THE MAN BEGINS HIS MINISTRY.
Some time in August, 1829, Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began with
Lundy the editorship of _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_. Radical
as the Park Street Church address was, it had, nevertheless, ceased to
represent in one essential matter his anti-slavery convictions and
principles. The moral impetus and ground-swell of the address had
carried him beyond the position where its first flood of feeling had for
the moment left him. During the composition of the address he was
transported with grief and indignation at the monstrous wrong which
slavery did the slaves and the nation. He had not thought out for
himself any means to rid both of the curse. The white heat of the
address destroyed for the instant all capacity for such thinking. "Who
can be amazed, temperate, and furious--in a moment? No man. The
expedition of his violent love outran the pauser reason" He had accepted
the colonization scheme as an instrument for removing the evil, and
called on all good citizens "to assist in establishing auxiliary
colonization societies in every State, county, and town"; and implored
"their direct and liberal patronage to the parent society." He had not
apparently, so much as dreamed of any other than gradual emancipation.
"The emancipation of all the slaves of this generation is most assuredly
out of the question," he said; "the fabric which now towers above the
Alps, must be taken away brick by brick, and foot by foot, till it is
reduced so low that it may be overturned without burying the nation in
its ruins. Years may elapse before the completion of the achievement;
generations of blacks may go down to the grave, manacled and lacerated,
without a hope for their children." He was on the Fourth of July a firm
and earnest believer in the equity and efficacy of gradualism. But after
that day, and some time before his departure for Baltimore, he began to
think on this subject. The more he thought the less did gradualism seem
defensible on moral grounds. John Wesley had said that slavery was the
"sum of all villainies"; it was indeed the sin of sins, and as such
ought to be abandoned not gradually but immediately. Slave-holding was
sin and slaveholders were sinners. The sin and sinner should both be
denounced as such and the latter called to instant repentance, and the
duty of making immediate restitution of the stolen liberties of their
slaves. This was the tone ministers of religion held every where toward
sin and sinners, and this should be the tone held by the preachers of
Abolition toward slavery, and slaveholders. To admit the principle of
gradualism was for Abolition to emasculate itself of its most virile
quality. Garrison, consequently rejected gradualism as a weapon, and
took up instead the great and quickening doctrine of immediatism. Lundy
did not know of this change in the convictions of his coadjutor until
his arrival in Baltimore. Then Garrison frankly unburdened himself and
declared his decision to conduct his campaign against the national
iniquity along the lines of immediate and unconditional emancipation.
The two on this new radicalism did not see eye to eye. But Lundy with
sententious shrewdness and liberality suggested to the young radical:
"Thee may put thy initials to thy articles and I will put my initials to
mine, and each will bear his own burden." And the arrangement pleased
the young radical, for it enabled him to free his soul of the necessity
which was then sitting heavily upon it. The precise state of his mind in
respect of the question at this juncture in its history and in his own
is made plain enough in his salutatory address in _The Genius of
Universal Emancipation_. The vow made in Bennington ten months before to
devote his life to philanthrophy, and the dedication of himself made six
months afterward to the extirpation of American slavery, he solemnly
renews and reseals in Baltimore. He does not hate intemperance and war
less, but slavery more, and those, therefore, he formally relegates
thenceforth to a place of secondary importance in the endeavors of the
future. It is obvious that the colonization scheme has no strong hold
upon his intelligence. He does not conceal his respect for it as an
instrument of freedom, but he puts no high value on its utility. "It may
pluck a few leaves," he remarks, "from the Bohon Upas, but can neither
extract its roots nor destroy its withering properties. Viewed as an
auxiliary, it deserves encouragement; but as a remedy it is altogether
inadequate." But this was not all. As a remedy, colonization was not
only altogether inadequate, its influence was indirectly pernicious, in
that it lulled the popular mind into "a belief that the monster has
received his mortal wound." He perceived that this resultant
indifference and apathy operated to the advantage of slavery, and to the
injury of freedom. Small, therefore, as was the good which the
Colonization Society was able to achieve, it was mixed with no little
ill. Although Garrison has not yet begun to think on the subject, to
examine into the motives and purposes of the society, it does not take a
prophet to foresee that some day he will. He had already arrived at
conclusions in respect of the rights of the colored people "to choose
their own dwelling place," and against the iniquity of their
expatriation, which cut directly at the roots of the colonization
scheme. Later the pro-slavery character of the society will be wholly
revealed to him. But truth in the breast of a reformer as of others must
needs follow the great law of moral growth, first the blade, then the
ear, and then the full corn in the ear. It is enough that he has made
the tremendous step from gradual to immediate and unconditional
emancipation on the soil.
