THE HOUR AND THE MAN.
The providential man was not yet twenty-five. In personal appearance he
was quite the reverse of his friend Lundy. Garrison was gifted with a
body that matched his mind, strong, straight, sound in every part, and
proportioned in every member. As he stood he was much above the medium
height. His dark hair had already partially left the crown of the high
dome-shaped head. His forehead combined height with breadth, which,
taken in connection with the brown eyes covered with the now habitual
glasses, lent to his countenance a striking air of moral serenity and
elevation. Force, firmness, no ordinary self-reliance and courage found
masterly expression in the rest of the face. There was through the whole
physical man a nice blending of strength and delicacy of structure. The
impression of fineness and finish was perhaps mainly owing to the
woman-like purity and freshness of skin and color, which overspread the
virile lines and features of the face from brow to chin. What one saw in
that face was the quality of justice made flesh, good-will to men
personified.
This characterization of the reformer's countenance may be considered
absurd by some readers. But absurd it is not. People who had read his
stern denunciations of slave-holding and slaveholders, and who had
formed their image of the man from his "hard language" and their own
prejudices could not recognize the original when they met him. His
manner was peculiarly winning and attractive, and in personal
intercourse almost instantly disarmed hostility. The even gentleness of
his rich voice, his unfailing courtesy and good temper, his quick eye
for harmless pleasantries, his hearty laugh, the Quaker-like calmness,
deliberateness, and meekness, with which he would meet objections and
argue the righteousness of his cause, his sweet reasonableness and
companionableness were in strange contrast to popular misconceptions and
caricatures of him. No one needed to be persuaded, who had once
conversed with him, that there was no hatred or vindictiveness in his
severities of language toward slaveholders. That he was no Jacobin, no
enemy of society, was perceived the moment one looked into his grave,
kind face, or caught the warm accents of his pacific tones, or listened
to the sedate intensity, and humanity of his discourses on the enormity
of American slavery as they fell from him in conversations between man
and man. Here is a case in point, a typical incident in the life of the
reformer; it occurred, it is true, when he was twenty-seven, but it
might have occurred at twenty-five quite as well; it is narrated by
Samuel J. May in his recollections of the anti-slavery conflict: On his
way from New York to Philadelphia with Garrison, Mr. May fell into a
discussion with a pro-slavery passenger on the vexed question of the
day. There was the common pro-slavery reasoning, which May answered as
well as he was able. Presently Mr. Garrison drew near the disputants,
whereupon May took the opportunity to shift the anti-slavery burden of
the contention to his leader's shoulders. All of his most radical and
unpopular Abolition doctrines Garrison immediately proceeded to expound
to his opponent. "After a long conversation," says Mr. May, "which
attracted as many as could get within hearing, the gentleman said,
courteously: 'I have been much interested, sir, in what you have said,
and in the exceedingly frank and temperate manner in which you have
treated the subject. If all Abolitionists were like you, there would be
much less opposition to your enterprise. But, sir, depend upon it, that
hair-brained, reckless, violent fanatic, Garrison, will damage, if he
does not shipwreck, any cause.' Stepping forward, I replied, 'Allow me,
sir, to introduce you to Mr. Garrison, of whom you entertain so bad an
opinion. The gentleman you have been talking with is he.'"
Or take Harriet Martineau's first impressions on seeing him. "His aspect
put to flight in an instant what prejudices his slanderers had raised in
me. I was wholly taken by surprise. It was a countenance glowing with
health, and wholly expressive of purity, animation and gentleness. I did
not wonder at the citizen who, seeing a print of Garrison at a shop
window without a name to it, went in and bought it, and framed it as the
most saintlike of countenances."
The appearance of such a man on the stage of our history as a nation, at
this hour, was providential. His coming was in the fulness of time. A
rapid review of events anterior to the advent of Garrison will serve to
place this matter more clearly before the general reader. To begin,
then, at the beginning we have two ships off the American coast, the one
casting anchor in Plymouth harbor, the other discharging its cargo at
Jamestown. They were both freighted with human souls. But how different!
Despotism landed at Jamestown, democracy at Plymouth. Here in the germ
was the Southern idea, slave labor, slave institutions; and here also
was the Northern idea, free labor, free institutions. Once planted they
grew, each seed idea multiplying after its kind. In course of time there
arose on one side an industrial system in which the plantation
principle, race-rule and race-slavery, were organic centers; and, on the
other, a social system in which the principle of popular power and
government, the town meeting, and the common school were the ganglia of
social expansion. Contrary ideas beget naturally enough contrary
interests and institutions. So it is no matter for surprise that the
local interests and institutions of the thirteen revolted colonies
lacked homogeneity and identity. What was calculated to promote the
general welfare of the Northern one, it was quite possible might work a
totally opposite result in the Southern. For, indeed, while there were
slaves in them all, the slave system had taken root in Southern soil
only; and while on the other hand the spirit of freedom was existent in
each, free labor had rooted itself in Northern ground solely.
