E449 .G2553 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS *& -& GARRISON: AN OUTLINE OF HIS LIFE BV OLIVER JOHNSON 3.QX NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1879 Gc Copyright, 1879, by CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Trow's Printing and Bookbinding Co., 205-213 East 12th, St., NEW YORK. GARRISON William Lloyd Garrisox, the founder and leader of the movement for the abolition of slavery in the United States of America, was born in Xewburyport. Massachusetts, Decem- ber io, 1805. His parents were from the British Province of New Brunswick. The father, a sea- captain, went away from home when William was a child, and it is not known whether he died at sea or on the land. The mother is said to have been a woman of high character, charming in person, and eminent for piety. For her William had the deepest reverence, and he is supposed to have inherited from her the moral qualities ^ that specially fitted him for his career. She was entirely dependent for the support of herself and children upon her labors as a nurse. She was able to give William but a meagre chance for acquiring an education, but he had a taste for books, and made the most of his limited opportu- 4 GARRISON. nities. She first set him to learn the trade of ; shoemaker, and, when she found this did not sui him , let him try his hand at cabinet-making. Bu the latter pleased him no better than the former In October, 1818, however, when he was in hi fourteenth year, he was made more than conten by being indentured to Ephraim W. Allen, pro prietor of " The Newburyport Herald," to lean the trade of a printer. He found in this occu pation a happy stimulus to his literary taste an< ambition, as well as some available opportuni ties for mental culture. Pie soon became a; expert compositor, and after a time began h write anonymously for the " Herald." His com munications won the commendation of the edi tor, who had not at first the slightest suspicio: that he was the author. He also wrote fo other papers with equal success. A series c political essays, written by him for the " Saler Gazette," was copied by a prominent Philadel phia journal, the editor of which attributed then to the Hon. Timothy Pickering, a distinguishe* statesman of Massachusetts. His skill as i printer won for him the position of foreman while his ability as a writer was so marked tha the editor of the " Herald," when temporaril; GARRISON. 5; called away from his post, left the paper in his charge. The printing-office was for him, what it has been for many another poor boy, no mean sub- stitute for the academy and the college. He was full of enthusiasm for liberty ;• the struggle of the Greeks to throw off the Turkish yoke en- listed his warmest sympathy, and at one time he seriously thought of entering the West Point Academy and fitting himself for a soldier's ca- reer. His apprenticeship ended with his minor- ity in 1826, when he began the publication of a new paper, the " Free Press," in his native place. This paper was full of spirit and intel- lectual force, but Newburyport was a sleepy place and did not appreciate a periodical so fresh and free ; and so the enterprise failed. Mr. Garrison then went to Boston, where, after working for a time as a journeyman printer, he became the editor of the " National Philanthro- pist," the first journal established in America to promote the cause of total abstinence from in- toxicating liquors. His work in this paper was highly appreciated by the friends of temperance, but a change in the proprietorship led to his withdrawal before the end of a year. In 1828 6 GARRISON. he was induced to establish the " Journal of the Times " at Bennington, Vermont, to support the re-election to the Presidency of the United States of John Quincy Adams. The new paper, though attractive in many ways, and full of force and fire, was too far ahead of public sentiment on moral questions to win a large support. Whether or not it would have lived if he had continued to be its editor, it is impossible to say ; but the time had come at last when he was to enter upon the work with which his name will be forever associated. In Boston he had met Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker philanthropist, who had been for years engaged in an effort to convince the people of the United States that they ought to do something to promote the abolition of slavery. Mr. Garrison had been deeply moved by Mr. Lundy's appeals, and after going to Vermont he showed the deepest interest in the slavery question. Mr. Lundy was then publishing in Baltimore a small month- ly paper, entitled " Genius of Universal Eman- cipation," and he resolved to go to Bennington and invite Mr. Garrison to join him in the edi- torship. With this object in view he walked from Boston to Bennington, through the frost GARRISON. 