At this period he tested the disposition of slaveholders to manumit
their slaves. The Colonization Society had given it out that there was
no little desire on the part of many masters to set their slaves free.
All that was wanted for a practical demonstration in this direction was
the assurance of free transportation out of the country for the
emancipated slaves. Lundy had made arrangement for the transportation of
fifty slaves to Hayti and their settlement in that country. So he and
Garrison advertised this fact in the _Genius_, but they waited in vain
for a favorable response from the South--notwithstanding the following
humane inducement which this advertisement offered: "THE PRICE OF
PASSAGE WILL BE ADVANCED, and everything furnished of which they may
stand in need, until they shall have time to prepare their houses and
set in to work." No master was moved to take advantage of the
opportunity. This was discouraging to the believers in the efficacy of
colonization as a potent anti-slavery instrument. But Garrison was no
such believer. With unerring moral instinct he had from the start placed
his reliance "on nothing but the eternal principles of justice for the
speedy overthrow of slavery."
He obtained at this period an intimate personal knowledge of the free
colored people. He saw that they were not essentially unlike other
races--that there was nothing morally or intellectually peculiar about
them, and that the evil or the good which they manifested was the common
property of mankind in similar circumstances. He forthwith became their
brave defender against the common slanders of the times. "There is a
prevalent disposition among all classes to traduce the habits and morals
of our free blacks," he remarked in the _Genius_. "The most scandalous
exaggerations in regard to their condition are circulated by a thousand
mischievous tongues, and no reproach seems to them too deep or
unmerited. Vile and malignant indeed is this practice, and culpable are
they who follow it. We do not pretend to say that crime, intemperance,
and suffering, to a considerable extent, cannot be found among the free
blacks; but we do assert that they are as moral, peaceable, and
industrious as that class of the whites who are, like them, in indigent
circumstances--and far less intemperate than the great body of foreign
immigrants who infest and corrupt our shores." This idea of the natural
equality of the races he presented in the _Genius_ a few weeks before
with Darwinian breadth in the following admirable sentences: "I deny the
postulate that God has made, by an irreversible decree, or any inherent
qualities, one portion of the human race superior to another. No matter
how many breeds are amalgamated--no matter how many shades of color
intervene between tribes or nations give them the same chances to
improve, and a fair start at the same time, and the result will be
equally brilliant, equally productive, equally grand."
At the same time that he was making active, personal acquaintance with
the free colored people, he was making actual personal acquaintance with
the barbarism of slavery also. "The distinct application of a whip, and
the shrieks of anguish" of the slave, his residence in Baltimore had
taught him was "nothing uncommon" in that city. Such an instance had
come to him while in the street where the office of the _Genius_ was
located. It was what was occurring at almost all hours of the day and in
almost all parts of the town. He had not been in Baltimore a month when
he saw a specimen of the brutality of slavery on the person of a negro,
who had been mercilessly flogged. On his back were thirty-seven gashes
made with a cowskin, while on his head were many bruises besides. It was
a Sunday morning, fresh from his terrible punishment, that the poor
fellow had found the editors of the _Genius_, who, with the compassion
of brothers, took him in, dressed his wounds, and cared for him for two
days. Such an experience was no new horror to Lundy, but it was
doubtless Garrison's first lesson in that line, and it sank many fathoms
deep into his heart.
