. 
 Fire point-blank at the sun, and the force 
 of gravity will describe a parabola for you 
 without your assistance. Try to describe a 
 parabola with your projectile and you will 
 signally fail. We are all climbers on the 
 slope of a conical peak, much too steep to 
 mount directly — striving to reach the top. 
 Our rule is, "Climb straight up"; and the 
 man who comes the nearest to this impos- 
 sible feat will get there first. It is a waste 
 of time to speculate about angles and spirals. 
 Our own inertia will take care of that of 
 itself. And it is consoling to know that the 
 world is going upward, ever more and more 
 away from the plane of brute-force. In the 
 education of children, the treatment of pris- 
 oners, the conduct of wars, in every field of 
 life, we are becoming more and more civil- 
 ized and humane and human. Who shall fix 
 a limit to this advance? Who shall say that 
 barbarism ceases at this point, and here 
 
 82 
 
Delimitation of Non-Resistance 
 
 the race must cease to rise? I believe that 
 this progress will be eternal, and that Garri- 
 son in insisting that all use of force among 
 men was wrong, was truly indicating the 
 proper objective of human progress/ 
 
 * A sign of the times is the recent book, "Resist not Evil," 
 by the well-known lawyer and political leader of Chicago, 
 Clarence S. Darrow, who advocates the doctrine in its extreme 
 form with great ability. 
 
 83 
 
CHAPTER X 
 GARRISON AND THE CIVIL WAR^ 
 
 And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind 
 rent the mountains and brake in pieces the rocks before the 
 Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an 
 earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after 
 the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after 
 the fire a still small voice.— I KINGS xix:n, 12. 
 
 Garrison is not known as a non-resistant 
 because the world was not ready for non- 
 resistance, but it was ready for Abolition, 
 and consequently upon his labors for Aboli- 
 tion his fame at present rests. But to the 
 young agitator of the thirties one cause must 
 have seemed as hopeless as the other— or 
 rather they must both have seemed hopeless 
 to those who lacked his faith. But he went 
 on his way, full of hope, and sowed his seed 
 faithfully, leaving the harvest to take care of 
 itself. And he had the rare good fortune to 
 reap one harvest, at any rate, during his life- 
 time. He might, like so many other good men, 
 have passed his life in urging the highest 
 ethics upon a generation too blind to see the 
 
 ' A portion of this chapter appeared originally in the North 
 American Review, and is reprinted here by consent. 
 
 84 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 truth; but fortunately he found a particular 
 cause, completely in harmony with his high- 
 est conceptions, and yet ripe for action. With- 
 out abating a tittle of his beliefs, he threw 
 himself heart and soul into the struggle for 
 emancipation. 
 
 In considering that struggle we are brought 
 face to face at once with the anomaly that 
 the cause fathered by a non-resistant was at 
 last achieved by the greatest war of history. 
 Does not this dispose of all the claims of the 
 doctrine of abstention from violence? Was 
 not non-resistance impotent until men who 
 believed in bloodshed, gun-powder and cold 
 iron came to its assistance? Is not physical 
 force the true remedy for such evils as slavery 
 after all? I think not. Garrison had just one 
 thing to accomplish and that was to make 
 slavery intolerable, and this he succeeded in 
 doing. When it had once become intolerable, 
 it was doomed; but the method of its aboli- 
 tion was a matter of choice in which he was 
 overruled. He has been blamed from the 
 standpoint of non-resistance because he did 
 not continue to protest against the war, and 
 did not dissociate himself more distinctly 
 from its methods. It has been urged 
 against him that when a young friend who 
 had obtained a commission in the army came 
 to bid him farewell in uniform, Garrison 
 slapped him on the back and wished him 
 
 85 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 Godspeed without a word of disapproval. If 
 there was any inconsistency in this behavior 
 it was certainly very natural — very human — 
 and he must be indeed a very rigid moralist 
 who would refuse to excuse it. We all 
 remember the story of the lady who, under 
 most provoking circumstances, thanked a 
 neighbor for swearing for her, and if Garri- 
 son even went so far as to rejoice over the 
 victories of an army committed to emancipa- 
 tion, it was not a very heinous crime. But 
 his general course during these difficult days 
 seems to me absolutely consistent and praise- 
 worthy. His defense, which we have already 
 considered in another chapter, is impreg- 
 nable. He was living among people who did 
 not accept his standards of right and wrong. 
 If they chose to fight over an issue which 
 he thought should be settled peaceably, he 
 could not but hope that the side of Abolition 
 would triumph. 
 
 Was war the best method of abolishing 
 slavery? Was it a moral method? Was it 
 the most efficient? As to its morality, the 
 North is practically unanimous; but, then, so 
 too is the South, and on the other side! 
 This fact ought perhaps to disturb our con- 
 fidence. Thousands of men and women who 
 disapprove of most wars would make an 
 exception of this, the holy war par excellence 
 waged for the liberation of an enslaved 
 
 86 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 race. But has not the South an equal right 
 to judge of holiness? It is and was much 
 more religious and orthodox (as those words 
 are ordinarily used) than the North. The 
 leaders of the Northern hosts, Lincoln, 
 Grant, Sherman, Sheridan and the rest, were 
 not ''religious" men, and their connection 
 with churches of any kind was usually of 
 the most formal description; while Jefferson 
 Davis, Lee and Stonewall Jackson were pil- 
 lars of the church. And unprejudiced foreign 
 observers often took the side of the South, 
 too, of whom Mr. Gladstone was a notable 
 example. Was his sympathy with the South 
 a mistake? That depends, I think, on the 
 character of the motives which determined 
 his choice. If it was a kindly feeling for slavery 
 that influenced him, of course it was a mistake. 
 If it was a lurking fondness for the lazy, useless 
 life of the Southern aristocracy — for the life 
 of a class like his own, whose boast it was 
 that it lived on the labor of others — then, too, 
 it was a mistake. But it is possible to take 
 another view of the issue. In the late fifties 
 and early sixties, the North and South hated 
 each other bitterly. I was brought up in the 
 midst of that hatred and partook of it; and 
 I remember suggesting, as a small boy, when 
 Jefferson Davis was captured, that he be taken 
 through the streets of our cities on exhibition 
 in an iron cage. Our favorite song devoted him 
 
 87 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 to death by hanging on a sour-apple tree. 
 As for the Southerners, they could find no 
 words vile enough to describe their fellow 
 citizens of the North, "Northern scum'* being 
 one of the commonest and most polite. 
 
 Here, then, is the ethical proposition: We 
 have two neighbors living in partnership 
 and hating each other with a deadly hatred, 
 and one of them desires to separate peaceably 
 from the other. There was no practical dif- 
 ficulty in the way of making a division, for 
 the cleavage ran along geographical lines, 
 and any Master-in-Chancery would have 
 been obliged to report that an actual parti- 
 tion was perfectly feasible. Given this state 
 of affairs, was it morally justifiable for the 
 stronger partner to hold the other to his side 
 by force? This is no Constitutional question, 
 for it rises far above the plane of seals and 
 parchment. Indeed, nothing obscures moral 
 investigations so much as the dragging in by 
 the heels of artificial and unnatural considera- 
 tions. The simple issue was: Is it right to 
 hold haters together by force? If Mr. Glad- 
 stone decided this question in the negative, I, 
 for one, do not see how he could reasonably 
 have done otherwise. 
 
 What was the psychological condition of 
 the Northern mind, that the preference 
 should be given to it? It was filled with 
 hatred, as we have seen; and, where it did 
 
 88 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 not hate, it was still bent upon having its 
 own way. If we except an inconsiderable 
 number of Abolitionists, the question of 
 slavery did not affect the attitude of the 
 North. It was only the South that was pre- 
 occupied with slavery. President Lincoln 
 said, as we have seen, that the war was under- 
 taken for the sole purpose of preserving the 
 Union, and that he would preserve it, either 
 free or slave, or part free and part slave. He 
 called out the troops to maintain the Union, 
 and not to abolish slavery. The slaves were 
 finally freed, as a war measure, to assist the 
 armies in the field. The war was not de- 
 signed to help emancipation, but emancipa- 
 tion to help the war. And what was this 
 **Union" for which so many lives were sac- 
 rificed and in honor of which so much poetry 
 was written? In the last analysis it was the 
 forcible binding together of mutual haters, 
 and its idealization was a curious example of 
 fetish-worship. Apart from sentiment, the 
 practical element in the Union spirit was the 
 desire to preserve the size of the country; 
 it was devotion to the idea of bigness, and 
 the belief that bigness is a matter of latitude 
 and longitude — the same spirit which pre- 
 vailed in the Mexican and Philippine wars — 
 in other words, the spirit of imperialism. It 
 is impossible of course to extract any moral 
 essence from a mere matter of geographical 
 
 89 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 extension, and it is hardly necessary to point 
 out that the highest civilizations of the past, 
 those of Athens and Jerusalem and Florence, 
 were restricted to narrow areas. 
 