As the war of the Revolution was an uprising against arbitrary power,
and for the establishment of political liberty, it pushed easily into
the foreground the larger subject of human rights. Most of the leading
actors felt the inconsistency of keeping some men in bondage, when they
were fighting to rid themselves of a tyranny which, in comparison to the
other, was a state of honorable freedom. Their humanity condemned
African slavery, and they earnestly desired its extinction. The
Declaration of Independence proves to how high a level the tide of
freedom rose in the colonies. The grand truths by it proclaimed the
signers of that instrument did not restrict in their application to some
men to the exclusion of other men. They wrote "All men," and they meant
exactly what they wrote. Too simply honest and great they were to mean
less than their solemn and deliberate words.
On political as well as on moral grounds they desired emancipation. But
there was a difficulty which at the time proved insuperable. The
nation-making principle, the idea of country, was just emerging out of
the nebulous civil conditions and relations of the ante-Revolutionary
epoch. There was no existent central authority to reach the evil within
the States except the local governments of the States respectively. And
States in revolt against the central authority of the mother country
would hardly be disposed to divest themselves of any part of their newly
asserted right to govern themselves for the purpose of conferring the
same upon any other political body. To each State, then, the question
was necessarily left for settlement.
The war, during its continuance, absorbed the united resources and
energies of the people and their leaders. The anti-slavery movement made
accordingly but small progress. Reforms thrive only when they get a
hearing. Public attention is the food on which they thrive. But precious
little of this food was the Abolition cause able to snatch in those
bitter years. It could not grow. It remained in the gristle--hardly more
than a sentiment. But the sentiment was a seed, the promise and potency
of kindlier times. With the close of the long struggle other questions
arose; got the people's ears; fixed the attention of the leaders. Scant
notice could emancipation extort from men who had to repair the ravages
of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil
society in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder. The instinct of
self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling.
It succumbed to circumstances, content to obtain an occasional sermon,
an annual address, a few scattered societies to keep a human glow in the
bosom of the infant Confederacy.
The Confederation failed. The formation of a more perfect union was
demanded and undertaken. This transcendent task straightway thrust into
the background every other enterprise and interest. The feeble activity
of the freedom-making principle was checked, for the time being, by the
energy of the nation-making power. They were not antagonistic
forces--only in the natural order of things, the earliest stages in the
evolution of the former had to come after the first steps were taken in
the development of the latter. Before there could start a general
movement against American slavery there must needs be an American
nation. An American nation was, in the year 1787, in process of
successful development. With the adoption of the Constitution, the
national principle entered on a period of marvelous expansion and
activity.
Let it not, however, be hastily concluded that freedom meanwhile was in
total eclipse, that the anti-slavery sentiment was absolutely without
influence. For it unquestionably inspired the Ordinance of 1787. The
Northwest Territory, out of which were subsequently organized the States
of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was thereby,
forever secured to the Northern idea, and free labor. Supplementary to
this grand act was the Constitutional prohibition of the African
slave-trade after the year 1808. Together they were intended to
discourage the growth of slavery--the first by restricting its
territorial extension, the second, by arresting its numerical increase.
And without doubt they would have placed the evil in the way of ultimate
extinction had other and far reaching causes not intervened to produce
adverse social and political conditions.
The first of these causes, in point of time, were certain labor-saving
inventions in England, which vastly enhanced the demand for raw cotton.
Arkwright's invention of the spinning machine about twenty years prior
to the adoption of the Constitution, perfected by the spinning-jenny of
Hargreaves, and the mule of Crompton, "turned Lancashire," the historian
Green says, "into a hive of industry." The then rapid demand for cotton
operated in time as a stimulus to its production in America. Increased
productivity raised the value of slave property and slave soil. But the
slow and tedious hand method of separating the fiber of the cotton bulb
from the seed greatly limited the ability of the Cotton States to meet
and satisfy the fast growing demand of the English manufacturers, until
Eli Whitney, in 1793, by an ingenious invention solved the problem of
supply for these States. The cotton gin was not long in proving itself
the other half--the other hand of the spinning machine.