Maryland was one of the slave-breeding States and Baltimore a slave
emporium. There was enacted the whole business of slavery as a
commercial enterprise. Here the human chattels were brought and here
warehoused in jails and other places of storage and detention. Here they
were put up at public auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder,
and from here they were shipped to New Orleans, the great distributing
center for such merchandise. He heard what Lundy had years before heard,
the wail of captive mothers and fathers, wives, husbands and children,
torn from each other; like Lundy, "he felt their pang of distress; and
the iron entered his soul." He could not hold his peace in the midst of
such abominations, but boldly exposed and denounced them. His
indignation grew hot when he saw that Northern vessels were largely
engaged in the coastwise slave-trade; and when, to his amazement, he
learned that the ship _Francis_, owned by Francis Todd, a Newburyport
merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves,
his indignation burst into blaze. He blazoned the act and the name of
Francis Todd in the _Genius_, and did verily what he had resolved to do,
viz., "to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this
nefarious business," the captain as well as the owner of the
ill-freighted ship. He did literally point at these men the finger of
scorn. Every device known to the printer's art for concentrating the
reader's attention upon particular words and sentences, Garrison made
skillful use of in his articles--from the deep damnation of the heavy
black capitals in which he printed the name Francis Todd, to the small
caps in which appeared the words, "sentenced to solitary confinement for
life," and which he flanked with two terrible indices. But the articles
did not need such embellishment. They were red hot branding irons
without them. One can almost smell the odor of burning flesh as he reads
the words: "It is no worse to fit out piratical cruisers or to engage in
the foreign slave-trade, than to pursue a similar trade along our coast;
and the men who have the wickedness to participate therein, for the
purpose of keeping up wealth should be ==>SENTENCED TO SOLITARY
CONFINEMENT FOR LIFE; <==_they are the enemies of their own
species--highway robbers, and murderers_; and their final doom will be,
unless they speedily repent, _to occupy the lowest depths of perdition_.
I know that our laws make a distinction in this matter. I know that the
man who is allowed to freight his vessel with slaves at home, for a
distant market, would be thought worthy of death if he should take a
similar freight on the coast of Africa; but I know, too, that this
distinction is absurd, and at war with the common sense of mankind, and
that God and good men regard it with abhorrence.
"I recollect that it was always a mystery in Newburyport how Mr. Todd
contrived to make profitable voyages to New Orleans and other places,
when other merchants, with as fair an opportunity to make money, and
sending to the same ports at the same time invariably made fewer
successful speculations. The mystery seems to be unravelled. Any man can
gather up riches if he does not care by what means they are obtained."
A copy of the _Genius_, containing this article Garrison sent to the
owner of the ship _Francis_. What followed made it immediately manifest
that the branding irons of the reformer had burned home with scarifying
effect. Mr. Todd's answer to the strictures was a suit at law against
the editors of the _Genius_ for five thousand dollars in damages. But
this was not all. The Grand Jury for Baltimore indicted them for
publishing "a gross and malicious libel against Francis Todd and
Nicholas Brown." This was at the February Term, 1830. On the first day
of March following, Garrison was tried. He was ably and eloquently
defended by Charles Mitchell, a young lawyer of the Baltimore Bar. But
the prejudice of judge and jury rendered the verdict of guilty a
foregone conclusion. April 17, 1830, the Court imposed a penalty of
fifty dollars and costs, which, with the fine amounted in all to nearly
one hundred dollars. The fine and costs Garrison could not pay, and he
was therefore committed to jail as a common malefactor. His confinement
lasted seven weeks. He did not languish during this period. His head and
hands were in fact hardly ever more active than during the term of his
imprisonment. Shut out by Maryland justice from work without the jail,
he found and did that which needed to be done within "high walls and
huge." He was an extraordinary prisoner and was treated with
extraordinary consideration by the Warden. He proved himself a genuine
evangel to the prisoners, visiting them in their cells, cheering them by
his bouyant and benevolent words, giving them what he had, a brother's
sympathy, which to these ill-fated ones, was more than gold or silver.
He indited for such of them as he deemed deserving, letters and
petitions to the Governor praying their pardon; and he had the great
satisfaction of seeing many of his efforts in this regard crowned with
success.
But more than this his imprisonment afforded him an opportunity for a
closer acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery than he could possibly
have made had he lived otherwise in Baltimore. A Southern jail was not
only the place of detention of offenders against social justice, but of
slaves waiting for the next market-day, of recaptured fugitives waiting
for their owners to reclaim them. Here they were huddled and caged,
pitiful and despairing in their misery. Such scenes sickened the young
reformer every day. God had opened to him the darkest chapter in the
book of the negroes' wrongs. Here is a page from that black volume of
oppression and cruelty, the record of which he has preserved in the
following graphic narrative: "During my late incarceration in Baltimore
prison, four men came to obtain a runaway slave. He was brought out of
his cell to confront his master, but pretended not to know him--did not
know that he had ever seen him before--could not recollect his name. Of
course the master was exceedingly irritated. 'Don't you remember,' said
he, 'when I gave you not long since thirty-nine lashes under the
apple-tree? Another time when I gave you a sound flogging in the barn?