 If the morality of the Northern policy in 
 the Civil War was questionable, its worldly 
 wisdom was even more so. What would 
 have been likely to happen if the South had 
 been allowed to secede peacefully and with 
 the good wishes of her late partner? That 
 the Confederacy would have suffered from its 
 new commercial isolation cannot be doubted; 
 and that the States of the Confederation 
 would have quarreled is almost equally cer- 
 tain, for hard times make hard tempers. It 
 is easy to predict, then, that a nation built 
 upon the principle of free secession would 
 not have remained long intact. It is very 
 clear, too, that slavery could not have lasted 
 long along the Northern border; for even 
 before the war, with the fugitive-slave law v 
 full operation, a continual stream of escap* 
 slaves found its way across the intervening 
 States to Canada. If nothing but an ordinary 
 boundary line had separated the slave States 
 from free soil, a general exodus of slaves 
 would have begun, and ere long the border 
 States would of necessity have ceased to be 
 slave States. With slavery extinct, the reason 
 for their separation from the North would 
 have ceased, and their commercial interests 
 
 90 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 would have demanded reunion with the 
 United States, while the kindly action of the 
 North in permitting them to secede without 
 interference would have left no hostile feel- 
 ings in their minds to prevent such a reunion. 
 With the border States once annexed, a new 
 boundary would have been created along 
 their Southern frontier, and here again his- 
 tory would repeat itself, until the nation was 
 again one. I do not think that such an out- 
 come of Secession is fanciful, and its realiza- 
 tion would have been hastened by the grow- 
 ing impatience of the civilized world with 
 *^^ -^ continuance of chattel-slavery. 
 
 igainst this natural evolution of the race- 
 difficulty what have we actually to set? Slav- 
 ery was, indeed, abolished ; but it is altogether 
 impossible to sum up the evils which we have 
 entailed upon ourselves by the manner of 
 its abolition. First of all, we have the loss 
 of hundreds of thousands of lives, and all 
 the grief and suffering consequent upon that 
 loss. It is a common remark that the wars 
 of Napoleon permanently injured the phy- 
 sique of the French people by killing off the 
 strongest men. Is it not likely that we have 
 suffered to some extent in the same way? 
 Then, how much money did the war cost? 
 And how much more wisely it might have 
 been expended! Furthermore, consider our 
 disgraceful annual pension bill, which, larger 
 
 91 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 than the cost of any European standing army, 
 is, I believe, actually increasing, and which 
 seems to have transformed the brave hosts 
 of the North into an army of mendicants! 
 And into that mendicancy who shall say 
 how much fraud has entered? Indeed, the 
 moral effects of the war were its worst effects. 
 Is there a tavern at any cross-roads, North or 
 South, without its venerable toper whose 
 habits were corrupted by the war? And 
 where one has survived, how many have died 
 of intemperance of all kinds, and of loath- 
 some diseases which the war generated, fos- 
 tered and spread down to this very day? All 
 the flags with which we decorate their graves 
 on Memorial Day cannot conceal the truth. 
 I have seen it stated that discharged soldiers 
 founded our army of tramps, a name which 
 has come into use in my time. Do not think 
 that these are the imaginations of a fanatic 
 who sees in history only that which he looks 
 for. In the Century Magazine for November, 
 1903, is an article on "The Present Epidemic 
 of Crime," by the Rev. Dr. James M» 
 Buckley, one of the best-known clergymen 
 in the country. At the very head of the 
 causes of this "epidemic" he places the great 
 war. "Among the influences which have 
 powerfully affected the primary causes of 
 crime, and are sources of this present epi- 
 demic, is the effect of the Civil War. . . . 
 
 92 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 The evil done by that war to public and pri- 
 vate morality was almost irremediable. Its 
 effects were seen upon Congress, upon poli- 
 tics, upon reconstruction, upon business, upon 
 society, and upon the habits of the people." 
 
 One of the worst results of the Civil War 
 was the resuscitation of the spirit of war and 
 imperialism. Is it a wonder that children 
 brought up in an atmosphere of hate and 
 bloodshed should have had the spirit of hate 
 and bloodshed infused into their hearts? The 
 seed sown then duly bore its crop, and the 
 Mttle-cry, "Remember the Maine!" (a vessel 
 
 hich all the world but America believes to 
 have been destroyed by accident) was the 
 direct offspring of "The Union Forever !" The 
 Cuban War, waged for the independence of 
 Cuba (which could have been obtained, 
 according to our Secretary of State and our 
 Minister to Spain, without a shot), and the 
 Philippine War, waged for the purpose of 
 depriving a brave people of their freedom, 
 are the legitimate twin offspring of the Civil 
 War, which in their turn may have their 
 accursed progeny a generation hence. 
 
 The speculation caused by the interruption 
 of commerce and the derangement of the 
 currency during our war laid the foundations 
 of the new plutocracy. Money was needed 
 to pay the enormous expenses of destruction, 
 and the tariff began to grow, and behind it 
 
 93 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 monopoly ensconced itself. With the new 
 tramp came the new multi-millionaire, and 
 caste, luxury, pauperism and labor troubles 
 in their train. It would be possible to write 
 a long and plausible book, tracing the origin 
 of almost all the pressing evils of the day 
 to the Civil War. Was the forcing of the 
 issue of the abolition of slavery a few years 
 before its time worth while at such a cost? 
 Garrison was right. The war was a mistake. 
 This brings us to the sad fact that the war 
 did not settle the race question, but merely 
 aggravated it. Slavery was wrong and 
 should have come to an end, but we ended it 
 in the wrong way. The real trouble with the 
 South at present is that the question of sla- 
 very was settled over the heads of the in- 
 habitants by a hostile and hated power. No 
 people could at heart accept such a settle- 
 ment with good grace, and it is not to be 
 expected of human nature. We stabbed the 
 South to the quick, and during all the years 
 of reconstruction turned the dagger round 
 in the festering wound. The spirit of war 
 and imperialism has never yet properly set- 
 tled any question, except the question as to 
 which side is the stronger; and now, after 
 forty years, we are beginning to learn that the 
 Negro has yet to be emancipated. If the 
 South had been permitted to secede, slavery 
 would have died a natural death, the South- 
 
 94 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 erners would have felt that they had con- 
 sented to its demise, and they would have 
 accepted the new order with that attitude 
 of acquiescence which is necessary to the 
 success of any social experiment. We have 
 still at this late day to learn the ancient lesson 
 of Buddha: "Hatred does not cease by ha- 
 tred at any time; hatred ceases by love; this 
 is an old rule." 
 
 The wisest thing that was said by any 
 Northerner at the outbreak of the war was 
 the saying usually ascribed to Horace Gree- 
 ley : "Let the erring sisters go." Mr. Whitelaw 
 
 id has loyally endeavored to defend his for- 
 mer chief from this ascription, and he declares 
 that Mr. Greeley never used the words. If 
 Mr. Reid is speaking solely in the interests 
 of historical accuracy, well and good; but if 
 he is stretching a point to save his friend, 
 he is doing him a doubtful service, for the final 
 historian of the Civil War will have to record 
 that these were the words, and the only 
 words, of wisdom. And this was substan- 
 tially the advice which Garrison gave. 
 
 In an article in the North American Review 
 I took the position that Mr. Gladstone was 
 right in sympathizing with the South, and I 
 was much gratified afterwards to receive a 
 letter from an English ex-official who was 
 close to Mr. Gladstone and familiar with his 
 opinions, in which letter he assured me that 
 
 95 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 my explanation of the British statesman's 
 position was correct. His communication 
 ran in part as follows: 
 
 But what was his real reason for sym- 
 pathizing with the South? I am quite sure 
 that it was not sympathy with the Southern 
 "aristocracy" — which undoubtedly, however, 
 had a great effect in bringing over the mass 
 of upper-class opinion to that side. I do 
 not believe it was his father's slave-owning 
 connection (although that influenced some 
 of his early speeches during the time he 
 was still a Tory), for he had long since 
 shaken himself free from those ideas. I 
 firmly believe it was, as he viewed it, his 
 love of liberty, his hatred and distrust of 
 any policy of keeping any body of men in 
 a political connection against their will. 
 This he regarded as bad for the community 
 which included an unwilling element in its 
 midst, because it was an element of weak- 
 ness and not of strength; just as a regi- 
 ment wherein one-fifth of the men hate 
 their officers or want to desert will not 
 fight as well as a regiment "at union with 
 itself." He further regarded it as bad for 
 the element unwillingly included, because, 
 being deprived of liberty, they were apt to 
 direct all their energies to a struggle to be 
 free, instead of along the natural lines of 
 free and peaceful development and progress. 
 This was at the root of his later Eastern 
 policy, of his sympathy with Italy, and of 
 his Irish policy, and also of his policy of 
 
 96 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 union with the Colonies by the silken ties 
 of sentiment and the elastic bonds of free- 
 dom, rather than by any forced and formal 
 connection or by any cast-iron scheme of 
 supposed material interests. 
 
 Such were Mr. Gladstone's views, and such 
 also were Garrison's. I do not believe that 
 the final judgment of posterity will be favor- 
 able to the course of the North in the Civil 
 War, any more than it will be favorable to 
 the policy of coercion in Ireland. It requires 
 delicate instruments to cure national diseases, 
 
 .d we took the sledge-hammer as ours. It 
 x.iay be high treason to say so, but I think 
 that the statesmanship of Gladstone — and of 
 Garrison — was sounder than that of Lincoln. 
 
