MISCHIEF LET LOOSE.
A wild-cat-like creature was abroad. To it the Abolitionists were to be
thrown. It was to destroy Garrison, make an end of Thompson, and
suppress between its enormous jaws the grandest moral movement of the
century. Besides doing up this modest little programme, the beast, O
wonderful to say, was also to crown its performances by "saving" the
Union. Rejoicing in the possession of such a conservative institution,
the politicians, the press, and public opinion uncaged the monster,
while from secure seats they watched the frightful scenes of fury and
destruction enacted by it in the national arena.
These scenes began in the summer of 1834, and in the city of New York.
They were ushered in by the breaking up of an anti-slavery celebration
on the Fourth of July by the clack and roar of several hundred young
rowdies, gathered for the purpose. Their success but whetted the
appetite of the spirit of mischief for other ventures against the
Abolitionists. As a consequence New York was in a more or less disturbed
state from the fourth to the ninth of the month. The press of the city,
with but a single exception (_The Evening Post_) meanwhile goaded the
populace on by false and inflammatory representations touching the
negroes and their friends, to the rioting which began in earnest on the
evening of the ninth. That night a mob attacked Lewis Tappan's house on
Rose street, breaking in the door, smashing blinds and windows, and
playing havoc generally with the furniture. On the following evening the
rioters assailed the store of Arthur Tappan, on Pearl street,
demolishing almost every pane of glass in the front of the building. On
the same evening the mob paid its respects to Rev. Dr. Cox, by breaking
windows both at his house and at his church. The negro quarters in the
neighborhood of Five Points, and their houses in other parts of the
city, were raided on the night of the 11th, and much damage done by the
lawless hordes which for nearly a week wreaked their wrath upon the
property of the negroes and their anti-slavery friends.
After this brave beginning, the wild-cat-like spirit continued, these
ferocious demonstrations in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan,
Connecticut, Maine, and New Hampshire. The slavery agitation had
increased apace. It had broken out in Congress on the presentation of
anti-slavery petitions. The fire thus kindled spread through the
country. Southern excitement became intense, amounted almost to panic.
The activity of the anti-slavery press, the stream of anti-slavery
publications, which had, indeed, increased with singular rapidity, was
exaggerated by the Southern imagination, struck it with a sort of
terror. There were meetings held in many parts of the South, tremendous
scenes enacted there. In Charleston, South Carolina, the post-office was
broken open by an aristocratic mob, under the lead of the famous Robert
Y. Hayne, and a bonfire made of the Abolition mail-matter which it
contained. As this Southern excitement advanced, a passionate fear for
the stability of the Union arose in the heart of the North. Abolition
and the Abolitionists had produced these sectional disturbances.
Abolition and the Abolitionists were, therefore, enemies of the
"glorious Union." Northern excitement kept pace with Southern excitement
until, in the summer of 1835, a reign of terror was widely established
over both sections. To Garrison, from his _Liberator_ outlook, all
seemed "Consternation and perplexity, for perilous times have come."
They had, indeed, come in New York, as witness this from the pen of
Lydia Maria Child, who was at the time (August 15) in Brooklyn. Says
she:
"I have not ventured into the city, nor does one of us dare to
go to church to-day, so great is the excitement here. You can
form no conception of it. 'Tis like the time of the French
Revolution, when no man dared trust his neighbor. Private
assassins from New Orleans are lurking at the corners of the
streets to stab Arthur Tappan, and very large sums are offered
for any one who will convey Mr. Thompson into the slave
States.... There are several thousand Southerners now in the
city, and I am afraid there are not seven hundred among them who
have the slightest fear of God before their eyes. Mr. Wright
[Elizur] was yesterday barricading his doors and windows with
strong bars and planks an inch thick. Violence in some form
seems to be generally expected."