Another time when you was scourged for giving me the lie, by saying that
the horse was in a good condition?' 'Yes,' replied the slave, whose
memory was thus quickened, 'I do recollect. You have beaten me cruelly
without cause; you have not given me enough to eat and drink; and I
don't want to go back again. I wish you to sell me to another master. I
had rather even go to Georgia than to return home!'
"'I'll let you know, you villain,' said the master, 'that my wishes and
not _yours_, are to be consulted. I'll learn you how to run away
again.'"
The other men advised him to take the black home, and cut him up in inch
pieces for his impudence, obstinacy, and desertion--swearing
tremendously all the while. The slave was ordered back to his cell. Then
ensued the following colloquy between Garrison and the master:
G.--"Sir, what right have you to that poor creature?"
M.--"My father left him to me."
G.--"Suppose your father had broken into a bank and stolen ten thousand
dollars, and safely bequeathed that as a legacy; could you
conscientiously keep the money? For myself, I had rather rob any bank to
an indefinite amount than kidnap a fellow-being, or hold him in bondage;
the sin would be less injurious to society, and less sinful in the sight
of God."
M.--"Perhaps you would like to buy the slave and give him his liberty?"
G.--"Sir, I am a poor man; and were I ever so opulent, it would be
necessary, on your part, to make out a clear title to the services of
the slave before I could conscientiously make a bargain."
M--"Well, sir, I can prove from the Bible that slavery is right."
G.--"Ah! that is a precious book--the rule of conduct. I have always
supposed that its spirit was directly opposed to everything in the shape
of fraud and oppression. However, sir, I should be glad to hear your
text."
M. (hesitatingly)--"Ham--Noah's curse, you know."
G. (hastily)--"Oh, sir, you build on a very slender foundation. Granting
even--what remains to be proved--that the Africans are the descendants
of Ham, Noah's curse was a _prediction_ of future servitude, and not an
injunction to oppress. Pray, sir, is it a careful desire to fulfill the
Scriptures, or to make money, that induces you to hold your fellow-men
in bondage?"
M. (excitedly)--"Why, sir, do you really think that the slaves are
beings like ourselves?--that is, I mean do you believe that they possess
the same faculties and capacities as the whites?"
G. (energetically)--"Certainly, sir, I do not know that there is any
moral or intellectual quality in the curl of the hair, or the color of
the skin. I cannot conceive why a black man may not as reasonably object
to my color, as I to his. Sir, it is not a black face that I detest, but
a black heart--and I find it very often under a white skin."
M. (derisively)--"Well, sir, how should you like to see a black man
President of the United States?"
G. (severely)--"As to that, sir, I am a true Republican, and bow to the
will of the majority. If the people prefer a black President, I should
cheerfully submit; and if he be qualified for the station, may
peradventure give him my vote."
M. (triumphantly)--"How should you like to have a black man marry your
daughter?"
G. (making a home thrust and an end of the dialogue)--"I am not
married--I have no daughter. Sir, I am not familiar with _your_
practices; but allow me to say, that slaveholders generally should be
the last persons to affect fastidiousness on that point; for they seem
to be enamored with _amalgamation_."
Garrison's pen was particularly busy during the term of his
imprisonment. He paid his respects to the State's Attorney who
prosecuted him, to the judge who condemned him, and to Francis Todd, the
owner of the ship _Francis_. He prepared and scattered broadcast a true
account of his trial, showing how the liberty of the press had been
violated in the case. He did not doubt that it would astonish Europe if
it were known there "that _an American citizen lies incarcerated in
prison, for having denounced slavery and its abettors in his own
country_." The fact created no little astonishment in America. Slavery
became distinctly connected for the first time with abridgments of the
freedom of the press, and the right of free speech. And the cause of the
slave became involved with the Constitutional liberties of the republic.