 There is a class of critics which denies the 
 importance of Garrison's services to the coun- 
 try on the ground that all idealists and 
 reformers are mere empty voices, and that 
 none but economic causes affect the condition 
 of men. The world, according to these phil- 
 osophers, crawls upon its belly, and its brain 
 and heart follow submissively wherever the 
 belly leads. This is known as the "economic 
 interpretation of history," and is particularly 
 affected by Marxian socialists, who believe 
 that state socialism is destined to be estab- 
 lished by irresistible economic laws, and that 
 their own idealism and agitation are alto- 
 
 97 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 gether fruitless; which does not prevent 
 them, however, from laboring and sacrificing 
 themselves for the cause, like the typical 
 idealist. This belief and this behavior is 
 strangely like the Christian doctrine of pre- 
 destination, the certain triumph of the 
 church, and the fore-ordained election of the 
 saints, which has never interfered with the 
 missionary activity of believers. The disciple 
 of Marx comforts himself with the materialist 
 equivalent of the statement that all things 
 work together for good, and his dogmatism 
 is as strict as that of any Presbyterian sect. 
 It is the old issue of fatalism and free will, 
 the fatalist usually exerting himself to secure 
 his ends much more strenuously than his 
 adversary. 
 
 The most complete application of this the- 
 ory of economic causes to the subject of 
 slavery has been made by an acute socialist 
 thinker, Mr. A. M. Simons, in a series of 
 articles in the International Socialist Review 
 of Chicago during the year 1903. According 
 to him the idealism of Garrison and the 
 Abolitionists — the growing belief in the 
 immorality of slavery and the justice of the 
 demand for freedom, John Brown and his 
 raid, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the battle songs 
 of the North — all these things were phantas- 
 
 98 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 magoria and the people were deceiving them- 
 selves. 
 
 The real conflict was . . . between 
 the capital that hired free labor and the cap- 
 ital that owned slave labor." 
 
 And Mr. Simons represents the Northern 
 capitalists in the anticipation of a future 
 struggle between themselves and their 
 employes, as deliberately determining that the 
 capitalists of the South should not enjoy the 
 "privilege of an undisturbed industry." It 
 
 ^ms to me that anyone who can believe 
 - s can believe anything that he wishes to. 
 The fact is that slave labor did not compete 
 with the free labor of the North. The South 
 had a practical monopoly of the production 
 of cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar, and slavery 
 was chiefly confined to that production. The 
 relative cheapness or dearness of slave labor 
 had consequently no appreciable effect on 
 Northern labor; and if it had, it is absurd to 
 suppose that Northern capital appreciated 
 the fact or brought about the war for any 
 such reason. It is true that the North 
 desired a protective tariff for its manufactures, 
 and that the South preferred free trade so 
 that it might have a world-wide market for 
 its cotton. It is true that North and South 
 each desired to control the national govern- 
 
 * Quoted by Mr. Simons from a former work by Benjamin E. 
 Green. 
 
 99 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 ment. But no war would have been fought 
 if the South had not seceded; the South 
 would not have seceded unless she had 
 feared for the future of slavery; and slavery 
 would not have been menaced except for the 
 agitation of the anti-slavery people of the 
 North with Garrison at their head. 
 
 As a matter of fact, human idealism enters 
 into all the works of man; and the philoso- 
 phy which asserts that poetry and religion 
 spring from economic conditions and nothing 
 else, is erroneous or at least one-sided. That 
 mind and body are so intermingled that they 
 react upon each other is undoubtedly true, 
 and our extreme idealists need to be reminded 
 now and then that the bread and butter factor 
 must not be forgotten ; but to assert that mind 
 is made of bread and butter is going much too 
 far, and it ignores the commonest experiences 
 of human consciousness. Man's wish — man's 
 will — is a force to be dealt with. Even ordi- 
 nary hunger involves wish and will in the 
 choice of food. Is our present civilization 
 governed partially by the yield of wheat? 
 But wheat itself is a human creation. The 
 first man who tasted a grain of wild wheat 
 and liked it and proceeded to sow other simi- 
 lar grains was moved as much by fancy as 
 by economic necessity. And there is hunger 
 and hunger. There is a hunger and thirst 
 for knowledge, and a hunger and thirst after 
 
 100 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 righteousness, and many other hungers and 
 thirsts which must all be reckoned with in 
 the study of evolution. And man can see 
 the workings of this side of evolution in his 
 own mind. I have become a vegetarian, for 
 instance, and I am unable to detect any eco- 
 nomic reason for my change of diet. I know 
 many others of whom the same is true. In 
 time the increase in the number of such vege- 
 tarians will produce an appreciable effect upon 
 the economic condition of mankind, and here 
 clearly will be a change occasioned in large 
 part by pure idealism. The same is true of 
 socialism, and I know many leading socialists 
 who, so far from having been impelled to 
 socialism by economic motives, would be eco- 
 nomic losers by its victory. And so with the 
 temperance movement, the peace movement, 
 the movement for the prevention of cruelty to 
 animals, and many others. I am conscious 
 and every man is conscious, of doing things 
 every day against mere economic interests, 
 and I do not refer exclusively to philanthropy 
 by any means. The rnillionaire who spends 
 his money on a trip to Europe instead of 
 saving it overrules his economic interests on 
 account of his higher desire for novel expe- 
 riences, and he does the same thing when 
 he pays for a superfluous ornament on his 
 house. To overlook men's desires is to over- 
 look life itself, and in the record of the living 
 
 lOI 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 actions of men the thought precedes the 
 thing. You cannot have a dinner without 
 thinking it out beforehand, nor build a house 
 without plans. You might wait till dooms- 
 day for "economic conditions" to roast a 
 potato for you. The will of man must inter- 
 vene before the miracle is performed, and 
 sometimes he wills to rise above his economic 
 conditions and refuses to bend before them. 
 In short, the "economic interpretation of his- 
 tory" is equivalent to the brick interpretation 
 of a house (leaving the architect and the 
 owner who ordered it built out of the ques- 
 tion) — that is, no interpretation at all. 
 Economic conditions are more often the limi- 
 tation than the source of evolution. The exer- 
 tion of our powers is more or less bounded 
 by our materials, and events which are not 
 economically possible are not likely to hap- 
 pen ; but things are not yet in the saddle and 
 the socialist movement, with its devoted and 
 self-forgetful leaders, gives ample proof of it. 
 It is curious to note that our extreme mate- 
 rialists call themselves "scientific socialists," 
 and our extreme idealists, who deny the exist- 
 ence of matter, take the name of "Christian 
 scientists." True "science" lies between these 
 extremes, and perhaps it is wise to fight shy 
 of those who advertise their "science" too 
 conspicuously. 
 
 In the history of slavery the element of 
 
 102 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 human will and initiative is particularly 
 prominent. A sentimental bishop was the 
 first to suggest the importation of Africans 
 to America in order to relieve the Indians 
 from the labor which their spirit could not 
 brook. It was a philanthropic business at the 
 start. Indians would not work, Negroes 
 would. Here again the human factor asserted 
 itself. The cavalier immigrants of the South 
 did not like to work, the Puritans of the 
 North did ; hence one of the reasons that slav- 
 ery flourished only below Mason and Dixon's 
 line. Mr. Simons refers to this fact as "one 
 of those strange happenings" called "coinci- 
 dences"! "The interesting point lies," he 
 goes on to say, "in the fact that in Europe it 
 was just the cavalier who represented the old 
 feudal organization of society with its servile 
 system of labor, while the Puritan is the 
 representative of the rapidly rising bourgeoisie 
 which was to rest upon the status of wage- 
 slavery." "Strange happening," "coincidence," 
 "interesting point"! This is certainly most 
 naive. There was no reason why slaves should 
 not be employed in the North in raising wheat 
 as well as in the South in raising cotton, except 
 that the Northerners did not want them, and 
 heredity as well as climate goes to account 
 for tKe difference. Mr. Simons himself quotes 
 from the work of an ante-bellum author a 
 reference to German settlers who, "true to 
 
 103 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 their national instincts, will not employ the 
 labor of a slave." And in fine, as if to show 
 how little he is convinced by his own argu- 
 ments, Mr. Simons says of this same volume 
 (Helper's "Impending Crisis"), "This book 
 had a most remarkable circulation in the 
 years immediately preceding the war, and 
 probably if the truth as to the real factors 
 which made public opinion could be deter- 
 mined, it had far more to do with bringing 
 on the Civil War than did 'Uncle Tom's 
 Cabin' " — which involves an admission as to 
 the latter book as well as to the former. 
 Books and arguments and ideals had their 
 leading part to play in the abolition of slav- 
 ery, and the very adversaries of the belief 
 cannot get away from it. "Public opinion" is 
 and always has been a determining element 
 in history, and it is swayed by novels and 
 agitators and poets. Garrison still has his 
 place in history. 
 