7 and snow of a New England winter, a distance of 125 miles. His mission was successful. Mr. Garrison was deeply impressed by the good Quaker's zeal and devotion, and he resolved to join him and devote himself thereafter to the work of abolishing slavery. In pursuance of this plan he went to Balti- more in the autumn of 1829, and thenceforth the " Genius " was published weekly, under the joint editorship of the two men. It was under- stood, however, that Mr. Garrison would do most of the editorial work, while Mr. Lundy would spend most of his time in lecturing and procuring subscribers. On one point the two editors differed radically, Lundy being the ad- vocate of gradual, and Garrison the champion of immediate, emancipation. The former was possessed by the idea that the negroes, on be- ing emancipated, must be colonized somewhere beyond the limits of the United States ; the latter held that they should be emancipated on the soil of the country, with all the rights of freemen. In view of this difference it was agreed that each should speak on his own in- dividual responsibility in the paper, appending his initial to each of his articles for the informa- 8 GARRISON. tion of the reader. It deserves mention here that Mr. Garrison was then in utter ignorance of the change previously wrought in the opinions of English abolitionists by Elizabeth Heyrick's pamphlet in favor of immediate, in distinction from gradual emancipation. The sinfulness of slavery being admitted, the duty of immediate emancipation to his clear ethical instinct was perfectly manifest. He saw that it would be idle to expose and denounce the evils of slavery,, while responsibility for the system was placed upon former generations, and the duty of abol- ishing it transferred to an indefinite future. His demand for immediate emancipation fell like a tocsin upon the ears of slaveholders. For gen- eral talk about the evils of slavery they cared little, but this assertion that every slave was en- titled to instant freedom filled them with alarm and roused them to anger, for they saw that, if the conscience of the nation were to respond to the proposition, the system must inevitably fall. The " Genius," now that it had become a ve- hicle for this dangerous doctrine, was a paper to be feared and intensely hated. Baltimore was then one of the centres of the domestic slave trade, and upon this traffic Mr. Garrison GARRISON. 9 heaped the strongest denunciations. A vessel owned in Newburyport having taken a cargo of slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans, he char- acterized the transaction as an act of " domestic piracy," and avowed his purpose to " cover with thick infamy " those engaged therein. He was thereupon prosecuted for libel by the owner of the vessel, fined in the sum of fifty dollars, mulcted in costs of court, and, in default of pay- ment, committed to jail. His imprisonment created much excitement, and in some quarters, in spite of the pro-slavery spirit of the time, was a subject of indignant comment in public as well as private. The excitement was fed by the publication of two or three striking sonnets, instinct with the spirit of liberty, which Mr. Garrison inscribed on the walls of his cell. One of these, " Freedom of Mind," is remarkable for freshness of thought and terseness of expression, and will probably hold a permanent place in American literature. John G. Whittier, the Quaker poet, inter- ceded with Henry Clay to pay Mr. Garrison's fine and thus release him from prison. To the credit of the slaveholding statesman, it must be said that he responded favorably, but before he 10 GARRISON. had time for the requisite preliminaries, Mr. Arthur Tappan, a philanthropic merchant of New York, contributed the necessary sum and set the prisoner free after an incarceration of seven weeks. The partnership between Mr. Garrison and Mr. Lundy was then dissolved by mutual consent, and the former resolved to es- tablish a paper of his own, in which, upon his sole responsibility, he could advocate the doc- trine of immediate emancipation and oppose the scheme of African colonization. He was sure, after his experiences at Baltimore, that a movement against slavery resting upon any less radical foundation than this would be ineffica- cious. He first proposed to establish his paper at Washington, in the midst of slavery, but on returning to New England and observing the state of public opinion there, he came to the conclusion that little could be done at the South while the non-slaveholding North was lending her influence, through political, commercial, re- ligious, and social channels, for the sustenance of slavery. He determined, therefore, to pub- lish his paper in Boston, and, having issued his prospectus, set himself to the task of awakening an interest in the subject by means of lectures GARRISON. II in some of the principal cities and towns of the North. It was an up-hill work. Contempt for the negro and indifference to his wrongs were almost universal. In Boston, then a great cot- ton mart, he tried in vain to procure a church or vestry for the delivery of his lectures, and thereupon announced in one of the daily jour- nals that if some suitable place was not promptly offered he would speak on the Common. A body of infidels proffered him the use of their small hall, and, no other place being accessible, he accepted it gratefully, and delivered therein three lectures, in which he unfolded his princi- ples and plans. He visited, privately, many of the leading citizens of the city, statesmen, di- vines, and merchants, and besought them to take the lead in a national movement against slavery ; but they all with one consent made excuse, some of them listening to his plea with manifest impatience. He was disappointed, but not disheartened. His conviction of the right- eousness of his cause, of the evils and dangers of slavery, and of the absolute necessity of the contemplated movement, was intensified by op- position, and he resolved to go forward, trusting in God for success. 