From that year the slave interests of the South rose in market value,
and its industrial system assumed unexpected importance in the economic
world. The increased production of cotton led directly to increased
demand for slave labor and slave soil. The increased demand for slave
labor the Constitutional provision relating to the African slave trade
operated in part to satisfy. The increased demand for slave soil was
likewise satisfied by the cession to the United States by Georgia and
North Carolina of the Southwest Territory, with provisos practically
securing it to slavery. Out of this new national territory were
subsequently carved the slave States of Tennessee, Mississippi, and
Alabama.
Slave soil unlike free soil, is incapable of sustaining a dense
population. Slave labor calls for large spaces within which to multiply
and prosper. The purchase of Louisiana and the acquisition of Florida
met this agrarian necessity on the part of the South. Immense, unsettled
areas thus fell to the lot of the slave system at the crisis of its
material expansion and prosperity. The domestic slave-trade under the
impetus of settling these vast regions according to the plantation
principle, became an enormous and spreading industry. The crop of slaves
was not less profitable than the crop of cotton. A Southern white man
had but to buy a score of slaves and a few hundred acres to get "rich
beyond the dreams of avarice." So at least calculated the average
Southern man.
This revival of slavery disappointed the humane expectation of its
decline and ultimate extinction entertained by the founders of the
republic. It built up instead a growing and formidable slave class, and
interest in the Union. With the rise of giant slave interests, there
followed the rise of a power devoted to their encouragement and
protection.
Three far-reaching concessions the slave States obtained in the
convention of 1787, viz., the right to import slaves from Africa until
1808; the rendition of fugitive slaves escaping into the free States,
and the three-fifths slave representation clause of the
Constitution--all of which added vastly to the security and value of
this species of property, and as a consequence contributed to the slave
revival.
The equality of the States in the upper branch of the National
Legislature, taken in connection with the right of the slave States to
count five slaves as three freemen in the apportionment of
representatives to the lower House of Congress, gave the Southern
section an almost immediate ascendency in the Federal Government. To the
South was thus opened by an unexpected combination of circumstances a
wide avenue for the acquisition of fabulous wealth, and to Southern
public men an incomparable arena for the exercise of political abilities
and leadership. An institution, which thus ministered to two of the
strongest passions of mankind--avarice and ambition--was certain to
excite the most intense attachment. Its safety naturally, therefore,
became among the slave class an object of prime importance. Southern
jealousy in this regard ultimated inevitably in Southern narrowness,
Southern sectionalism, which early manifested themselves in the
exclusion from lead in national affairs of Northern public men, reputed
to be unfriendly to slavery. Webster as late as 1830, protested warmly
against this intolerance. Like begets like. And the proscribing of
anti-slavery politicians by the South, created in turn not a little
sectional feeling at the North, and helped to stimulate there a
consciousness of sectional differences, of antagonism of interests
between the two halves of the Union.
Discontent with the original basis of the Union, which had given the
South its political coign of vantage, broke out first in New England.
The occasion, though not the cause, of this discontent was, perhaps, the
downfall of the Federal party, whose stronghold was in the East. The
commercial and industrial crisis brought on by the embargo, and which
beggared, on the authority of Webster, "thousands of families and
hundreds of thousands of individuals" fanned this Eastern
dissatisfaction into almost open disaffection towards a government
dominated by Southern influence, and directed by Southern statesmanship.
To the preponderance of this Southern element in national legislation
New England traced her misfortunes. She was opposed to the War of 1812,
but was overruled to her hurt by the South. In these circumstances New
England went for correcting the inequalities of the original basis of
the Union, which gave to the South its undue preponderance in shaping
national laws and policies. This was the purpose of the Hartford
Convention, which proposed the abrogation of the slave representation
clause of the Constitution, and the imposition of a check upon the
admission of new States into the Union. The second proposition did not
say "new slave States," but new slave States was, nevertheless, intended
by the Convention. Here in point of time and magnitude, was the first
distinct collision of the two sets of ideas and interests of the
Republic.
Following the Treaty of Ghent other and imperious questions engaged the
public attention--questions of the tariff, of finance, internal
improvements, national defence, a new navy, forts and fortifications.
Hard times, too, engrossed an enormous share of this attention. The
immediate needs and problems of the hour pushed into the background all
less pressing ones. The slavery question amidst the clamor and babel of
emergent and material interests, lost something of its sectional heat
and character. But its fires were not extinguished, only banked as
events were speedily to reveal.