 Another class of critic minimizes the work 
 of the Abolitionists upon the ground that they 
 did more harm than good, and that slavery 
 would have been abolished much more easily 
 without them. To refute this argument we 
 must appeal to the entire history of the times, 
 which has been so briefly summarized in 
 these pages. We cannot read it impartially 
 without being conscious throughout of the 
 constant presence, behind statesmen and poli- 
 
 104 
 
Garrison and the Civil War 
 
 tician, behind orator and editor, of the goad 
 of the Abolitionist. In the troubled waters of 
 controversy his was ever the stirring power. 
 He was not a fly on the wheel, but steam in 
 the engine. And we can call the best of all 
 witnesses in confirmation of this fact. Presi- 
 dent Lincoln, a few days before his assassina- 
 tion, when congratulated by Mr. Chamberlain, 
 afterwards governor of South Carolina, upon 
 having freed the slaves, answered, "I have 
 been only an instrument. The logic and 
 moral power of Garrison and the anti-slavery 
 people of the country, and the army, have 
 done all." 
 
 105 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE RESULTS OF THE WAR IN THE 
 SOUTH 
 
 For what can war but endless war still breed ? 
 
 —MILTON. 
 
 We have considered some of the general 
 effects of the Civil War upon the country — 
 effects which would have been avoided if 
 Garrison's peaceful counsels had prevailed; 
 but many of these evils have been especially 
 concentrated in the South. This is not the 
 fault of the Southerner, for with the possible 
 exception of his lesser fondness for manual 
 labor, he differs in no essential respect from 
 other men of Anglo-Saxon descent, and so 
 far as the race question is concerned, the 
 Northerner who settles in the South is usu- 
 ally the less considerate of the two. But the 
 war absorbed the entire South. Every man 
 and boy took part in it. It devastated the 
 home, and where it did not devastate it 
 impoverished. War <Tvas hell in Georgia, 
 where General Sherman learned its character 
 after having created it ; and not a mere matter 
 of the morning newspaper, as it was in many 
 
 io6 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 a Northern household. It was a matter of 
 necessity that its damning effects should be 
 greatest in the States of the Confederacy. If 
 it is true that a large crop of military schools 
 sprang up in the North, and that much was 
 done to infect the minds of the young with 
 the ideals of militarism, in the South every 
 lad inherited by his birthright the title of 
 major or captain. I have my own impres- 
 sions of a recent journey in the South which 
 revealed to me the unfortunate results of 
 choosing war as an antidote for slavery, and 
 perhaps I may be pardoned for devoting a 
 chapter to my recollections, believing that 
 they substantiate Garrison's position that 
 gunpowder should have no place in the social 
 pharmacopeia. And first, then, to show that 
 the race question is farther from settlement 
 than ever. 
 
 I put up one afternoon for a few hours at 
 a tiny hotel in a remote village, and a room 
 was assigned to me which had been vacated 
 in haste for my benefit by some more perma- 
 nent resident. It bore all the marks of a 
 sitting-room as well as a bedroom, and on 
 the table were lying, one on the other, a 
 couple of books which had evidently been 
 recently laid aside, and each of them con- 
 tained a book-mark. The under volume was 
 a large Bagster Bible; the upper was a big 
 book bearing on its upturned cover the exag- 
 
 107 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 gerated face of a negro in gilt, made to look 
 as much like an ape as possible, with the 
 title in gilt letters above and below it, "The 
 Negro a Beast, Or In the Image of God." 
 Two Negro servants were coming in and out 
 of the room, making the fire and preparing 
 for my comfort, and I could not but wonder 
 at the strange lack of delicacy of the Bible 
 reader who had left this hideous volume to 
 stare them in the face, and this, too, in the 
 chivalrous South! I picked up the book in 
 curiosity after the servants had left. The 
 title page was adorned by a series of sub- 
 titles, of which I copied one as a sample. It 
 read as follows: "The Negro a Beast, But 
 Created With Articulate Speech and Hands, 
 That He May Be of Service to His Master, 
 the White Man." Here was indeed a rich 
 relic of the ancient South of slavery, a South 
 that has passed away forever! I looked 
 down at the date and rubbed my eyes in 
 astonishment. There must be some mistake. 
 The book was printed in the year of Our 
 Lord 1900! And in one of the greatest cities 
 of the South, too ! And what do you suppose 
 is the name of the publishing company which 
 issues this precious work? It is called the 
 "American Book and Bible House !" I turned 
 over the pages of the book. It was an 
 illiterate medley of folly and superstition — an 
 attempt to prove by Scripture that the Negro 
 
 108 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 was not the descendant of Ham, and to show 
 that the serpent in the garden of Eden was 
 a black man ! It was just such a book as, if 
 it had been produced by a Negro, would 
 almost have justified despair for his race. It 
 is not remarkable perhaps that a single 
 lunatic should have written such a book, but 
 that a publisher should have been found for 
 it, that commercial success should have been 
 expected from it, that people should buy it 
 and lay it on their Bibles and leave it on 
 their tables to insult the black men who saw 
 it, and astound the white — all this was in- 
 credible. 
 
 It so happened that I was reading a book 
 written by a Negro at the same time, and I 
 took it from my portmanteau and laid it 
 beside the other volume. My book was 
 Booker Washington's "Up from Slavery," a 
 book which I had some difficulty in getting 
 in a great Southern city, and which proved 
 conclusively that its author was one of the 
 best and ablest men in this country, black or 
 white; and it made me blush for my white 
 race as I thought of these two authors 
 together. 
 
 And shortly afterwards I read a third book, 
 which occupies the middle ground between 
 these two, but which unfortunately resembles 
 the white man's folly more than the black 
 man's wisdom. It is "The Leopard's Spots,'* 
 
 109 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 by the Rev. Thomas Dixon, a shining light 
 in the Southern Baptist Church ; and it tempts 
 me to retort, *'Thou tiger, first wash the 
 stripes out of thine own hide, and then shalt 
 thou see clearly to wash out the spots out of 
 thy brother's hide," for it is in the spirit of 
 the tiger rather than in that of the 
 Christian minister that Mr. Dixon treats the 
 delicate issues of the race question which is 
 the subject of his novel. The point which he 
 seeks to make is that the Negro must be 
 kept by force, if necessary, in the place of an 
 inferior, and that he should not be educated 
 above it. Again and again he reiterates the 
 statement which I give in his own words, 
 for it seems to me to be lacking in clearness 
 to say the least, that "in a democracy you can- 
 not build a nation inside of a nation of two 
 antagonistic races, and therefore the future 
 American must be either an Anglo-Saxon or 
 a mulatto." This mixing up of the marriage 
 relation with other social relations runs 
 through the whole book, and it seems to me 
 to be illogical. I have dined on a social equal- 
 ity with thousands of white women whom it 
 would have been repugnant to me to marry. 
 I fail to see that the one idea involves the 
 other. I believe it is natural and best that peo- 
 ple should intermarry within their own race. 
 We received Li Hung Chang with complete 
 social equality, and yet most of us would not 
 
 no 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 be willing to marry his daughter, and proba- 
 bly he fully reciprocated the feeling. In the 
 absence of all inherited artificial feeling and 
 tradition, I should think that a Negro would 
 prefer to marry one of his own color. The 
 wrens and orioles are now singing out of my 
 window. They do not intermarry, but I do 
 not see why that should prevent them from 
 treating each other with entire courtesy up 
 to the point of social equality. The danger 
 of a nation of mulattos, if it is a danger, does 
 not lie in the direction of intermarriage, as 
 we all know, but of the illicit intercourse 
 which has already produced millions of them, 
 and which shows how far the white man can 
 overcome his distaste for the Negro. Flout 
 the fact as we may, a large part of the col- 
 ored population of the South are our own 
 cousins. 
 
 The matter of the "usual crime" committed 
 by Negroes is a frightful one and it will have 
 to be faced, but it is very clear that it has 
 not been faced in the right way. Lynchings, 
 burnings at the stake — and Mr. Dixon depicts 
 one for us — have failed to decrease the num- 
 ber of them. And let us remember that 
 every civilized nation contains solitary brutes 
 who assault and murder women, but that 
 only white Americans still burn at the stake 
 —and that, too, in multitudes. Savagery will 
 not cure savagery, and the tiger cannot tame 
 
 III 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 the leopard. Mr. Dixon seems to see this 
 when he speaks of the mob as a thousand- 
 legged beast, and anticipates with dread the 
 time when there will be a black beast of the 
 same kind to set off against the white beast. He 
 thinks that the permanent display of force 
 by the whites is the best remedy, and forgets. 
 Christian minister though he be, that the effi- 
 cacy of sympathy and brotherly interest has 
 scarcely been tried. The race question is no 
 simple matter to be settled at a thousand 
 miles' distance by academic theories; but it 
 is safe to say that it will only be solved by 
 the spirit of love, and that Booker Washing- 
 ton shows far more of this than the author 
 of "The Leopard's Spots." Mr. Dixon may 
 not know it, but he seems to believe in a 
 gospel of hate. One of the heroes of the 
 book, an ex-Confederate common soldier, 
 admits that he hates the very sight of a 
 Negro, and this before the period of recon- 
 struction had set in and when the Negro had 
 done nothing but work and suffer. There is 
 a total lack of measure, too, in the punish- 
 ments meted to the black man in this novel. 
 One of them asks a white woman to kiss 
 him. He makes no effort to force her to 
 comply, but he is speedily hanged. "His 
 thick lips had been split with a sharp knife, 
 and from his teeth hung this placard: 'The 
 answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro 
 
 112 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 lips that dare pollute with words the woman- 
 hood of the South/ " There is no hint in the 
 story that this penalty was slightly excessive, 
 nor that a gentleman need hesitate in taking 
 part in such an execution. In another place 
 a Negro trooper refuses to make room on a 
 sidewalk for a lady and her male escort. He 
 is at once beaten to death. Surely this is 
 the spirit of the tiger. 
 