12 GARRISON. On the first of January, 1831, without a dol- lar of capital save in hand and brain, and with- out a single subscriber, he and his partner is- sued the first number of " The Liberator/' avowing their " determination to print it as long as they could subsist on bread and water, or their hands obtain employment." Its motto was, " Our Country is the World — our Coun- trymen are Mankind ; " and the editor, in his address to the public, uttered the words which have become memorable as embodying the .whole purpose and spirit of his life : — " I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not ex- cuse — I will not retreat a single inch — and I will be heard." Help came but slowly. For many months Mr. Garrison, and his brave part- ner, Mr. Isaac Knapp, who died long before the end of the conflict, made their bed on the floor of the room, ''dark, unfurnitured and mean," in which they printed their paper, and where the Mayor of Boston, in compliance with the request of a distinguished magistrate of the South, "ferreted them out," in "an obscure hole," "their only visible auxiliary a negro boy." But the paper founded under such in- auspicious circumstances exerted a mighty in- GARRISON. 13 fluence, and lived to record not only President Lincoln's proclamation of emancipation, but the adoption of an amendment to the Constitu- tion of the United States forever prohibiting slavery. It was the beginning and the nucleus of an agitation that eventually pervaded and filled every part of the country, and that baffled alike the wiles of politicians and parties, and the devices of those pulpits and ecclesiastical bodies which forgot that Jesu* came to preach deliverance to the captives and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. Other newspapers were afterwards established upon the same principles ; anti-slavery societies, founded upon the doctrine of immediate emanci- pation, sprang up on every hand ; the agita- tion was carried into political parties, into the press, and into legislative and ecclesiastical assemblies; until, in i860, the Southern States, taking alarm from the election of a President known to be at heart opposed to slavery though pledged to enforce all the constitutional safe- guards of the system, seceded from the Union and set up a separate government. In the struggle that ensued slavery was abolished by an exercise of the powers of war, as a necessary means of restoring the Union. 14 GARRISON. Mr. Garrison sought the abolition of slavery by moral means alone. He knew that the Na- tional Government had no power over the sys- tem in any State, though it could abolish it at the National Capital, and prohibit it in the in- choate States called Territories. He thought it should, by the exercise of such limited pow- ers as it possessed, bring its moral influence to bear in favor of abolition ; but neither he nor his associates ever asked Congress to exercise any unconstitutional power. His idea was to combine the moral influence of the North, and pour it through every open channel upon the South. To this end he made his appeal to the Northern churches and pulpits, beseeching them to bring the power of Christianity to bear against the slave system, and to advocate the right of the slaves to immediate and uncondi- tional freedom. He thought that, under the mo- ral pressure thus created, and which would be re-enforced by the civilization and Christianity of the foremost nations of the world, the South would speedily give way and proclaim freedom to her bondmen. He was a man of peace, hat- ing war not less than he did slavery ; but he warned his countrymen that if they refused to GARRISON. 