[Illustration: Wm. Lloyd Garrison]
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON
_THE ABOLITIONIST_
BY ARCHIBALD H. GRIMKE, M.A.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Grimké, Archibald Henry, 1849-1930.
William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist.
Reprint of the 1891 ed. published by Funk & Wagnalls, New York.
1. Garrison, William Lloyd, 1805-1879.
Reprinted from the edition of 1891, New York First AMS edition published
in 1974
_To Mrs. Anna M. Day, who has been a mother to my little girl, and a
sister to me, this book is gratefully and affectionately dedicated, by_
_The Author_.
PREFACE.
The author of this volume desires by way of preface to say just two
things:--firstly, that it is his earnest hope that this record of a hero
may be an aid to brave and true living in the Republic, so that the
problems knocking at its door for solution may find the heads, the
hands, and the hearts equal to the performance of the duties imposed by
them upon the men and women of this generation. William Lloyd Garrison
was brave and true. Bravery and truth were the secret of his marvelous
career and achievements. May his countrymen and countrywomen imitate his
example and be brave and true, not alone in emergent moments, but in
everyday things as well.
So much for the author's firstly, now for his secondly, which is to
acknowledge his large indebtedness in the preparation of this book to
that storehouse of anti-slavery material, the story of the life of
William Lloyd Garrison by his children. Out of its garnered riches he
has filled his sack.
HYDE PARK, MASS., May 10, 1891.
CONTENTS.
Dedication III
Preface V
CHAPTER I.
The Father of the Man 11
CHAPTER II.
The Man Hears a Voice: Samuel, Samuel! 38
CHAPTER III.
The Man Begins his Ministry 69
CHAPTER IV.
The Hour and the Man 92
CHAPTER V.
The Day of Small Things 110
CHAPTER VI.
The Heavy World is Moved 118
CHAPTER VII.
Master Strokes 133
CHAPTER VIII.
Colorphobia 157
CHAPTER IX.
Agitation and Repression 170
CHAPTER X.
Between the Acts 192
CHAPTER XI.
Mischief Let Loose 208
CHAPTER XII.
Flotsam and Jetsam 233
CHAPTER XIII.
The Barometer Continues to Fall 242
CHAPTER XIV.
Brotherly Love Fails, and Ideas Abound 263
CHAPTER XV.
Random Shots 292
CHAPTER XVI.
The Pioneer Makes a New and Startling Departure 306
CHAPTER XVII.
As in a Looking Glass 319
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Turning of a Long Lane 335
CHAPTER XIX.
Face to Face 356
CHAPTER XX.
The Death-Grapple 370
CHAPTER XXI.
The Last 385
Index 397
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
CHAPTER I.
THE FATHER OF THE MAN.
William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, December
10, 1805. Forty years before, Daniel Palmer, his great-grandfather,
emigrated from Massachusetts and settled with three sons and a daughter
on the St. John River, in Nova Scotia. The daughter's name was Mary, and
it was she who was to be the future grandmother of our hero. One of the
neighbors of Daniel Palmer was Joseph Garrison, who was probably an
Englishman. He was certainly a bachelor. The Acadian solitude of five
hundred acres and Mary Palmer's charms proved too much for the
susceptible heart of Joseph Garrison. He wooed and won her, and on his
thirtieth birthday she became his wife. The bride herself was but
twenty-three, a woman of resources and of presence of mind, as she
needed to be in that primitive settlement. Children and cares came apace
to the young wife, and we may be sure confined her more and more closely
to her house. But in the midst of a fast-increasing family and of
multiplying cares a day's outing did occasionally come to the busy
housewife, when she would go down the river to spend it at her father's
farm. Once, ten years after her marriage, she had a narrow escape on one
of those rare days. She had started in a boat with her youngest child,
Abijah, and a lad who worked in her household. It was spring and the St.
John was not yet clear of ice. Higher up the river the ice broke that
morning and came floating down with the current. The boat in which Mary
Garrison and her baby rode was overtaken by the fragments and wrecked.
The mother with her child sought refuge on a piece of ice and was driven
shoreward. Wrapping Abijah in all the clothes she could spare she threw
him ashore. She and the lad followed by the aid of an overhanging willow
bough. The baby was unharmed, for she had thrown him into a snow-bank.
But the perils of the river gave place to the perils of the woods. In
them Mary Garrison wandered with her infant, who was no less a personage
than the father of William Lloyd Garrison, until at length she found the
hut of a friendly Indian, who took her in and "entertained her with his
best words and deeds, and the next morning conducted her safely to her
father's."