 Mr. Dixon's ideal Negro is the old planta- 
 tion servant who despises his own race. He 
 draws the picture of one of them and holds 
 him up to admiration. When the whites 
 overthrow the Negro government, old Nelse 
 cries, "Dar now! Ain't I done told you no 
 kinky-headed niggers gwine ter run dis 
 gov'ment!" I humbly submit that such a 
 man is really a disgrace to any race. It is 
 on the lines of self-respect that the Negro 
 must do his part in solving the race question. 
 He must learn his own worth, not in the 
 spirit of boastfulness nor of imitation, but in 
 the spirit of self-improvement and honor. He 
 must put down himself the crimes against 
 women which are his shame, and I have faith 
 that men like Booker Washington can set 
 such a movement on foot. The white clergy 
 of the South have a tremendous responsibil- 
 ity. They have an influence far transcending 
 that of their colleagues in the North. Will 
 they use it like Mr. Dixon and the ministers 
 
 113 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 he creates in his book, to foment misunder- 
 standings and distrust, or to infuse the spirit 
 of Christ into the problem? It is surely dis- 
 couraging to find the Episcopal bishop of 
 Arkansas, an Ohioan, publicly defending the 
 practice of lynching. We all admit now that 
 the policy of "reconstruction" was a sad 
 mistake and that Northern interference can 
 do little, but it is still possible to begin a new 
 work of reconstruction based upon human 
 sympathy. If the South will undertake this 
 task, it will escape the battle of the ''beasts" 
 which is otherwise inevitable. Swedenborg 
 somewhere says that the African race is to be 
 the race of love — the race of the future. Let 
 it try to live up to this prophecy, and set a 
 good example to the whites. The Rev. Henry 
 Richards, for many years a missionary on the 
 Congo, writes: "I believe the Anglo-Saxon 
 to be naturally far more cruel and brutal than 
 the African." There should be hope then for 
 the latter race. 
 
 It is to be hoped that there is some truth 
 in the theory of reincarnation, for it affords 
 such grand opportunities for poetic justice. 
 If there is anything in it, the author of "The 
 Negro a Beast" should make his next ap- 
 pearance as a full-blooded Congo black; the 
 author of "Leopard's Spots" would figure 
 among the mulattos from whom he wishes 
 to save us ; and the author of "Up From Sla- 
 
 114 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 very" — well — if any man has earned the right 
 to the whitest of skins (if he would like to 
 have one) it is Booker ¥/ashington. And if 
 these three gentlemen came on the stage 
 again together, I am confident that we should 
 find the last of the three exerting his powers 
 for the benefit of the other two in a spirit of 
 love to which they are total strangers. 
 
 And I cannot refrain from adding an anec- 
 dote or two from my own experience to show 
 the perpetual atmosphere of explosives in 
 which the Southerner lives as a result of the 
 war. We are bad enough in the North, what 
 with the enormous number of our homicides, 
 the not unusual habit of carrying revolvers, 
 and the craze for militarism, battleships and 
 warfare; but all these faults are aggravated 
 in the South, and it seems a natural result 
 of the great war. 
 
 I formed one of a group one evening sit- 
 ting around the stove in the hotel office of 
 a Southern tov/n. There were three or four 
 commercial men, and one old graybeard who 
 seemed to be related in some way to the 
 proprietor and who was the living image of 
 Walt Whitman. From time to time he poked 
 the fire with an old sword, which continual 
 use of the kind had reduced to half its origi- 
 nal length. 
 
 "You used that all through the wa', didn't 
 you, Uncle Joe?" said one of the party, spit- 
 
 "5 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 ting into the sandbox which held the stove. 
 The old man nodded assent, but like a mod- 
 est man he showed no desire to enlarge on 
 the subject. He gave the sword a shove into 
 the sand and drew back into his wooden 
 chair. I looked with approval on the con- 
 verted v/eapon. It was even better than a 
 spear-made pruning hook, for there had been 
 no unnecessary labor of remanufacture and 
 no disguise of the happy change of function. 
 A young Tennesseean was expatiating upon 
 the merits of his house paint. He had for- 
 merly been in the tobacco business and had 
 sold snuff in regions where the whole popu- 
 lation, men, women and children, chew the 
 vile stuff until they reek with it. Now he 
 was helping to beautify and preserve the 
 weather-stained houses of the countryside, 
 and I felt that he had been reclaimed as well 
 as the sword. We were, barring the spitting, 
 a pleasant, cheerful and sociable company. 
 
 Suddenly a draft of air came in upon us 
 and we could hear a commotion at the outer 
 door, dominated by the agreeable deep- 
 chested voice of a man, who was saluting the 
 landlord. Soon they came in to the desk, 
 two Negroes carrying luggage behind them. 
 In a moment the stove was deserted and all 
 of my companions gathered around the new 
 arrival. He was a large man of middle age 
 with a gray mustache and ruddy face, at 
 
 ii6 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 once strong in its lines and good natured. 
 My friends approached him respectfully and 
 without any sign of their customary familiar- 
 ity, and as he shook hands with them there 
 was a pleasant word for each. And then in 
 his hearty voice he explained that his train 
 was ten hours late and that he must get on 
 to such and such a town that evening, and 
 there was a general giving of advice and tele- 
 phoning and consulting of timetables until 
 it was proven beyond peradventure that it 
 was impossible for him to proceed until the 
 morrow. 
 
 Meanwhile I felt rather "out of it," and 
 at an early stage of the proceedings good 
 old Uncle Joe took pity upon me, and coming 
 over to me whispered: 
 
 "You know who that is, don't you?" 
 
 I acknowledged with shame that I did not, 
 and with a look of blank amazement, he 
 added : 
 
 "Why, that's Major Bedford!" as if the 
 announcement would surely startle me. I 
 fear that my expression was unsatisfactory 
 to him, for there was sorrow in his tone as 
 he explained to the benighted Yankee that 
 Major Bedford was the biggest lawyer in 
 West Carobama, and that only last month 
 he got Hank Martin off, though everybody 
 knew he had chucked Sam Davis into the 
 well. 
 
 117 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 By this time the Major had gone in to sup- 
 per and my friends resumed their seats 
 around the stove, while a chorus of admira- 
 tion for the great lawyer filled the smoky air. 
 When it at last subsided, one rather sullen 
 individual who was opposite me said drily: 
 
 "He's a mean man, though," and then to 
 my surprise, one by one the others nodded 
 their heads and echoed: 
 
 "Yes, he {s a mean man." 
 
 I could not account for this apparent 
 change of opinion, and I ventured to ask for 
 light. 
 
 "I don't quite understand," I said. "You 
 were all praising him a minute ago, and he 
 certainly seems to be very good natured and 
 genial. How can he be a mean man?" 
 
 "You see, he shoots pretty quick. D'you 
 remember how he shot Jim Foster in court? 
 Why, that young fellow was the most prom- 
 ising lawyer in the State, and he had a case 
 against the Major, and I don't know how it 
 was, but he got excited and said somebody 
 lied, and probably they had, and out the 
 Major whips his six-shooter and shot the 
 boy dead as a doornail." 
 
 "Is it possible," I cried, "and how did he 
 escape hanging?" 
 
 "Self-defense," was the laconic reply. This 
 was my first lesson in the Southern significa- 
 tion of the word "mean," but a few days later 
 
 ii8 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 my education in this respect was completed, 
 and I shall never again misunderstand the 
 word in that latitude. 
 
 It happened this way. I had taken a room 
 for the night in a poor hotel (which is a 
 rather uncommon thing in the South). My 
 bedroom was not a comfortable place and 
 the tobacco stains on the walls were revolt- 
 ing. The bed was a bad one, too, and it took 
 me a long time to fall asleep, but at last I 
 succeeded. I must have been sleeping for 
 two or three hours when I heard a loud call 
 in the hallway, ''Waitah! waitah!" Then 
 followed in an undertone a string of drunken, 
 incoherent imprecations. "Dam* shame! 
 Never come here again. Treat a gen'leman 
 so," with a series of unrepeatable oaths get- 
 ting louder and louder until he bellowed out 
 again, "Waitah, waitah! where's my room, 
 waitah!" I could hear the man shuffling 
 along the corridor, falling from time to time, 
 and trying the doors as he passed, while the 
 various inmates of the rooms, with greater or 
 less eloquence, called down curses upon his 
 head. I expected from moment to moment to 
 hear the report of a revolver, and I won- 
 dered how much of an obstruction my door 
 would offer to a bullet, and was quite pre- 
 pared to slide down behind the bed in case 
 he should try to get into my room. I watched 
 the disturbance auricularly as I have often 
 
 119 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 watched a thunderstorm. At one moment it 
 would be raging outside of my door; then it 
 would gradually move along, the explosions 
 and crashes becoming less distinct until the 
 storm center passed quite out of my horizon, 
 the unhappy guest having reached a distant 
 part of the hotel. Then just as I was dozing 
 off, I would hear the faint echoes of his cry, 
 "Waitah, waitah !" and it would grow stronger 
 and stronger until he v/ould fall in a heap 
 again close to my quarters, spluttering, mut- 
 tering and cursing worse than before. Three 
 or four times the storm cloud disappeared in 
 the distance, and three or four times back 
 it came, until I was in despair. But once 
 again it was slowly blown away, Waitah! 
 Waitah I Waitah!" and I heard it no more. 
 