15 abolish slavery by moral power a retributive war must sooner or later ensue. The conflict was irrepressible. Slavery must be overthrown, if not by peaceful means, then in blood. The first society organized under Mr. Garrison's aus- pices, and in accordance with his principles, was the " New England Anti-Slavery Society," which adopted its Constitution in January, 1832. In the spring of this year Mr. Garrison issued his work entitled " Thoughts on African Coloni- zation," in which he showed by ample citations from official documents that the American Col- onization Society was organized in the interest of slavery, and that in offering itself to the peo- ple of the North as a practical remedy for that system it was guilty of deception. His book smote the Society with a paralysis from which it has never recovered. Agents of the Ameri- can Colonization Society in England having suc- ceeded in deceiving leading abolitionists there as to the character and tendency of that Society, Mr. Garrison was deputed by the New England Anti-Slavery Society to visit that country for the purpose of counteracting their influence. He went in the spring of 1833, when he was but twenty-seven years of age, and was received l6 GARRISON. with great cordiality by British abolitionists, some of whom had heard of his bold assaults upon American slavery, and seen a few numbers of " The Liberator." The struggle for emanci- pation in the West Indies was then at the point of culmination ; the leaders of the cause, from all parts of the kingdom, were assembled in London, and Mr. Garrison was at once admitted to their councils and treated with distinguished consideration. He formed the acquaintance of Wilberforce, Clarkson, Buxton, O'Connell, George Thompson, and many others, and was greatly cheered by what he saw and heard. He was thoroughly successful in his efforts to unde- ceive the people of England in respect to the character and designs of the American Coloni- zation Society, and took home with him a " Pro- test " against it, signed by Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, Samuel Gurney, William Evans, S. Lushington, T. Fowell Buxton, James Crop- per, Daniel O'Connell, and others, in which they declared their deliberate judgment that " its precepts were delusive," and "its real effects of the most dangerous nature." He also received assurances of the cordial sympathy of British abolitionists with him in his efforts to GARRISON. 17 abolish American slavery. He gained a hear- ing before a large, popular assembly in London, and won the confidence of those whom he ad- dressed by his evident earnestness, sincerity, and ability. Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, before he had an opportunity of meeting him, invited him to breakfast at his house. Mr. Garrison presented himself at the appointed time ; but Mr. Buxton, instead of coming forward promptly to take his hand, scrutinized him from head to foot, and then inquired, somewhat dubiously, " Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Garrison, of Boston, in the United States ? " Being an- swered in the affirmative, he lifted up his hands and exclaimed, "Why, my dear sir, I thought you were a black man, and I have consequently invited this company of ladies and gentlemen to be present to welcome Mr. Garrison, the black advocate of emancipation, from the United States of America." Mr. Garrison often said that, of all the compliments he ever received, this was the only one that he cared to remem- ber or repeat ; for Mr. Buxton had somehow or other supposed that no white American could plead for those in bondage as he had 2 1 8 GARRISON. done, and that therefore he must be black. Mr. Garrison's visit to England enraged the pro-slavery people and press of the United States at the outset, and when he returned home in September, with the " Protest " against the Colonization Society, and announced that he had engaged the services of George Thomp- son as a lecturer against American slavery, there were fresh outbursts of rage on every hand. The American Anti-Slavery Society was organized in December of that year, put- ting forth a masterly declaration of its princi- ples and purposes from the pen of Mr. -Garri- son. This added fresh fuel to the public excite- ment, and when Mr. Thompson came over in the next spring, the hostility to the cause began to manifest itself in mobs organized to suppress the discussion of the slavery question. Now began what Harriet Martineau called " the Martyr Age in America." Mr. Thompson gained a favorable hearing in a few places, but his appearance in any town or city became at length the signal of a mob, and in the fall of 1835 he was compelled, in order to save his life, to embark secretly for England. Just before his departure, the announcement that he would GARRISON. 19 address the Women's Anti-Slavery Society of Boston created "a mob of gentlemen of prop- erty and standing," from which, if he had been present, he could hardly have escaped with his life. The whole city was in an uproar. Mr. Garrison, almost denuded of his clothing, was dragged through the streets by infuriated men, with a rope around his body, by which they doubtless intended to hang him. He was res- cued with great difficulty and consigned to the jail for safety, until he could be secretly re- moved from the city. For two or three years these attempts to suppress the anti-slavery movement by violence were persisted in, but it was like attempting to extinguish a fire by pour- ing oil upon the flames, or like an effort to stop the roar of Niagara by increasing the vol- ume of its waters. Anti-slavery societies were greatly multiplied throughout the North, and many men of influ- ence, both in the Church and in the State, were won