The Palmers were a hardy, liberty-loving race of farmers, and Joseph
Garrison was a man of unusual force and independence of character. The
life which these early settlers lived was a life lived partly on the
land and partly on the river. They were equally at home with scythe or
oar. Amid such terraqueous conditions it was natural enough that the
children should develop a passion for the sea. Like ducks many of them
took to the water and became sailors. Abijah was a sailor. The
amphibious habits of boyhood gave to his manhood a restless, roving
character. Like the element which he loved he was in constant motion. He
was a man of gifts both of mind and body. There was besides a strain of
romance and adventure in his blood. By nature and his seafaring life he
probably craved strong excitement. This craving was in part appeased no
doubt by travel and drink. He took to the sea and he took to the cup.
But he was more than a creature of appetites, he was a man of sentiment.
Being a man of sentiment what should he do but fall in love. The woman
who inspired his love was no ordinary woman, but a genuine Acadian
beauty. She was a splendid specimen of womankind. Tall she was, graceful
and admirably proportioned. Never before had Abijah in all his
wanderings seen a creature of such charms of person. Her face matched
the attractions of her form and her mind matched the beauty of her face.
She possessed a nature almost Puritanic in its abhorrence of sin, and in
the strength of its moral convictions. She feared to do wrong more than
she feared any man. With this supremacy of the moral sense there went
along singular firmness of purpose and independence of character. When a
mere slip of a girl she was called upon to choose between regard for her
religious convictions and regard for her family. It happened in this
wise. Fanny Lloyd's parents were Episcopalians, who were inclined to
view with contempt fellow-Christians of the Baptist persuasion. To have
a child of theirs identify herself with this despised sect was one of
those crosses which they could not and would not bear. But Fanny had in
a fit of girlish frolic entered one of the meetings of these low-caste
Christians. What she heard changed the current of her life. She knew
thenceforth that God was no respecter of persons, and that the crucified
Nazarene looked not upon the splendor of ceremonies but upon the
thoughts of the heart of His disciples. Here in a barn, amid vulgar
folk, and uncouth, dim surroundings, He had appeared, He, her Lord and
Master. He had touched her with that white unspeakable appeal. The
laughter died upon the fair girlish face and prayer issued from the
beautiful lips. If vulgar folk, the despised Baptists, were good enough
for the Christ, were they not good enough for her? Among them she had
felt His consecrating touch and among them she determined to devote
herself to Him. Her parents commanded and threatened but Fanny Lloyd was
bent on obeying the heavenly voice of duty rather than father and
mother. They had threatened that if she allowed herself to be baptised
they would turn her out of doors. Fanny was baptised and her parents
made good the threat. Their home was no longer her home. She had the
courage of her conviction--ability to suffer for a belief.
Such was the woman who subsequently became the wife of Abijah Garrison,
and the mother of one of the greatest moral heroes of the century.
Abijah followed the sea, and she for several years with an increasing
family followed Abijah. First from one place and then another she glided
after him in her early married life. He loved her and his little ones
but the love of travel and change was strong within him. He was ever
restless and changeful. During one of his roving fits he emigrated with
his family from Nova Scotia to the United States. It was in the spring
of 1805 that he and they landed in Newburyport. The following December
his wife presented him with a boy, whom they called William Lloyd
Garrison. Three years afterward Abijah deserted his wife and children.
Of the causes which led to this act nothing is now known. Soon after his
arrival in Newburyport he had found employment. He made several voyages
as sailing-master in 1805-8 from that port. He was apparently during
these years successful after the manner of his craft. But he was not a
man to remain long in one place. What was the immediate occasion of his
strange behavior we can only conjecture. Possibly an increasing love for
liquor had led to domestic differences, which his pleasure-loving nature
would not brook. Certain it was that he was not like his wife. He was
not a man in whom the moral sense was uppermost. He was governed by
impulse and she by fixed moral and religious principles. He drank and
she abhorred the habit. She tried first moral suasion to induce him to
abandon the habit, and once, in a moment of wifely and motherly
indignation, she broke up one of his drinking parties in her house by
trying the efficacy of a little physical suasion. She turned the company
out of doors and smashed the bottles of liquor. This was not the kind of
woman whom Abijah cared to live with as a wife. He was not the sort of
man whom the most romantic love could attach to the apron-strings of any
woman. And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what
he would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace. The
condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife
and family and the legal and moral responsibilities of husband and
father.
Bitter days now followed and Fanny Garrison became acquainted with grief
and want. She had the mouths of three children to fill--the youngest an
infant at her breast. The battle of this broken-hearted woman for their
daily bread was as heroic as it was pathetic. She still lived in the
little house on School street where Lloyd was born. The owner, Martha
Farnham, proved herself a friend indeed to the poor harassed soul. Now
she kept the wolf from the door by going out as a monthly nurse--"Aunt
Farnham" looking after the little ones in her absence. She was put to
all her possibles during those anxious years of struggle and want. Even
Lloyd, wee bit of a boy, was pressed into the service. She would make
molasses candies and send him upon the streets to sell them. But with
all her industry and resource what could she do with three children
weighing her down in the fierce struggle for existence, rendered tenfold
fiercer after the industrial crisis preceding and following the War of
1812. Then it was that she was forced to supplement her scant earnings
with refuse food from the table of "a certain mansion on State street."