Great meetings to put the Abolitionists down afforded vents during this
memorable year to the pent-up excitement of the free States. New York
had had its great meeting, and had put the Abolitionists down with
pro-slavery resolutions and torrents of pro-slavery eloquence. Boston,
too, had to have her great meeting and her cataracts of pro-slavery
oratory to reassure the South of the sympathy and support of "the great
body of the people of the Northern States." The toils seemed everywhere
closing around the Abolitionists. The huge head of the asp of public
opinion, the press of the land was everywhere busy, day and night,
smearing with a thick and virulent saliva of lies the brave little band
and its leader. Anti-slavery publications, calculated to inflame the
minds of the slaves against their masters, and intended to instigate the
slaves to servile insurrections, had been distributed broadcast through
the South by the emissaries of anti-slavery societies. The Abolitionists
advocated the emancipation of the slaves in the South by Congress,
intermarriages between the two races, the dissolution of the Union, etc.
All of which outrageous misrepresentations were designed to render the
movement utterly odious to the public, and the public so much the more
furious for its suppression.
It was in the midst of such intense and widespread excitement that
Boston called its meeting to abolish the Abolitionists. It was the month
of August, and the heat of men's passions was as great as the heat of
the August sun. The moral atmosphere of the city was so charged with
inflammable gases that the slightest spark would have sufficed to
produce an explosion. The Abolitionists felt this and carried themselves
the while with unusual circumspection. They deemed it prudent to publish
an address to neutralize the falsehoods with which they were assailed by
their enemies. The address drawn up by Garrison for the purpose was
thought "too fiery for the present time," by his more cautious followers
and was rejected. The _Liberator_ office had already been threatened in
consequence of a fiery article by the editor, denouncing the use of
Faneuil Hall for the approaching pro-slavery meeting. It seemed to the
unawed and indignant champion of liberty that it were "better that the
winds should scatter it in fragments over the whole earth--better that
an earthquake should engulf it--than that it should be used for so
unhallowed and detestable a purpose!" The anti-abolition feeling of the
town had become so bitter and intense that Henry E. Benson, then clerk
in the anti-slavery office, writing on the 19th of the month, believed
that there were persons in Boston, who would assassinate George Thompson
in broad daylight, and doubted whether Garrison or Samuel J. May would
be safe in Faneuil Hall on the day of the meeting, and what seemed still
more significant of the inflamed state of the public mind, was the
confidence with which he predicted that a mob would follow the meeting.
The wild-cat-like spirit was in the air--in the seething heart of the
populace.
The meeting was held August 21st, in the old cradle of liberty. To its
call alone fifteen hundred names were appended. It was a Boston audience
both as to character and numbers, an altogether imposing affair, over
whom the mayor of the city presided and before whom two of the most
consummate orators of the commonwealth fulmined against the
Abolitionists. One of their hearers, a young attorney of twenty-four,
who listened to Peleg Sprague and Harrison Gray Otis that day, described
sixteen years afterward the latter and the effects produced by him on
that audience. Our young attorney vividly recalled how "'Abolitionist'
was linked with contempt, in the silver tones of Otis, and all the
charms that a divine eloquence and most felicitous diction could throw
around a bad cause were given it; the excited multitude seemed actually
ready to leap up beneath the magic of his speech. It would be something,
if one must die, to die by such a hand--a hand somewhat worthy and able
to stifle anti-slavery, if it could be stifled. The orator was worthy of
the gigantic task attempted; and thousands crowded before him, every one
of their hearts melted by that eloquence, beneath which Massachusetts
had bowed, not unworthily, for more than thirty years."
Here is a specimen of the sort of goading which the wild-cat-like spirit
of the city got from the orators. It is taken from the speech of Peleg
Sprague. The orator is paying his respects to George Thompson, "an
avowed _emissary_" "_a professed agitator_," who "comes here from the
dark and corrupt institutions of Europe to enlighten _us_ upon the
rights of man and the moral duties of our own condition. Received by our
hospitality, he stands here upon our soil, protected by our laws, and
hurls firebrands, arrows, and death into the habitations of our
neighbors and friends, and brothers; and when he shall have kindled a
conflagration which is sweeping in desolation over our land, he has only
to embark for his own country, and there look serenely back with
indifference or exultation upon the widespread ruin by which _our_
cities are wrapt in flames, and _our_ garments rolled in blood."
The great meeting was soon a thing of the past but not so its effects.
The echoes of Otis and Sprague did not cease at its close. They thrilled
in the air, they thrilled long afterward in the blood of the people.