In punishing Garrison, the Abolitionist, the rights of Garrison the
white freeman were trampled on. And white freemen in the North, who
cared nothing for Abolitionism, but a great deal for their right to
speak and write freely, resented the outrage. This fact was the most
important consequence, which flowed from the trial and imprisonment of
the young editor of _The Genius of Universal Emancipation_. "As the news
of my imprisonment became extensively known," he wrote, "and the merits
of the case understood, not a mail rolled into the city but it brought
me consolatary letters from individuals hitherto unknown to me, and
periodicals of all kinds from every section of the Union (not even
excepting the South), all uniting to give me a triumphant acquittal--all
severely reprehending the conduct of Mr. Todd--and all regarding my
trial as a mockery of justice." This unexpected result was one of those
accidents of history, which "have laws as fixed as planets have."
The prosecution and imprisonment of Garrison was without doubt designed
to terrorize him into silence on the subject of slavery. But his
persecutors had reckoned without a knowledge of their victim. Garrison
had the martyr's temperament and invincibility of purpose. His
earnestness burned the more intensely with the growth of opposition and
peril. Within "gloomy walls close pent," he warbled gay as a bird of a
freedom which tyrants could not touch, nor bolts confine:
"No chains can bind it, and no cell enclose,
Swifter than light, it flies from pole to pole,
And in a flash from earth to heaven it goes!"
or with deep, stern gladness sang he to "The Guiltless Prisoner" how:
"A martyr's crown is richer than a king's!
Think it an honor with thy Lord to bleed,
And glory 'midst intensest sufferings;
Though beat--imprisoned--put to open shame
Time shall embalm and magnify thy name."
"Is it supposed by Judge Brice," the guiltless prisoner wrote from his
cell, "that his frowns can intimidate me, or his sentence stifle my
voice on the subject of African oppression? He does not know me. So long
as a good Providence gives me strength and intellect, I will not cease
to declare that the existence of slavery in this country is a foul
reproach to the American name; nor will I hesitate to proclaim the guilt
of kidnappers, slave abettors, or slaveowners, wheresoever they may
reside, or however high they may be exalted. I am only in the _alphabet_
of my task; time shall perfect a useful work. It is my shame that I have
done so little for the people of color; yea, before God, I feel humbled
that my feelings are so cold, and my language so weak. A few white
victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show
the tyranny of our laws. I expect and am willing to be persecuted,
imprisoned, and bound for advocating African rights; and I should
deserve to be a slave myself if I shrunk from that duty or danger." The
story of the trial of William Lloyd Garrison, from which the above brave
words are taken, fell into the hands of that noble man and munificent
merchant, Arthur Tappan, of New York. From the reading of it he rose
"with that deep feeling of abhorrence of slavery and its abettors which
every one must feel who is capable of appreciating the blessings of
liberty," and thereupon notified Lundy to draw upon him for one hundred
dollars if that amount would give the young editor his liberty. The fine
and costs of court were accordingly paid and just forty-nine days after
entering Baltimore jail a prisoner, Garrison recovered his freedom. The
civil action of Todd against him was still pending. Nothing daunted
Garrison went North two days after his discharge to obtain certain
evidence deemed important by his counsel to his defence. He took with
him an open letter from Lundy looking to the renewal of the weekly
_Genius_ under their joint control. Prior to Garrison's trial the paper
had fallen into great stress for want of money. Lundy and he had made a
division of their labors, the latter doing the editorial and office
work, while the former traveled from place to place soliciting
subscriptions and collecting generally the sinews of war. But the
experiment was not successful from a business standpoint. For as
Garrison playfully observed subsequently: "Where friend Lundy could get
one new subscriber, I could knock a _dozen_ off, and I did so. It was
the old experiment of the frog in the well, that went two feet up and
fell three feet back, at every jump." Where the income of the paper did
not exceed fifty dollars in four months and the weekly expenditure
amounted to at least that sum, the financial failure of the enterprise
was inevitable. This unhappy event did actually occur six weeks before
the junior editor went to jail; and the partnership was formally
dissolved in the issue of the _Genius_ of March 5, 1830. But when Arthur
Tappan made his generous offer of a hundred dollars to effect Garrison's
release, he made at the same time an offer of an equal amount to aid the
editors in reëstablishing the _Genius_. This proposition led to hopes on
the part of the two friends to a renewal of their partnership in the
cause of emancipation. And so Garrison's visit to the North was taken
advantage of to test the disposition of Northern philanthropy to support
such a paper. But what he found was a sad lack of interest in the slave.