 It was nearly nine o'clock when I came in 
 to breakfast in the morning and took my 
 seat at a table occupied by two "drummers," 
 who were conversing with each other. 
 
 "Tol'able lively night," remarked one of 
 them, whom I shall call Smith. 
 
 "Yes," said I. "Who on earth was that 
 man, and what ever became of him?" 
 
 "It's Pete Bunker," replied the man. "Don't 
 you know Pete? Why, the Bunkers are one 
 of the best families in these parts. The cook 
 found him in the kitchen this morning sitting 
 at the table fast asleep with his head on his 
 arms. He came out of his room for some- 
 
 120 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 thing or other, and couldn't find it again. 
 But Pete don't often get drunk like that. 
 He's a good fellow when he's sober." 
 
 "He's a mean man, though, sometimes," 
 said the other. "Do you remember how he 
 shot that nigger Simpson? That was six 
 years ago, and the boy can't walk to-day. 
 He done for him, he did. And Simpson 
 hadn't done nothin', either." 
 
 "Did they try him for it?" I asked. 
 
 "Naw," was the reply, and the two men 
 looked at me in wonder. 
 
 "I reckon he left his gun in his room last 
 night," said Smith. "It was pretty lucky. 
 But there hain't been any shootin' in town 
 lately. When was the last shootin', Dave?" 
 
 "A year ago Christmas," answered Dave. 
 "That Jake Hart scrimmage. You remember. 
 Jake got angry at Cy Jones and shot him 
 dead. Jake was an awful nice fellow, but I 
 must say he was a mean one. And then 
 Tom Spear — he was sheriff — he said he'd 
 arrest him if it took him ten years, and Jake, 
 he said he shouldn't. I met Jake in the 
 street one day, and he says to me, says he, 
 *Just you tell Tom Spear that I like him 
 first rate,' says he; 'he's done me a lot of 
 good turns and I'd like to do him a good 
 turn, too; but just you tell him that if he 
 tries to grab me I'll shoot him at sight like 
 a dog, I will,' says he. *Just tell him that.' 
 
 121 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 And I told Tom sure enough, and he got 
 three fellers to go with him. He wanted me 
 to go with him, but I wouldn't — not much. 
 I knowed that Jake Hart was a mean man. 
 But he went with three of 'em, and they 
 heard Jake was at Tim Brown's, and they 
 went upstairs and opened the door; and 
 Jake, just as quiet as I am, he shoots Tom 
 Spear dead; and then the next feller shoots 
 Jake right through the chest, and he falls 
 down, but he sits up again and draws a bead 
 on number two, and down he goes, and then 
 he shoots number three, and the fourth man 
 he thought he'd better stay downstairs. That 
 was Christmas Eve, and they buried all four 
 of 'em together. Ther hain't been any 
 shootin' in town since then." 
 
 "Yes, Jake was a mean cuss," said Smith, 
 "but I liked him first rate." And we finished 
 our buckwheat cakes in silence. 
 
 If Garrison were alive and could visit the 
 South to-day and read "Up From Slavery," 
 "The Leopard's Spots" and "The Negro a 
 Beast," he would find sufficient reasons for 
 congratulating himself upon his course. 
 Slavery was a crying evil. In a thousand 
 ways it was a disgrace to his country and to 
 mankind, and it should have been abolished; 
 but it was abolished the wrong way. The 
 Negro is far better off as a wage earner than 
 he was as a slave, but the hostility between 
 
 122 
 
Results of the War in the South 
 
 the races has been intensified by the rude 
 and ruthless manner of bringing the change 
 about. And besides this, the habits of four 
 years of licensed slaughter, arson, rape and 
 rapine have corrupted both races; and not 
 the least of the evil legacies of the war is the 
 revolver, an instrument manufactured only 
 for manslaughter— a miserable, crooked little 
 vermin v^hich is gnawing its way into the 
 vitals of the community and destroying civ- 
 ilization in its path. It ought to be denounced 
 in every pulpit and boycotted in every decent 
 assembly of men. It is a nuisance which 
 must be abated before the South can enter- 
 tain any just expectation of rivaling the 
 North. She is hopelessly handicapped by 
 her "mean men." 
 
 Garrison believed as fully in the abolition 
 of war as in the abolition of slavery. He 
 did not believe in doing evil that good may 
 come. But he was overruled, and with the 
 good came a vast cloud of evils which still 
 cast their shadow thick upon the land. 
 
 123 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 PRACTICAL LESSONS FROM GARRI- 
 SON'S CAREER 
 
 God is our guide! No swords we draw, 
 
 We kindle not war's battle-fires; 
 By union, justice, reason, law, 
 
 We claim the birthright of our sires. 
 W^e raise the watchword, Liberty — 
 We will, we will, we will be free! 
 
 —"Songs of Freedom" (Anon.), page 80. 
 
 The abolition of American slavery was a 
 single step in the long march of the human 
 race toward freedom and a state of peaceful 
 social equilibrium undisturbed by the coer- 
 cion of man by man, and Garrison was one 
 of the few great leaders of such movements 
 who appreciated the wider significance of 
 his particular task. Mankind has always 
 been engaged in this march and perhaps 
 always will be. We are taking such steps 
 to-day, and the efforts to overthrow imperial- 
 ism, militarism, plutocracy, monopoly and all 
 other forms of trespass on the rights of 
 man are further steps on the road of 
 emancipation. We may well then find sug- 
 gestions in the Abolition movement which 
 
 124 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 will be of value in forming a diagnosis of 
 present conditions and seeking a remedy for 
 existing ills. 
 
 (i) And first of all, the Abolition move- 
 ment was initiated by people of humble rank 
 in society. Garrison began life as a cobbler's 
 apprentice, and Lundy was a saddler. Even 
 when the war broke out very few persons of 
 prominence in society had taken their place 
 among the Abolitionists, and those who did, 
 such as Wendell Phillips and Edmund Quincy, 
 were more or less ostracised and maligned. It 
 was never "respectable" to be an Abolitionist. 
 And it is true of all great social movements 
 that their origin has been outside the pale 
 of the "upper classes." Growth does not 
 begin at the top, and a healthy, vigorous, just 
 cause cannot in the nature of things be 
 respectable at first; and just in proportion 
 as it becomes respectable it loses its energy 
 and single-mindedness. And this estrange- 
 ment of the wealth and culture of the day gives 
 rise to all sorts of libelous stories regarding 
 reformers. Because Garrison and his follow- 
 ers were not in "society" they were looked 
 upon by "society" with contempt, and it 
 became easy to stigmatize them as infidels, 
 blasphemers and Sabbath-breakers, and they 
 were accused of endeavoring to foment insur- 
 rection among the slaves. Nothing was too 
 vile or too criminal to be ascribed to them, 
 
 125 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 although they were, in fact, the most reUg- 
 ious and puritanic of people. It requires wise 
 men, indeed, to look for contemporary his- 
 tory, not in the Capitol of Rome or of Wash- 
 ington, but in the manger and the attic. 
 
 (2) The churches were unanimously hos- 
 tile to Garrison and the Abolitionists. Here 
 and there a stray clergyman had the courage 
 to support them, but it was at the risk of his 
 reputation in his denomination, and most of 
 these declared themselves only when the cause 
 was far advanced. Garrison and many of his 
 friends retorted by cutting loose from all 
 ecclesiastical organizations. Their new wine 
 was too strong for the old bottles, and it 
 always is. The movement for peace to-day 
 is obstructed by the churches just as emanci- 
 pation was, and almost any church meeting is 
 ready to shout for any war, however diabolical, 
 in which its country may be engaged, while 
 "infidels'* and skeptics and materialists out- 
 side take up the cause of Christian brother- 
 hood. Only last week (as I write) in Phila- 
 delphia (the City of Brotherly Love) the 
 Pennsylvania Division, United Boys' Brigade 
 of America, "in full military uniform," was 
 reviewed by the State Commander and 
 addressed by the reverend and distinguished 
 chaplain. There were companies from the 
 Presbyterian, Methodist, Congregational, 
 Reformed, Episcopal, Reformed Episcopal 
 
 126 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 and Moravian churches, and one company 
 from Holy Trinity Church was named after 
 the "Prince of Peace"! What would William 
 Penn and the early Moravians have said of 
 it? And Episcopal missionaries have intro- 
 duced the Brigade into China, a nation which 
 looks down on war. If lovers of peace leave 
 the church as the Abolitionists did, they may 
 find more Christianity without, and they will 
 not be without good precedents for their action. 
 There is something petrifying and deadening 
 in institutionalism of all kinds, sacred and 
 profane, and a church cannot in the very 
 nature of things (except at its very incep- 
 tion) be a pioneer in social progress. We 
 must be satisfied if it does not fall back too 
 far in the rear. Institutions of learning fall 
 into the same category, and their general 
 influence during the years of anti-slavery 
 activity was uniformly reactionary. Those 
 who expect to find guidance now or at any 
 time for the advance of society in the 
 churches or universities are asking impossi- 
 bilities and neglecting one of the plainest 
 lessons of history— namely, that the priest 
 and the professor are rarely in the van. 
 