to the cause. Mr. Garrison, true to his original purpose, never faltered or turned back. Other friends of the cause were sometimes dis- couraged — he, never. The abolitionists of the United States were a united body until 1839-40 20 GARRISON. when divisions sprang up among them. Mr. Garrison countenanced the activity of women in the cause, even to the extent of allowing them to vote and speak in the anti-slavery societies, and appointing them as lecturing agents. To this a strong party was opposed upon social and religious grounds. Then there were some who thought Mr. Garrison dealt too severely with the churches and pulpits for their complicity with slavery, and who accused him of a want of religious orthodoxy. He was, moreover, a non-resistant, and this, to many, was distasteful. The dissentients from his opinions determined to form an anti-slavery political party, while he believed in working by moral rather than political party instrumentali- ties. These differences led to the organization of a new National Anti-Slavery Society, in 1840, and to the formation of the " Liberty Party " in politics. The two societies sent their delegates to the World's Anti-Slavery Conven- tion, in London, in 1840, and Mr. Garrison re- fused to take his seat in that body, because the women delegates from the United States were excluded. The discussions of the next few years served GARRISON. 21 to make clearer than before the practical workings of the Constitution of the United States as a shield and support of slavery ; and Mr. Garrison, after long and painful re- flection, came to the conclusion that its pro- slavery clauses were immoral, and that it was therefore wrong to take an oath for its support. The Southern States had a greatly enlarged representation in Congress on account of their slaves, and the National Government was con- stitutionally bound to assist in the capture of fugitive slaves, and to suppress every attempt on their part to gain their freedom by force. In view of these provisions, Mr. Garrison, adopting a bold Scriptural figure of speech, de- nounced the Union as " a covenant with death and an agreement with hell," and adopted as his motto the legend, " No union with slave- holders." His argument on this question, in the light of ethical principles generally admitted to be sound, could not easily be answered, and many men, who shrank from the conclusion that followed therefrom, were held by it as in a vise. His exposures of the character and practical working of the pro-slavery clauses of the Con- stitution, in spite of the impatience with which 22 GARRISON. they were regarded in some quarters, made a deep impression upon the national conscience, and served to abate that undiscriminating and idolatrous reverence for the Union, upon which the slave-holders had so long relied for the pro- tection of their system. One class of abolitionists sought to evade the difficulty by strained interpretations of the clauses referred to, while others, admitting that they were immoral, felt themselves obliged, notwithstanding, to support the Constitution in order to avoid what they thought would be still greater evils. The American Anti-Slav- ery Society, of which Mr. Garrison was the President from 1S43 to the day of emancipa- tion, was during all this period the nucleus of an intense and powerful moral agitation, which was greatly valued by the soundest and most faithful workers in the field of politics, who greatly respected him for his fidelity to his con- victions. On the other hand, Mr. Garrison always had the highest respect for every ear- nest and faithful opponent of slavery, however far he might be from adopting his special views. He was intolerant of nothing but con- scious treachery to the cause. When in 1861 the ga; 23 -'I from the Union and took 1 . -)y that pet h in the that the rth, in- . and an : rare :nen. He I this I ■ - - - - - 24 GARRISON. gle to which his life was devoted. In 1865, at the close of the war, he declared that, slavery being abolished, his career as an abolitionist was ended. He counselled a dissolution of the American Anti-Slavery Society, insisting that it had become functus officiis, and that whatever needed to be done for the protection of the freedmen could best be accomplished by new associations formed for that purpose. " The Liberator" was discontinued at the end of the same year, after an existence of thirty-five years. He visited England for the second time in 1846, and again in 1867, when he was received with distinguished honors, public as well as private. In 1877, when he was there for the last time, he declined every form of public recognition. He died in New York, May 24, 1879, in the 74th year of his age, and was buried in Boston, after a most im- pressive funeral service, May 28th. In 1843 a small volume of his " Sonnets and other Poems" was published, and in 1852 appeared a volume of " Selections " from his " Writings and Speeches." His wife, Helen Eliza Benson, died in 1876. Four sons and one daugl^ter sur- vive them. e daughtf v3 ,♦.."•♦ *- Y jP^. », n* 1* ^ ^ ^ ^