It was Lloyd who went for this food, and it was he who had to run the
gauntlet of mischievous and inquisitive children whom he met and who
longed for a peep into his tin pail. But the future apostle of
non-resistance was intensely resistant, we may be sure, on such
occasions. For, as his children have said in the story of his life:
"Lloyd was a thorough boy, fond of games and of all boyish sport.
Barefooted, he trundled his hoop all over Newburyport; he swam in the
Merrimac in summer, and skated on it in winter; he was good at sculling
a boat; he played at bat and ball and snowball, and sometimes led the
'Southend boys' against the Northenders in the numerous conflicts
between the youngsters of the two sections; he was expert with marbles.
Once, with a playmate, he swam across the river to 'Great Rock,' a
distance of three-fourths of a mile and effected his return against the
tide; and once, in winter, he nearly lost his life by breaking through
the ice on the river and reached the shore only after a desperate
struggle, the ice yielding as often as he attempted to climb upon its
surface. It was favorite pastime of the boys of that day to swim from
one wharf to another adjacent, where vessels from the West Indies
discharged their freight of molasses, and there to indulge in stolen
sweetness, extracted by a smooth stick inserted through the bung-hole.
When detected and chased, they would plunge into the water and escape to
the wharf on which they had left their clothes." Such was the little man
with a boy's irrepressible passion for frolic and fun. His passion for
music was hardly less pronounced, and this he inherited from his mother,
and exercised to his heart's content in the choir of the Baptist Church.
These were the bright lines and spots in his strenuous young life. He
played and sang the gathering brood of cares out of his own and his
mother's heart. He needed to play and he needed to sing to charm away
from his spirit the vulture of poverty. That evil bird hovered ever over
his childhood. It was able to do many hard things to him, break up his
home, sunder him from his mother, force him at a tender age to earn his
bread, still there was another bird in the boy's heart, which sang out
of it the shadow and into it the sunshine. Whatever was his lot there
sang the bird within his breast, and there shone the sun over his head
and into his soul. The boy had unconsciously drawn around him a circle
of sunbeams, and how could the vulture of poverty strike him with its
wings or stab him with its beak. When he was about eight he was parted
from his mother, she going to Lynn, and he, wee mite of a man, remaining
in Newburyport. It was during the War of 1812, and pinching times, when
Fanny Garrison was at her wit's end to keep the wolf from devouring her
three little ones and herself into the bargain. With what tearing of the
heart-strings she left Lloyd and his little sister Elizabeth behind we
can now only imagine. She had no choice, poor soul, for unless she
toiled they would starve. So with James, her eldest son, she went forth
into the world to better theirs and her own condition. Lloyd went to
live in Deacon Ezekiel Bartlett's family. They were good to the little
fellow, but they, too, were poor. The Deacon, among other things, sawed
wood for a living, and Lloyd hardly turned eight years, followed him in
his peregrinations from house to house doing with his tiny hands what he
could to help the kind old man. Soon Fanny Lloyd's health, which had
supported her as a magic staff in all those bitter years since Abijah's
desertion of wife and children, began in the battle for bread in Lynn,
to fail her. And so, in her weakness, and with a great fear in her heart
for her babies, when she was gone from them into the dark unknown
forever, she bethought her of making them as fast as possible
self-supporting. And what better way was there than to have the boys
learn some trade. James she had already apprenticed to learn the mystery
of shoemaking. And for Lloyd she now sent and apprenticed him, too, to
the same trade. Oh! but it was hard for the little man, the heavy
lapstone and all this thumping and pounding to make a shoe. Oh! how the
stiff waxen threads cut into his soft fingers, how all his body ached
with the constrained position and the rough work of shoemaking. But one
day the little nine-year-old, who was "not much bigger than a last," was
able to produce a real shoe. Then it was probably that a dawning
consciousness of power awoke within the child's mind. He himself by
patience and industry had created a something where before was nothing.