Everywhere he went he encountered what appeared to him to be the most
monstrous indifference and apathy on the subject. The prejudices of the
free States seemed to him stronger than were those of the South. Instead
of receiving aid and encouragement to continue the good work of himself
and coadjutor, and for the doing of which he had served a term of seven
weeks in prison, men, even his best friends sought to influence him to
give it up, and to persuade him to forsake the slave, and to turn his
time and talents to safer and more profitable enterprises nearer home.
He was informed by these worldly wise men and Job's counselors that his
"scheme was visionary, fanatical, unattainable." "Why should he make
himself," they argued, "an exile from home and all that he held dear on
earth, and sojourn in a strange land, among enemies whose hearts were
dead to every noble sentiment?" Ah! he himself confessed that all were
against his return to Baltimore. But his love of the slave was stronger
than the strength of the temptation. He put all these selfish objections
behind him. As he has recorded the result of this experience:
"Opposition served only to increase my ardor, and confirm my purpose."
Strange and incomprehensible to his fellows is the man who prefers
"persecution, reproach, and poverty" with duty, to worldly ease and
honor and riches without it. When a man appears in society who is not
controlled by motives which usually govern the conduct of other men he
becomes at first an object of pity, then of contempt, and, lastly, of
hate. Garrison we may be sure at the end of this visit had made rapid
transit from the first to the second of these stages in the esteem of
his generation.
His experience was not all of this deplorable kind. He left Baltimore
without the money required to pay his way North, depending literally
upon the good God to provide for him the necessary means to complete his
journey. And such help was more than once providentially afforded the
young apostle of liberty. At New York, when he did not know how he was
to go farther for want of means, he met a Mr. Samuel Leggett who gave
him a pass on the "splendid steamboat _President_." It seems that this
friend in his need had read with indignation the story of his trial. The
bread which he had scattered from his prison on the waters of public
sentiment had thus returned to him after many days in the timely
assistance of a sympathetic soul. And then, again, when he was in Boston
in sore distress for a little money, suddenly, beautifully, the desire
of his heart was satisfied. But let him tell the incident in his own
touching way. His face was turned toward Baltimore: "But how was I to
return?" he asks. "I had not a dollar in my pocket, and my time was
expired. No one understood my circumstances. I was too proud to beg, and
ashamed to borrow. My friends were prodigal of pity, but of nothing
else. In the extremity of my uneasiness, I went to the Boston
post-office, and found a letter from my friend Lundy, inclosing a draft
for $100 from a stranger and as a remuneration for my poor inefficient
services in behalf of the slaves!" The munificent stranger was Ebenezer
Dole, of Hallowell, Maine. Money thus acquired was a sacred trust to
this child of Providence. "After deducting the expenses of traveling,"
he goes on to say, "the remainder of the above-named sum was applied in
discharging a few of the debts incurred by the unproductiveness of the
_Genius_."
Garrison returned to Baltimore, but he did not tarry long in that
slave-ruled city. Todd's suit against him was tried after his departure,
and the jury soothed the Newburyport merchant's wounded pride with a
verdict for a thousand dollars. He never attempted, however, to enforce
the payment of the same being content probably with the "vindication,"
which his legal victory gave him.
Before the reformer left Baltimore he had definitely abandoned the plans
looking to a revival of his interest in the _Genius_. He determined
instead to publish a sheet devoted to the abolition of slavery under his
sole management and control. This paper he proposed to call the _Public
Liberator_, and to issue from Washington. The prospectus of this
journalistic project bearing date, August, 1830, declares in its opening
sentence its "primary object" to be "the abolition of slavery, and the
moral and intellectual elevation of our colored population." "I shall
spare no efforts," he pledged himself, "to delineate the withering
influence of slavery upon our national prosperity and happiness, its
awful impiety, its rapid extension, and its inevitable consequences if
it be suffered to exist without hindrance. It will also be my purpose to
point out the path of safety, and a remedy for the disease." This
comprehensive and aggressive plan of campaign signalized the rise of an
Abolitionism wholly unlike the Abolitionism of any previous time in the
history of the country. It did in fact date the opening of a new era in
the slavery struggle in America.