 (3) Garrison and the Abolitionists found 
 themselves arrayed perforce against the laws 
 of the land, and these laws, as they were 
 carried out by presidents, governors, legisla- 
 tors and judges, were among the chief 
 
 127 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 obstacles in the path of justice. Almost all 
 the disturbances caused at anti-slavery meet- 
 ings — frequently ending in personal violence 
 and arson — had the scarcely disguised sym- 
 pathy of the authorities, and the law was suc- 
 cessfully invoked to spread slavery and return 
 the fugitive slave. The leading statesmen 
 and politicians of the country, with hardly 
 a single exception, did what they could for 
 slavery as long as they thought that cause 
 advantageous to their fortunes. They had 
 substituted paper and ink for their own con- 
 sciences, and had forgotten the primitive obli- 
 gations of man in the artificial claims of their 
 oaths of office. This is surely inhuman. 
 How does a bad law or a bad constitution 
 differ from any other bad thing? We can- 
 not throw the blame for our acts upon parch- 
 ment and legal-cap. While a bill is on its pas- 
 sage in the legislature we do not hesitate to 
 charge improper motives against the mem- 
 bers, and we often detect log rolling and 
 even bribery and corruption. But when the 
 bill has triumphed over our protests and 
 become a law we straightway fall down on 
 our knees before it. Is not this fetish- 
 worship? We talk of the majesty of the law 
 as we used to talk of the majesty of our 
 rulers; but the two absurdities must vanish 
 together, for laws are not a whit more majes- 
 tic than those who make and enforce them. 
 
 128 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 There may be majesty in a good law or a 
 good man, but there is none whatever in bad 
 laws or bad men. It is, I say, nothing but 
 fetish-worship — the same spirit which induced 
 the Egyptians to sacrifice virgins to the rising 
 Nile, and forced Jephthah to slay his daugh- 
 ter Jephthah had taken an oath, just as the 
 pro-slavery Northern judges and sheriffs had 
 taken oaths; but it was an oath better 
 honored in the breach than in the observ- 
 ance, and there are crimes worse than per- 
 jury of this kind. But there was really no 
 dilemma for the honest man. He could at 
 any moment resign his office. And oaths of 
 office are medieval institutions which have 
 unfortunately survived a great deal of simi- 
 lar rubbish. No bank president or railway 
 director has to swear upon the Bible. Why 
 should our political people be obliged to? 
 The oath has no effect upon a bad man, while 
 it can do nothing but worry a good one. We 
 have got rid of the comparatively harmless 
 folly of the coronation ceremony, and our 
 judges and senators do not sit in solemn 
 conclave to determine who shall carry the 
 king's saltspoon or warming-pan in proces- 
 sion, but we have kept the most dangerous 
 feature of all, the coronation oath — the oath 
 of office. It was this oath taken by George 
 III which cost his country dearly. We upset 
 the tyranny of George III, but the tyranny 
 
 129 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 of the oath still flourishes. The late Senator 
 Tim Campbell, a local politician of some 
 fame in the City of New York, once astounded 
 the legislature by exclaiming during an acri- 
 monious debate, "What is a little thing like 
 the Constitution between friends?" There 
 was a certain elemental truth in this state- 
 ment. Laws and constitutions are made for 
 men, and not men for laws and constitutions. 
 
 It is no wonder that Garrison denounced 
 the legal obstacles which stood in his way. 
 The Abolitionists were ready to revolt, pas- 
 sively, against the government, and the con- 
 vention in Massachusetts demanded the seces- 
 sion of the North. The Constitution of the 
 United States was a "covenant with death 
 and hell," and there must be no "Union" with 
 slave-holders. Thoreau issued a personal dec- 
 laration of independence and seceded by him- 
 self from the Union. He filed the following 
 document with the town clerk: "Know all 
 men by these presents that I, Henry Thoreau, 
 do not wish to be regarded as a member of 
 any incorporated society which I have not 
 joined."' 
 
 And Garrison had as little affection for the 
 government as Thoreau. He would not even 
 use it for his own ends, beyond petitioning it ; 
 and I suppose a man might address a petition 
 
 'Essay on the Duty of Civil Disobedience. 
 130 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 to any institution without any implied 
 approval of it. He showed by the vitality 
 of his own influence that the true life of a 
 community is independent and outside of 
 its governmental forms. God is not in the 
 court or the legislature, but in the human 
 soul, and courts and legislatures are the last 
 places in which to find that vital spark. Take 
 our national political system as it is centered 
 in Washington, and the one crowning con- 
 demnation of it is that it is not the Real 
 Thing. It is an empty illusion. Like the 
 church of Sardis, it has a name that it lives, 
 and is dead. There is a question that lies 
 deeper than the one of good and evil, and 
 right and wrong. It is the question of vital- 
 ity. The Real Thing may be good or bad, 
 but it must be alive. God is the Real Thing 
 and the devil is the Real Thing, and in 
 between all are the shams and make-believes 
 and hypocrisies that make up such a large 
 part of existence. And the indictment of 
 Washington is that it is a sham. There is 
 something great in the idea of ruling. Even 
 with all the cruelties of Cortez and Genghis 
 Khan, governing is a great thing — a crime, 
 a sin, an evil, if you will — but still great. 
 But Washington does not rule. It has a 
 name that it rules, and is a slave. Once it 
 was ruled by the oligarchy of Southern land- 
 holders and slave-holders. To-day it is ruled 
 
 131 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 by the oligarchy of finance. Dig in Pennsyl- 
 vania avenue and you will soon find Wall 
 street under the surface. 
 
 Washington is not the Real Thing. Osten- 
 sible, nominal governments rarely are. At 
 their inauguration they are genuine; but 
 nations grow and their forms of government 
 do not keep pace with their growth, and the 
 power gradually passes into other channels 
 and comes from other sources, and yet the 
 old forms continue for ages after the life 
 has left them and people still bow down to 
 the empty shell. The Senate survived in 
 Rome long after the Emperor had become 
 an autocrat. He deferred to the Senate in 
 form, as long as it made no effort to assert 
 itself. And so to-day we speak of Senators 
 from Colorado or New Jersey or Connecticut, 
 and the President of the Senate so addresses 
 them from the chair. If he expressed the 
 truth he would recognize them as the Sena- 
 tors from this, that or the other railway com- 
 bination, or from such and such a trust. The 
 old power that lay in the people of the States 
 has become absorbed by the vast aggrega- 
 tions of wealth, and the vitality has passed 
 from our politics into our economics. A 
 revolution as great as that of Rome has 
 taken place, and the public does not yet 
 appreciate the fact. 
 
 It is easy to say hard and true things of 
 
 132 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 Wall Street, but that tortuous and narrow 
 thoroughfare, with its skyscrapers overawing 
 the forgotten church in the graveyard at its 
 head, has after all the one supreme virtue — 
 it is the Real Thing. No one can question 
 its abundant vitality, its vigor, its dominating 
 influence. It has drawn to itself the national 
 center of gravity. It rules, and Washington 
 is only one of its pawns. V/all Street leaves 
 the gilded imitation organ pipes to the states- 
 men, and plays its own tunes behind them. 
 It has the sense to prefer power to show. 
 The men who rule in Wall Street do not care 
 to have their names appear in the newspa- 
 pers. They avoid it, and they leave the field 
 of self-advertisement to the politicians who 
 swim on the surface and carry out their 
 behests. 
 
 Garrison was justified in his distrust of 
 politicians and political methods, and in 
 addressing himself to the living heart of the 
 people and leaving their officeholders and 
 their Capital alone. The atmosphere of Wash- 
 ington would have been stifling to such a 
 frank and outspoken man, and he would have 
 been out of his element in Congress. Service 
 is higher than office. Someone must needs 
 be President, but to live for others is the 
 special gift of God. The real life of the nation 
 is not to be found at Washington. That fair 
 city, with its marble monuments, its memorial 
 
 133 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 statues, recalling so many hatreds and slaugh- 
 ters of the past, and its well-kept lawns and 
 drives, reminds me of nothing so much as a 
 beautiful cemetery — another Woodlawn or 
 Greenwood — where all is dead, with no man- 
 ufactures, no agriculture, no natural industry 
 — peopled by nothing but the mere effigies 
 of men and women and hiding a festering 
 mass of corruption. Such will never be the 
 source of any true reform. 
 
 (4) The message of Garrison was based 
 on abstract morality, and never deviated a 
 hair's breadth one way or the other on 
 account of any discrepancy between the 
 exigencies of theory and those of practice. 
 We have seen that there is sometimes such 
 a discrepancy, but the greatest teachers have 
 always risen above it. It was Lundy's attempt 
 to postpone the immediate claims of emanci- 
 pation which weakened his mission. 
 