The application of Missouri for admission into the Union as a slave
State four years after the Hartford Convention blew to a blaze the
covered embers of strife between the sections. The North was violently
agitated. For the admission of a new slave State meant two more slave
votes in the Senate, and an increase on the old inequitable basis of
slave representation in the lower House of Congress. It meant to the
Northern section indefinite Southern ascendency, prolonged Southern lead
in national legislation. All the smouldering passions of the earlier
period, of embargo, and non-intercourse, and the war of 1812, flamed
suddenly and fiercely in the heart of the free States.
The length and bitterness of that controversy excited the gravest
apprehensions for the stability of the Union. The dread of disunion led
to mutual concessions, to the Missouri Compromise. The slave-holding
section got its immediate claim allowed, and the free States secured the
erection of a line to the north of which slavery was forever prohibited.
And besides this, the admission of Maine was supposed to neutralize
whatever political advantages, which would accrue to the South from the
admission of Missouri as a slave State. Both sections were content, and
the slavery question was thought to be permanently settled. With this
final disposition of an ugly problem, the peace and permanence of the
Union were viewed universally as fixed facts. Still, considering the
gravity of the case, a little precaution would not go amiss. The slavery
question had shaken men's faith in the durability of the republic. It
was therefore adjudged a highly dangerous subject. The political
physicians with one accord prescribed on the ounce-of-prevention
principle, _quiet_, SILENCE, and OBLIVION, to be administered in large
and increasing doses to both sections. Mum was the word, and mum the
country solemnly and suddenly became from Maine to Georgia. But, alas!
beneath the ashes of this Missouri business, deep below the unnatural
silence and quiet, inextinguishable fires were burning and working again
to the surface of politics. In such circumstances a fresh outbreak of
old animosities must occur as soon as the subterranean heat should reach
the point of highest combustibility in the federal system. The tariff
proved to be that point of highest combustibility.
Alexander Hamilton inaugurated the policy of giving governmental aid to
infant manufactures. The wisdom of diversifying the industries of the
young nation was acquiesced in by the leading statesmen of both
sections. Beset as the republic then was by international forces hostile
to democratic institutions, it was natural enough that the great men who
presided over its early years should seek by Federal legislation to
render it, as speedily and completely as possible, industrially
self-dependent and self-supporting. The war of 1812 enforced anew upon
the attention of statesmen the importance of industrial independence.
The war debt, together with certain governmental enterprises and
expenditures growing out of the war, was largely, if not wholly,
responsible for the tariff of 1816. This act dates the rise of our
American system of protection. It is curious to note that Southern men
were the leaders of this new departure in the national fiscal policy.
Calhoun, Clay, and Lowndes were the guiding spirits of that period of
industrial ferment and activity. They little dreamt what economic evils
were to fall in consequence upon the South. That section was not slow to
feel the unequal action of the protective principle. The character of
its labor incapacitated the South from dividing the benefits of the new
revenue policy with its free rival. The South of necessity was
restricted to a single industry, the tillage of the earth. Slave labor
did not possess the intelligence, the skill, the patience, the
mechanical versatility to embark successfully in manufacturing
enterprises. Free labor monopolised the protected industries, and
Northern capital caught all the golden showers of fiscal legislation.
What the South needed, from an economic point of view, was unrestricted
access to the markets of the world for her products, and the freest
competition of the world in her own markets. The limitations imposed
upon the slave States by their industrial system was in itself a
tremendous handicap in their struggle for an advantageous place in the
New World of the nineteenth century; in their struggle with their free
sisters for political leadership in the Union. But with the development
of the protective principle those States fell into sore financial
distress, were ground between the upper millstone of the protective
system and the nether millstone of their own industrial system.
Prosperity and plenty did presently disappear from that section and
settled in the North. In 1828 Benton drew this dark picture of the state
of the South:
"In place of wealth, a universal pressure for money was felt; not enough
for common expenses; the price of all property down; the country
drooping and languishing; towns and cities decaying, and the frugal
habits of the people pushed to the verge of universal self-denial for
the preservation of their family estates."
He did not hesitate to charge to Federal legislation the responsibility
for all this poverty and distress, for he proceeds to remark that:
"Under this legislation the exports of the South have been made the
basis of the Federal revenue. The twenty odd millions annually levied
upon imported goods are deducted out of the price of their cotton, rice,
and tobacco, either in the diminished prices which they receive for
those staples in foreign ports, or in the increased price which they pay
for the articles they have to consume at home."