The eye of the boy got for the first time a glimpse of the man, who was
still afar off, shadowy in the dim approaches of the hereafter. But the
work proved altogether beyond the strength of the boy. The shoemaker's
bench was not his place, and the making of shoes for his kind was not
the mission for which he was sent into the world. And now again poverty,
the great scene-shifter, steps upon the stage, and Fanny Lloyd and her
two boys are in Baltimore on that never-ending quest for bread. She had
gone to work in a shoe factory established by an enterprising Yankee in
that city. The work lasted but a few months, when the proprietor failed
and the factory was closed. In a strange city mother and children were
left without employment. In her anxiety and distress a new trouble, the
greatest and most poignant since Abijah's desertion, wrung her with a
supreme grief. James, the light and pride of her life, had run away from
his master and gone to sea. Lloyd, poor little homesick Lloyd, was the
only consolation left the broken heart. And he did not want to live in
Baltimore, and longed to return to Newburyport. So, mindful of her
child's happiness, and all unmindful of her own, she sent him from her
to Newburyport, which he loved inexpressibly. He was now in his eleventh
year. Very happy he was to see once more the streets and landmarks of
the old town--the river, and the old house where he was born, and the
church next door and the school-house across the way and the dear
friends whom he loved and who loved him. He went again to live with the
Bartletts, doing with his might all that he could to earn his daily
bread, and to repay the kindness of the dear old deacon and his family.
It was at this time that he received his last scrap of schooling. He
was, as we have seen, but eleven, but precious little of that brief and
tender time had he been able to spend in a school-house. He had gone to
the primary school, where, as his children tell us, he did not show
himself "an apt scholar, being slow in mastering the alphabet, and
surpassed even by his little sister Elizabeth." During his stay with
Deacon Bartlett the first time, he was sent three months to the
grammar-school, and now on his return to this good friend, a few more
weeks were added to his scant school term. They proved the last of his
school-days, and the boy went forth from the little brick building on
the Mall to finish his education in the great workaday world, under
those stern old masters, poverty and experience. By and by Lloyd was a
second time apprenticed to learn a trade. It was to a cabinetmaker in
Haverhill, Mass. He made good progress in the craft, but his young heart
still turned to Newburyport and yearned for the friends left there. He
bore up against the homesickness as best he could, and when he could
bear it no longer, resolved to run away from the making of toy bureaus,
to be once more with the Bartletts. He had partly executed this
resolution, being several miles on the road to his old home, when his
master, the cabinetmaker, caught up to him and returned him to
Haverhill. But when he heard the little fellow's story of homesickness
and yearning for loved places and faces, he was not angry with him, but
did presently release him from his apprenticeship. And so the boy to his
great joy found himself again in Newburyport and with the good old
wood-sawyer. Poverty and experience were teaching the child what he
never could have learned in a grammar-school, a certain acquaintance
with himself and the world around him. There was growing within his
breast a self-care and a self-reliance. It was the autumn of 1818, when,
so to speak, the boy's primary education in the school of experience
terminated, and he entered on the second stage of his training under the
same rough tutelage. At the age of thirteen he entered the office of the
Newburyport _Herald_ to learn to set types. At last his boy's hands had
found work which his boy's heart did joy to have done. He soon mastered
the compositor's art, became a remarkably rapid composer. As he set up
the thoughts of others, he was not slow in discovering thoughts of his
own demanding utterance. The printer's apprentice felt the stirrings of
a new life. A passion for self-improvement took possession of him. He
began to read the English classics, study American history, follow the
currents of party politics. No longer could it be said of him that he
was not an apt pupil. He was indeed singularly apt. His intelligence
quickened marvelously. The maturing process was sudden and swift. Almost
before one knows it the boy in years has become a man in judgment and
character. This precipitate development of the intellectual life in him,
produced naturally enough an appreciable enlargement of the _ego_. The
young eagle had abruptly awakened to the knowledge that he possessed
wings; and wings were for use--to soar with. Ambition, the desire to
mount aloft, touched and fired the boy's mind. As he read, studied, and
observed, while his hands were busy with his work, there was a constant
fluttering going on in the eyrie of his thoughts. By an instinct
analogous to that which sends a duck to the water, the boy took to the
discussion of public questions. It was as if an innate force was
directing him toward his mission--the reformation of great public
wrongs. At sixteen he made his first contribution to the press. It was a
discussion of a quasi-social subject, the relation of the sexes in
society. He was at the impressionable age, when the rosy god of love is
at his tricks. He was also at a stage of development, when boys are
least attractive, when they are disagreeably virile, full of their own
importance and the superiority of their sex. In the "Breach of the
Marriage Promise," by "An Old Bachelor," these signs of adolescence are
by no means wanting, they are, on the contrary, distinctly present and
palpable. But there were other signs besides these, signs that the youth
had had his eyes wide open to certain difficulties which beset the
matrimonial state and to the conventional steps which lead to it, and
that he had thought quite soberly, if not altogether wisely upon them.