 (5) Garrison's message, though springing 
 from a spirit of unusual gentleness, which 
 condemned all recourse to physical force, was 
 couched in the stern and inexorable language 
 of absolute truth. The greatest teachers 
 have never been mealy-mouthed. The word 
 of God is a two-edged sword, and one which 
 should not be beaten into ploughshares. It 
 was a true instinct which made Garrison 
 severe as all the prophets have been severe. 
 
 These five attributes of the cause of Aboli- 
 
 134 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 tion (and there are doubtless many others 
 which escape me) are, I believe, the hall- 
 marks of all great reforms. We recognize 
 them at once in the history of the early 
 Christians. They, too, counted among them 
 "not many wise men, not many mighty, not 
 many noble"; and the truth which they 
 preached was hidden from the wise and 
 prudent and revealed only unto babes. They, 
 too, were charged v/ith stirring up the peo- 
 ple and turning the world upside down, with 
 uttering blasphemy and breaking the Sab- 
 bath. Against them the chief priests and 
 rulers, the Caiaphases and Herods and 
 Pilates, presented an unbroken front. They 
 also asserted principles with which for a 
 time at least they justified no compromise, 
 and their Founder, while setting them an 
 example of suffering without lifting a hand 
 in his defense, attacked the respectable sin- 
 ners of the day in language which has not yet 
 lost its sting. 
 
 We do well to question the value of any 
 reform which does not unite these features. 
 Any movement which has its source and 
 chief support among the great and wealthy 
 and learned, which is never accused of rous- 
 ing the passions of the oppressed or of run- 
 ning counter to the prevailing religion of 
 the time, which finds Church or State friendly 
 and complaisant, which is ready to yield an 
 
 135 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 iota in matters of principle, which hesitates 
 to denounce where denunciation is due, and 
 which finally places its reliance in anything 
 but the power of truth — any such movement, 
 if it be weighed, will be found wanting in the 
 elements inherent in a great cause. 
 
 Are we ready to learn these lessons, and 
 above all to adopt the methods of peace? 
 They that take the sword shall perish by the 
 sword. How many a brilliant cause has 
 been brought to naught by the folly of its 
 adherents, who sought to secure freedom by 
 the weapons of tyranny! I have recently 
 been reading the life of a reformer who was 
 almost a non-resistant — a man of puritanic 
 habits and simple life, and devoted with his 
 whole soul to the cause of freedom and the 
 people — and yet by yielding to the temptation 
 of using violent means he made his name the 
 object of universal execration. Robespierre 
 was until two years or so before his death a 
 consistent humanitarian and opponent of 
 bloodshed. It is an historical fact that he 
 resigned a lucrative judgeship because he was 
 unwilling to pronounce a sentence of death. 
 When the Revolution was well under way he 
 proposed a bill for the abolition of capital 
 punishment, and made a good fight for it. 
 He refused to be a member of a court to try 
 royalists, and served on a committee to pro- 
 tect the royal family during the September 
 
 136 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 massacres. Mobs always filled him with 
 abhorrence; he opposed the war with the 
 allies and took every occasion to protest 
 against a standing army on the highest moral 
 grounds. He was noted as a friend of the 
 Church, even when his friendliness compro- 
 mised his power, and the Girondists attacked 
 him on account of his belief in God. In 
 debate he was particularly fair minded, insist- 
 ing on obtaining a hearing for his opponents, 
 and never indulging in personalities. It was 
 with reluctance that he became a member of 
 the terror committee, and he invariably 
 avoided signing the guillotine lists when he 
 could. Again and again he denounced the 
 punishment of men for their opinions, no 
 matter what those opinions might be. When 
 the Gironde fell, it was Robespierre who 
 saved the Right from extermination, and, 
 in short, he was, as his last biographer, 
 Hilaire Belloc, says, "A man by nature 
 opposed to the Terror." Throughout these 
 fearful times he maintained unaltered a 
 dream of a perfect state in which all should 
 be happy and all virtuous. And yet this man 
 gradually gave his consent to the Terror in 
 order that he might maintain his power and 
 realize his vision, until, familiar with its 
 frightful mien, he seized upon it as a means 
 to his end, and was finally destroyed by the 
 extremists whom he intended to kill. It is an 
 
 137 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 undoubted fact that his plan was, after a few 
 more days of slaughter, to abolish the revo- 
 lutionary court and inaugurate his Rous- 
 seauan commonwealth; but it is idle to spec- 
 ulate as to what might have happened if he 
 had not fallen so soon. To the end he 
 remained true to some of his ideals. He 
 would not consent to an insurrection in his 
 own behalf until it was too late, nor when 
 arrested would he accept release without the 
 order of the Convention, for the Convention 
 represented his adored People. But for this 
 delay his life would have been saved. 
 
 How can such a career as Robespierre's be 
 explained? With Garrison's faith in the un- 
 aided power of the right, he would have had a 
 sure clue to follow. Without that faith no 
 man is to be trusted in such an environment. 
 It is difficult for us to imagine Ihe effect of 
 bloodthirsty surroundings; and yet have we 
 not seen in South Africa and China and the 
 Philippines equally striking examples of it? 
 Robespierre became finally a conspicuous 
 incarnation of all that he most hated, and he 
 reached this point by adopting means which 
 he knew were wrong, to gain an end in which 
 he profoundly believed. He dreaded most of 
 all to be left out of the stream of events — 
 dropped on one side on account of his 
 scruples, and consequently he plunged in, 
 was sucked into the maelstrom, and died, 
 
 138 
 
Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 having justly earned that reputation which of 
 all others he would most have deprecated. 
 If he had fallen before the trial of the King, 
 or if he had remained true to his conscience 
 and returned home when he found that he 
 could no longer guide his country along the 
 paths of peace, his name would have gone 
 down in history with Garrison's as that of a 
 benefactor of mankind. 
 
 When the time comes to make another dis- 
 tinct advance in that great movement towards 
 justice of which the French Revolution and 
 the anti-slavery agitation were episodes, shall 
 we follow the lead of Robespierre or that of 
 Garrison? It is quite possible that a revolu- 
 tion in America to-day would end as did 
 that of 1789 in France. It will not do 
 to pooh-pooh the idea as monstrous. Men 
 who can shoot down prisoners and administer 
 the water torture in the Orient might have 
 no insuperable objection to the guillotine at 
 home. In the case of some great industrial 
 crisis within the next few years, when prac- 
 tically all workmen are idle, let us suppose 
 that they begin to riot in many places at 
 once, and call for the bread which they can- 
 not earn. The ordinary machinery of com- 
 merce and of government has broken down. 
 In the midst of the disorder a national con- 
 vention is called and delegates flock to Wash- 
 ington, with the mutterings and threats of 
 
 139 
 
Garrison the Non-Resistant 
 
 discontent and starvation in their ears. They 
 would no longer be the futile politicians of 
 ordinary elections — the absurd and ridiculous 
 mannikins who now strut through the forms 
 of legislation; but real representatives of the 
 people, newly stirred to a consciousness of 
 their needs. I fancy I could name a score of 
 the delegates — men and women of the high- 
 est ideals and capacity. Such a representa- 
 tive body would be certain to compare favor- 
 ably from the point of view of ability with 
 the French Assembly, and it would come to- 
 gether with the same lofty aims and the same 
 devotion to them. Would it end in the same 
 carnival of horror? With the example of 
 the peace-loving Robespierre before us it is 
 impossible to scout the idea. The only safe- 
 guard against such a danger is the utter 
 repudiation of all violent methods of reform. 
 Once permit yourself to rely upon rifles and 
 prisons, and the descent is easy to all kinds 
 of cruelty and torture. The lesson of all his- 
 tory is that men are not to be trusted with 
 the power of life and death over their fel- 
 lows; and any revolution which claims for 
 itself any such power carries in its bosom 
 the seeds of a counter movement which will 
 bring in again the supremacy of the party of 
 reaction. The best mental exercise for 
 reformers is to accustom themselves to the 
 idea of dispensing with the use of physical 
 
 140 
 
I 
 
 Lessons from Garrison's Career 
 
 force, and of commending their cause to the 
 higher powers of influence, persuasion and 
 truth. 
 
 And Garrison was the true prophet of such 
 a peaceful method. He had the genuine spirit 
 of reform which we might do well to accept 
 from him as an inheritance. He was, indeed, 
 to use his friend Quincy's words, uttered as 
 early as 1838, "one of those rare spirits 
 which heaven at distant periods sends upon 
 the earth on holiest missions." He was, as 
 all such men are, in advance of his time, — "too 
 great . . to be a representative man at 
 present," as Harriet Martineau declared, but, 
 she added, "his example may raise up a class 
 hereafter." Such an example is indeed full 
 of inspiration for those who see in the world 
 around them many evils not altogether un- 
 related to those against which Garrison 
 struggled so long and so faithfully. But 
 wherever the cause of justice may call us, let 
 us be careful to go in his spirit, for, as one of 
 his fellow-workers truly said, "Non-resistance 
 is the temper of mind in which all enterprises 
 for humanity should be undertaken." 
 
 141 
 
The Books of Ernest Crosby 
 
 Plain Talk in Psalm and Parable 
 
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 Edward Carpenter, Poet and Prophet 
 
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 Oolden-Rule Jones, riayor of Toledo 
 
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TBE WORKS OF lEO TOLSTOY 
 
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