A suffering people are not apt to reason clearly or justly on the causes
which have brought them to indigence. They feel their wretchedness and
reach out for a victim. And the law-making power usually happens to be
that victim. As the distress of the South increased, the belief that
Federal legislation was responsible for it increased likewise. The
spread and deepening of this conviction in the Southern States
precipitated among them an ominous crisis in their attachment to the
Union. Nullification and an embittered sectionalism was the hateful
legacy bequeathed to the republic by the tariff controversy. It left the
South in a hyper-sensitive state in all matters relating to her domestic
interests. It left the North in a hyper-sensitive condition on all
matters touching the peace and stability of the Union. The silence and
oblivion policy on the subject of slavery was renewed with tenfold
intensity. Ulysses-like the free States bound themselves, their right of
free speech, and their freedom of the press on this subject, for fear of
the Siren voices which came thrilling on every breeze from the South.
Quiet was the word, and quiet the leaders in Church and State sought to
enforce upon the people, to the end that the vision of "States
dissevered, discordant, belligerent, of a land rent with civil feuds, or
drenched it may be, in fraternal blood," might not come to pass for
their "glorious Union."
The increasing friction and heat between the sections during twenty-five
years, had effected every portion of the Federal system, and created
conditions favorable to a violent explosion. Sectional differences of a
political and industrial complexion, forty years had sufficed to
develop. Sectional differences of a moral and social character forty
years had also sufficed to generate. To kindle all those differences,
all that mass of combustible feelings and forces into a general
conflagration a spark only was wanted. And out of the glowing humanity
of one man the spark was suddenly struck.
It is curious to note that in the year 1829, the very year in which
William Lloyd Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began the editorship of
_The Genius of Universal Emancipation_, the American Convention, or
national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of
slavery, fell into desuetude. It was as if Providence was clearing the
debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his
prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility
of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage
of the nation, put into old bottles. The Hour for a new movement against
slavery had come, and with its arrival the Man to hail it had also come.
Other men had spoken and written against slavery, and labored for the
freedom of the slave before Garrison had thought upon the subject at
all. Washington and Jefferson, Franklin, Jay, and Hamilton had been
Abolitionists before he was born, but theirs was a divided interest. The
establishment of a more perfect union was the paramount object of their
lives. John Wesley had denounced slavery in language quite as harsh as
Garrison's, but his, too, was a divided interest, the religious revival
of the eighteenth century being his distinctive mission. Benezet,
Woolman, and Lundy were saints, who had yearned with unspeakable
sympathy for the black bondmen, and were indefatigable in good works in
his behalf, but they had not that stern and iron quality without which
reforms cannot be launched upon the attention of mankind. What his
predecessors lacked, Garrison possessed to a marvelous degree--the
undivided interest, the supremacy of a single purpose, the stern stuff
out of which the moral reformer is made, and in which he is panoplied.
They were all his, but there was another besides--immediatism. This
element distinguished the movement against slavery, started by him, from
all other movements begun before he arrived on the stage, for the
emancipation of the slaves in the Union.
This doctrine of immediate as opposed to gradual emancipation, was not
original with Garrison, nor was he the first to enunciate it. More than
a dozen years before he was converted to it, Rev. George Bourne, in "The
Book and Slavery Irreconcilable," had shown that "the system (of
slavery) is so entirely corrupt that it admits of no cure but by a
_total and immediate abolition_. For a gradual emancipation is a virtual
recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice.
If it be just for one moment, it is hallowed forever; and if it be
inequitable, not a day should it be tolerated." In 1824, eight years
after the publication of Bourne's book, and five years before Garrison
announced the doctrine in the _Genius_, the Rev. James Duncan maintained
it, in his "Treatise on Slavery," with no uncertainty of sense or
conviction. But neither Bourne nor Duncan had been able to effect an
incarnation of the doctrine, without which the good which it aimed at
could not be achieved. What they failed to effect, it is the glory of
Garrison that he achieved in his own person. He was "_total and
immediate Abolition_" personified. "Truth is mighty and will prevail,"
is a wise saying and worthy of acceptation. But this ultimate prevailing
of TRUTH depends mainly upon individual effort, applied not
intermittently, but steadily to a particular segment of the circle of
conduct. It is the long, strong, never-ending pull and tug upon the
wheels of conduct, which marks the great reformer. He finds his age or
country stuck in some Serbonian bog of iniquity. He prays, but he prays
with his shoulders braced strenuously against the body of society, and
he does not cease his endeavors until a revolution in conduct places his
age or country on firm ground beyond its Serbonian bog. The coming of
such a man is no accident. When the Hour is ready and the Man comes, a
new epoch in the life of a people arises from the conjunction. Of such
vast consequence verily was the coming into American history of William
Lloyd Garrison.