The writer was verdant, to be sure, and self-conscious, and partial in
his view of the relations of the sexes, but there was withal a serious
purpose in the writing. He meant to expose and correct what he conceived
to be reprehensible conduct on the part of the gentler sex, bad feminine
manners. Just now he sees the man's side of the shield, a few years
later he will see the woman's side also. He ungallantly concludes "to
lead the '_single life_,' and not," as he puts it, "trouble myself about
the ladies." A most sapient conclusion, considering that this veteran
misogynist was but sixteen years old. During the year following the
publication of this article, he plied his pen with no little
industry--producing in all fifteen articles on a variety of topics, such
as "South American Affairs," "State Politics," "A Glance at Europe,"
etc., all of which are interesting now chiefly as showing the range of
his growing intelligence, and as the earliest steps by which he acquired
his later mastery of the pen and powerful style of composition. In a
letter addressed to his mother about this time, the boy is full of
Lloyd, undisguisedly proud of Lloyd, believes in Lloyd. "When I peruse
them over" (_i.e._ those fifteen communications to the press), "I feel
absolutely astonished," he naïvely confesses, "at the different subjects
which I have discussed, and the style in which they are written. Indeed
it is altogether a matter of surprise that I have met with such signal
success, seeing I do not understand _one single rule of grammar_, and
having a very inferior education." The printer's lad was plainly not
lacking in the bump of approbativeness, or the quality of
self-assertiveness. The quick mother instinct of Fanny Garrison took
alarm at the tone of her boy's letter. Possibly there was something in
Lloyd's florid sentences, in his facility of expression, which reminded
her of Abijah. He, too, poor fellow, had had gifts in the use of the
pen, and what had he done, what had he come to? Had he not forsaken wife
and children by first forsaking the path of holiness? So she pricks the
boy's bubble, and points him to the one thing needful--God in the soul.
But in her closing words she betrays what we all along suspected, her
own secret pleasure in her son's success, when she asks, "Will you be so
kind as to bring on your pieces that you have written for me to see?"
Ah! was she not every inch a mother, and how Lloyd did love her. But she
was no longer what she had been. And no wonder, for few women have been
called to endure such heavy burdens, fight so hopelessly the battle for
bread, all the while her heart was breaking with grief. Disease had made
terrible inroads upon her once strong and beautiful person. Not the
shadow of the strength and beauty of her young womanhood remained. She
was far away from her early home and friends, far away from her darling
boy, in Baltimore. James, her pride, was at sea, Elizabeth, a sweet
little maiden of twelve, had left her to take that last voyage beyond
another sea, and Abijah, without one word of farewell, with the silence
of long years unbroken, he, too, also! had hoisted sail and was gone
forever. And now in her loneliness and sorrow, knowing that she, too,
must shortly follow, a great yearning rose up in her poor wounded heart
to see once more her child, the comfort and stay of her bitter life. And
as she had written to him her wish and longing, the boy went to her, saw
the striking change, saw that the broken spirit of the saintly woman was
day by day nearing the margin of the dark hereafter, into whose healing
waters it would bathe and be whole again. The unspeakable experience of
mother and son, during this last meeting is not for you and me, reader,
to look into. Soon after Lloyd's return to Newburyport a cancerous tumor
developed on her shoulder, from the effects of which she died September
3, 1823, at the age of forty-five. More than a decade after her death
her son wrote: "She has been dead almost eleven years; but my grief at
her loss is as fresh and poignant now as it was at that period;" and he
breaks out in praise of her personal charms in the following original
lines:
"She was the masterpiece of womankind--
In shape and height majestically fine;
Her cheeks the lily and the rose combined;
Her lips--more opulently red than wine;
Her raven locks hung tastefully entwined;
Her aspect fair as Nature could design;
And then her eyes! so eloquently bright!
An eagle would recoil before her light."
The influence of this superb woman was a lasting power for truth and
righteousness in the son's stormy life. For a whole year after her
death, the grief of the printer's lad over his loss, seemed to have
checked the activity of his pen. For during that period nothing of his
appeared in the _Herald_. But after the sharp edge of his sorrow had
worn off, his pen became active again in the discussion of public men
and public questions. It was a period of bitter personal and political
feuds and animosities. The ancient Federal party was _in articulo
mortis_. The death-bed of a great political organization proves
oftentimes the graveyard of lifelong friendships. For it is a scene of
crimination and recrimination. And so it happened that the partisans of
John Adams, and the partisans of John Adams's old Secretary of State,
Timothy Pickering, were in 1824 doing a thriving business in this
particular line. Into this funereal performance our printer's apprentice
entered with pick and spade. He had thus early a _penchant_ for
controversy, a soldier's scent for battle. If there was any fighting
going on he proceeded directly to have a hand in it. And it cannot be
denied that that hand was beginning to deal some manly and sturdy blows,
whose resound was heard quite distinctly beyond the limits of his
birthplace. His communications appeared now, not only in the _Herald_,
but in the Salem _Gazette_ as well. Now it was the Adams-Pickering
controversy, now the discussion of General Jackson as a presidential
candidate, now the state of the country in respect of parties, now the
merits of "American Writers," which afforded his 'prentice hand the
requisite practice in the use of the pen. He had already acquired a
perfect knowledge of typesetting and the mechanical makeup of a
newspaper. During his apprenticeship he took his first lesson in the art
of thinking on his feet in the presence of an audience. The audience to
be sure were the members of a debating club, which he had organized. He
was very ambitious and was doubtless looking forward to a political
career. He saw the value of extempore speech to the man with a future,
and he wisely determined to possess himself of its advantage. He little
dreamt, however, to what great use he was to devote it in later years.