With Northern indifference and apathy on the subject of emancipation,
Garrison's previous visit to the North had acquainted him. Their
existence he saw interposed the main obstacle to the success of his new
venture in journalism. "The cause of this callous state of feeling," he
believed, "was owing to their exceeding ignorance of the horrors of
slavery." He accordingly made up his mind to throw the light which he
possessed into the midst of this darkness. He had written in prison
three lectures on "Slavery and Colonization." What better could he now
do than to deliver those lectures at the North? If the good people and
their religious leaders knew what he knew, they would presently feel as
he did on the question. He was loath to leave Baltimore without giving
this testimony against slavery. But unable to procure a room for this
purpose was finally compelled to content himself with the witness he had
already borne in the _Genius_ and in prison in behalf of the slave. In
Philadelphia he well-nigh failed to obtain a hall for his lectures, but
did finally succeed in getting the Franklin Institute, where, to small
audiences, he lifted up his voice against the iniquity of the times. He
repeated his lectures in New York, New Haven, and Hartford. But not many
came out to hear him. The nation, its churches, and politicians had
thrust their fingers in their ears to every cry coming up from the
slave. Why should they go to sup with a madman on horrors, with which as
patriotic people they were forbidden to concern themselves. And so for
the most part Garrison could do nothing with communities, which had
eyes, but obstinately refused to see with them upon any subject relating
to the abominations of slavery. In his own town of Newburyport, officers
of Christian churches not only refused to hear his message themselves,
but debarred others from listening to the woes and wrongs of
fellow-creatures in bondage. As Mr. Garrison truly said at the time: "If
I had visited Newburyport to plead the cause of twenty white men in
chains, every hall and every meeting-house would have been thrown open,
and the fervor of my discourses anticipated and exceeded by my
fellow-townsmen. The fact that two millions of colored beings are
groaning in bondage, in this land of liberty, excites no interest nor
pity." If these damning facts are remembered sixty years after their
occurrence to the shame of the trustees of the two churches, viz., the
Presbyterian Church on Harris street and the Second Congregational
Church, it is also remembered to the honor of the two pastors, Rev. Dr.
Daniel Dana, and the Rev. Dr. Luther F. Dimmick, that they had thrown
open to the prophet the doors of their meeting-houses, which the
trustees afterward slammed in his face.
In Boston the same hard luck followed him. In all that city of Christian
churches he could not obtain the use of a single meeting-house, "in
which to vindicate the rights of TWO MILLIONS of American citizens, who
are now groaning in servile chains in this boasted land of liberty; and
also to propose just, benevolent, and constitutional measures for their
relief." So ran an advertisement in the Boston _Courier_ of the sorely
tried soul. For two weeks he had gone up and down the town in search of
a room free of cost, in which to deliver his message. The door of every
sanctuary was locked against his cause. It was then, as a final
recourse, that he turned to the _Courier_, and made his last appeal to
the Christian charity of the city. The prayer of the prophet was
answered from an unexpected quarter. It was that ecclesiastical dragon
of the times, Abner Kneeland, and his society of "blasphemers," who
proved afresh the truth of that scripture which says: "Not every one
that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven;
but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." It was they
that gave to liberty a hearing, to the prophet of righteousness a chance
to deliver his message. It was in their meeting-house, in Julian Hall,
that Garrison gave his lectures, giving the first one on the evening of
October 15, 1830.
Samuel J. May, who was present, has preserved his impressions of the
lecture and lecturer. "Never before," he records many years afterward,
"was I so affected by the speech of man. When he had ceased speaking I
said to those around me: 'That is a providential man; he is a prophet;
he will shake our nation to its center, but he will shake slavery out of
it. We ought to know him, we ought to help him. Come, let us go and give
him our hands.' Mr. Sewall and Mr. Alcott went up with me and we
introduced each other. I said to him, 'Mr. Garrison, I am not sure that
I can indorse all you have said this evening. Much of it requires
careful consideration. But I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you
are called to a great work, and I mean to help you.' Mr. Sewall
cordially assured him of his readiness also to cooperate with him. Mr.
Alcott invited him to his home. He went and we sat with him until twelve
that night, listening to his discourse, in which he showed plainly that
_immediate, unconditional emancipation, without expatriation, was the
right of every slave, and could not be withheld by his master an hour
without sin_. That night my soul was baptised in his spirit, and ever
since I have been a disciple and fellow-laborer of William Lloyd
Garrison." A new force had arisen in our history, and a new epoch had
broken bolts for humanity.