There were other points worth noting at this time, and which seemed to
prophecy for him a future of distinction. He possessed a most attractive
personality. His energy and geniality, his keen sense of humor, his
social and bouyant disposition, even his positive and opinionated
temper, were sources of popular strength to him. People were strongly
drawn to him. His friends were devoted to him. He had that quality,
which we vaguely term magnetic, the quality of attaching others to us,
and maintaining over them the ascendency of our character and ideas.
In the midst of all this progress along so many lines, the days of his
apprenticeship in the _Herald_ office came to an end. He was just
twenty. With true Yankee enterprise and pluck, he proceeded to do for
himself what for seven years he had helped to do for another--publish a
newspaper. And with a brave heart the boy makes his launch on the
uncertain sea of local journalism and becomes editor and publisher of a
real, wide-awake sheet, which he calls the _Free Press._ The paper was
independent in politics and proved worthy of its name during the six
months that Garrison sat in the managerial chair. Here is the tone which
the initial number of the paper holds to the public: "As to the
political course of the _Free Press_, it shall be, in the widest sense
of the term, _independent_. The publisher does not mean by this, to rank
amongst those who are of everybody's and of nobody's opinion; ... nor
one of whom the old French proverb says: _Il ne soit sur quel pied
danser_. [He knows not on which leg to dance.] Its principles shall be
open, magnanimous and free. It shall be subservient to no party or body
of men; and neither the craven fear of loss, nor the threats of the
disappointed, nor the influence of power, shall ever awe one single
opinion into silence. Honest and fair discussion it will court; and its
columns will be open to all temperate and intelligent communications
emanating from whatever political source. In fine we will say with
Cicero: 'Reason shall prevail with him more than popular opinion.' They
who like this avowal may extend their encouragement; and if any feel
dissatisfied with it, they must act accordingly. The publisher cannot
condescend to solicit their support." This was admirable enough in its
way, but it was poor journalism some will say. And without doubt when
judged by the common commercial standard it _was_ poor journalism. In
this view it is a remarkable production, but in another aspect it is
still more remarkable in that it took with absolute accuracy the measure
of the man. As a mental likeness it is simply perfect. At no time during
his later life did the picture cease to be an exact moral representation
of his character. It seems quite unnecessary, therefore, to record that
he proceeded immediately to demonstrate that it was no high sounding and
insincere declaration. For in the second number, he mentions with that
singular serenity, which ever distinguished him on such occasions, the
discontinuance of the paper on account of matter contained in the first
issue, by ten indignant subscribers. "Nevertheless," he adds, "our
happiness at the loss of such subscribers is not a whit abated. We _beg_
no man's patronage, and shall ever erase with the same cheerfulness that
we insert the name of any individual.... Personal or political offence
we shall studiously avoid--truth _never_." Here was plainly a wholly new
species of the _genus homo_ in the editorial seat. What, expect to make
a newspaper pay and not beg for patronage? Why the very idea was enough
to make newspaperdom go to pieces with laughter. Begging for patronage,
howling for subscribers, cringing, crawling, changing color like the
chameleon, howling for Barabbas or bellowing against Jesus, all these
things must your newspaper do to prosper. On them verily hang the whole
law and all the profits of modern journalism. This is what the devil of
competition was doing in that world when William Lloyd Garrison entered
it. It took him up into an exceedingly high mountain, we may be certain,
and offered him wealth, position, and power, if he would do what all
others were doing. And he would not. He went on editing and publishing
his paper for six months regardful only of what his reason
approved--regardless always of the disapproval of others. Not once did
he palter with his convictions or juggle with his self-respect for the
sake of pelf or applause. His human horizon was contracted, to be sure.
It could hardly be otherwise in one so young. His world was his country,
and patriotism imposed limits upon his affections. "Our country, our
whole country, and nothing but our country," was the ardent motto of the
_Free Press_. The love of family comes, in the order of growth, before
the love of country; and the love of country precedes the love of all
mankind. "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear,"
is the great law of love in the soul as of corn in the soil. Besides
this contraction of the affections, there was also manifest in his first
journalistic venture a deficiency in the organ of vision, a failure to
see into things and their relations. What he saw he reported faithfully,
suppressing nothing, adding nothing. But the objects which passed across
the disk of his editoral intelligence were confined almost entirely to
the surface of things, to the superficies of national life. He had not
the ken at twenty to penetrate beneath the happenings of current
politics. Of the existence of slavery as a supreme reality, we do not
think that he then had the faintest suspicion. No shadow of its
tremendous influence as a political power seemed to have arrested for a
brief instant his attention. He could copy into his paper this atrocious
sentiment which Edward Everett delivered in Congress, without the
slightest comment or allusion. "Sir, I am no soldier. My habits and
education are very unmilitary, but there is no cause in which I would
sooner buckle a knapsack on my back, and put a musket on my shoulder
than that of putting down a servile insurrection at the South." The
reason is plain enough. Slavery was a _terra incognito_ to him then, a
book of which he had not learned the ABC. Mr. Everett's language made no
impression on him, because he had not the key to interpret its
significance. What he saw, that he set down for his readers, without
fear or favor. He had not seen slavery, knew nothing of the evil.
Acquaintance with the deeper things of life, individual or national,
comes only with increasing years, they are hardly for him who has not
yet reached his majority. Slavery was the very deepest thing in the life
of the nation sixty-four years ago. And if Garrison did not then so
understand it, neither did his contemporaries, the wisest and greatest
of them so understand it. The subject of all others which attracted his
attention, and kept his editorial pen busy, was the claim of
Massachusetts for indemnity from the general government, for certain
disbursements made by her for the defence of her sea-coast during the
war of 1812. This matter, which forms but a mere dust point in the
perspective of history, his ardent young mind mistook for a principal
object, erected into a permanent question in the politics of the times.
But the expenditure of enormous energies upon things of secondary and of
even tertiary importance, to the neglect of others of prime and lasting
interest, is supremely human. He was errant where all men go astray. But
the schoolmaster of the nation was abroad, and was training this young
man for the work he was born to do. These six months were, therefore,
not wasted, for in the university of experience he did ever prove
himself an apt scholar. One lesson he had learned, which he never needed
to relearn. Just what that lesson was, he tells in his valedictory to
the subscribers of the _Free Press_, as follows: "This is a time-serving
age; and he who attempts to walk uprightly or speak honestly, cannot
rationally calculate upon speedy wealth or preferment." A sad lesson, to
be sure, for one so young to learn so thoroughly. Perhaps some reader
will say that this was cynical, the result of disappointment. But it was
not cynical, neither was it the result of disappointment. It was
unvarnished truth, and more's the pity, but truth it was none the less.
It was one of those hard facts, which he of all men, needed to know at
the threshold of his experience with the world. Such a revelation proves
disastrous to the many who go down to do business in that world.
Ordinary and weak and neutral moral constitutions are wrecked on this
reef set in the human sea. Like a true mariner he had written it boldly
on his chart. There at such and such a point in the voyage for the
golden fleece, were the rocks and the soul-devouring dragons of the way.
Therefore, oh! my soul, beware. What, indeed, would this argonaut of the
press take in exchange for his soul? Certainly not speedy wealth nor
preferment. Ah! he could not praise where he ought to reprobate; could
not reprobate where praise should be the meed. He had no money and
little learning, but he had a conscience and he knew that he must be
true to that conscience, come to him either weal or woe. Want renders
most men vulnerable, but to it, he appeared, at this early age,
absolutely invulnerable. Should he and that almost omnipotent
inquisitor, public opinion, ever in the future come into collision upon
any principle of action, a keen student of human nature might forsee
that the young recusant could never be starved into silence or
conformity to popular standards. And with this stern, sad lesson
treasured up in his heart, Garrison graduated from another room in the
school-house of experience. All the discoveries of the young journalist
were not of this grim character. He made another discovery altogether
different, a real gem of its kind. The drag-net of a newspaper catches
all sorts of poets and poetry, good, bad, and indifferent--oftener the
bad and indifferent, rarely the good. The drag-net of the _Free Press_
was no exception to this rule; but, one day, it fetched up from the
depths of the hard commonplaces of our New England town life a genuine
pearl. We will let Mr. Garrison tell the story in his own way:
"Going up-stairs to my office, one day, I observed a letter
lying near the door, to my address; which, on opening, I found
to contain an original piece of poetry for my paper, the _Free
Press_. The ink was very pale, the handwriting very small; and,
having at that time a horror of newspaper original poetry--which
has rather increased than diminished with the lapse of time--my
first impulse was to tear it in pieces, without reading it; the
chances of rejection, after its perusal, being as ninety-nine to
one; ... but summoning resolution to read it, I was equally
surprised and gratified to find it above mediocrity, and so gave
it a place in my journal.... As I was anxious to find out the
writer, my post-rider, one day, divulged the secret, stating
that he had dropped the letter in the manner described, and that
it was written by a Quaker lad, named Whittier, who was daily at
work on the shoemaker's bench, with hammer and lapstone, at East
Haverhill. Jumping into a vehicle, I lost no time in driving to
see the youthful rustic bard, who came into the room with
shrinking diffidence, almost unable to speak, and blushing like
a maiden. Giving him some words of encouragement, I addressed
myself more particularly to his parents, and urged them with
great earnestness to grant him every possible facility for the
development of his remarkable genius."
Garrison had not only found a true poet, but a true friend as well, in
the Quaker lad, John Greenleaf Whittier. The friendship which sprang up
between the two was to last during the lifetime of the former. Neither
of them in those days of small things could have possibly by any flight
of the imagination foreseen how their two lives, moving in parallel
lines, would run deep their shining furrows through one of the greatest
chapters of human history. But I am anticipating, and that is a vice of
which no good storyteller ought to be guilty. So, then, let me
incontinently return from this excursion and pursue the even tenor of my
tale.
Garrison had stepped down from his elevated position as the publisher
and editor of the _Free Press_. He was without work, and, being
penniless, it behooved him to find some means of support. With the
instinct of the bright New England boy, he determined to seek his
fortunes in Boston. If his honesty and independence put him at a
disadvantage, as publisher and editor, in the struggle for existence, he
had still his trade as a compositor to fall back upon As a journeyman
printer he would earn his bread, and preserve the integrity of an
upright spirit. And so without a murmur, and with cheerfulness and
persistency, he hunted for weeks on the streets of Boston for a chance
to set types. This hunting for a job in a strange city was discouraging
enough. Twice before had he visited the place, which was to be his
future home. Once when on his way to Baltimore to see his mother, and
once afterward when on a sort of pleasure tramp with three companions.
But the slight knowledge which he was able to obtain of the town and its
inhabitants under these circumstances did not now help him, when from
office to office he went in quest of something to do. After many
failures and renewed searchings, he found what he was after, an
opportunity to practice his trade. Business was dull, which kept our
journeyman printer on the wing; first at one and then at another
printing office we find him setting types for a living during the year
1827. The winning of bread was no easy matter; but he was not ashamed to
work, neither was he afraid of hard work. During this year, he found
time to take a hand in a little practical politics. There was in July,
1827, a caucus of the Federal party to nominate a successor to Daniel
Webster in the House of Representatives. Young Garrison attended this
caucus, and made havoc of its cut and dried programme, by moving the
nomination of Harrison Gray Otis, instead of the candidate, a Mr.
Benjamin Gorham, agreed upon by the leaders. Harrison Gray Otis was one
of Garrison's early and particular idols. He was, perhaps, the one
Massachusetts politician whom the young Federalist had placed on a
pedestal. And so on this occasion he went into the caucus with a written
speech in his hat, eulogistic of his favorite. He had meant to have the
speech at his tongue's end, and to get it off as if on the spur of the
moment. But the speech stayed where it was put, in the speaker's hat,
and failed to materialize where and when it was wanted on the speaker's
tongue. As the mountain would not go to Mahomet, Mahomet like a sensible
prophet went to the mountain. Our orator in imitation of this
illustrious example, bowed to the inevitable and went to his mountain.
Pulling his extempore remarks out of his hat, he delivered himself of
them to such effect as to create quite an Otis sentiment in the meeting.
This performance was, of course, a shocking offence in the eyes of
those, whose plans it had disturbed. With one particular old fogy he got
into something of a newspaper controversy in consequence. The
"consummate assurance" of one so young fairly knocked the breath out of
this Mr. Eminent Respectability; it was absolutely revolting to all his
"ideas of propriety, to see a stranger, a man who never paid a tax in
our city, and perhaps no where else, to possess the impudence to take
the lead and nominate a candidate for the electors of Boston!" The
"young gentleman of six months standing," was not a whit abashed or awed
by the commotion which he had produced. That was simply a case of cause
and effect. But he seemed in turn astonished at his opponent's evident
ignorance of William Lloyd Garrison. "It is true," he replied, with the
proud dignity of conscious power, "it is true that my acquaintance in
this city is limited. I have sought none. Let me assure him, however,
that if my life be spared, my name shall one day be known to the
world--at least to such extent that common inquiry shall be unnecessary.
This, I know will be deemed excessive vanity--but time shall prove it
prophetic." To the charge of youth he makes this stinging rejoinder,
which evinces the progress he was making in the tournament of language:
"The little, paltry sneers at my youth by your correspondent have long
since become pointless. It is the privileged abuse of old age--the
hackneyed allegation of a thousand centuries--the damning _crime_ to
which all men have been subjected. I leave it to metaphysicians to
determine the precise moment when wisdom and experience leap into
existence, when, for the first time, the mind distinguishes truth from
error, selfishness from patriotism, and passion from reason. It is
sufficient for me that I am understood." This was Garrison's first
experience with "gentlemen of property and standing" in Boston. It was
not his last, as future chapters will abundantly show.