When the multitude dispersed Mischief went out into the streets of the
city with them. Wherever afterward they gathered Mischief made one in
their midst. Mischief was let loose, Mischief was afoot in the town. The
old town was no place for the foreign emissary, neither was it a safe
place for the arch-agitator. On the day after the meeting, Garrison and
his young wife accordingly retreated to her father's home at Brooklyn,
Conn., where the husband needed not to be jostling elbows with Mistress
Mischief, and her _pals_.
Garrison's answer to the speeches of Otis and Sprague was in his
sternest vein. He is sure after reading them that, "there is more guilt
attaching to the people of the free States from the continuance of
slavery, than those in the slave States." At least he is ready to affirm
upon the authority of Orator Sprague, "that New England is as really a
slave-holding section of the republic as Georgia or South Carolina."
Sprague, he finds, "in amicable companionship and popular repute with
thieves and adulterers; with slaveholders, slavedealers, and
slave-destroyers; ... with the disturbers of the public peace; with the
robbers of the public mail; with ruffians who insult, pollute, and
lacerate helpless women; and with conspirators against the lives and
liberties of New England citizens."
To Otis who was then nearly seventy years of age Garrison addressed his
rebuke in tones of singular solemnity. It seemed to him that the aged
statesman had transgressed against liberty "under circumstances of
peculiar criminality." "Yet at this solemn period," the reprobation of
the prophet ran, "you have not scrupled, nay, you have been ambitious,
to lead and address an excited multitude, in vindication of all
imaginable wickedness, embodied in one great system of crime and
blood--to pander to the lusts and desires of the robbers of God and his
poor--to consign over to the tender mercies of cruel taskmasters,
multitudes of guiltless men, women, and children--and to denounce as an
'unlawful and dangerous association' a society whose only object is to
bring this nation to repentance, through the truth as it is in Jesus."
These audacious and iconoclastic performances of the reformer were not
exactly adapted to turn from him the wrath of the idol worshipers. They
more likely added fuel to the hot anger burning in Boston against him.
Three weeks passed after his departure from the city, and his friends
did not deem it safe for him to return. Toward the end of the fourth
week of his enforced absence, against which he was chafing not a little,
an incident happened in Boston which warned him to let patience have its
perfect work. It was on the night of September 17th that the
dispositions of the city toward him found grim expression in a gallows
erected in front of his house at 23 Brighton street. This ghastly
reminder that the fellow-citizens of the editor of the _Liberator_
continued to take a lively interest in him, "was made in real
workmanship style, of _maple joist_ five inches through, eight or nine
feet high, for the accommodation of two persons." Garrison and Thompson
were the two persons for whom these brave accommodations were prepared.
But as neither they nor their friends were in a mood to have trial made
of them, the intended occupants consented to give Boston a wide berth,
and to be somewhat particular that they did not turn in with her while
the homicidal fit lasted.
This editing his paper at long range, and this thought of life and
safety Garrison did not at all relish. They grew more and more irksome
to his fearless and earnest spirit. For his was a "pine-and-fagot"
Abolitionism that knew not the fear of men or their wrath. But now he
must needs have a care for the peace of mind of his young wife, who was,
within a few months, to give birth to a child. And her anxiety for him
was very great. Neither was the anxiety of devoted friends and followers
to be lightly disregarded. All of which detained the leader in Brooklyn
until the 25th of the month, when the danger signals seemed to have
disappeared. Whereupon he set out immediately for his post in Boston to
be at the head of his forces. He found the city in one of those strange
pauses of popular excitement, which might signify the ebb of the tide or
only the retreat of the billows. He was not inclined to let the
anti-Abolition agitation subside so soon, before it had carried on its
flood Abolition principles to wider fields and more abundant harvests in
the republic. Anxious lest the cat-like temper of the populace was
falling into indifference and apathy, he and his disciples took occasion
to prod it into renewed wakefulness and activity. The instruments used
for this purpose were anti-slavery meetings and the sharp goad of his
_Liberator_ editorials. The city was possessed with the demon of
slavery, and its foaming at the mouth was the best of all signs that the
Abolition exorcism was working effectively. So, in between the
glittering teeth and the terrible paws was thrust the maddening goad,
and up sprang the mighty beast horrible to behold.
One of these meetings was the anniversary of the formation of the Boston
Female Anti-Slavery Society which fell on October 14th. The ladies
issued their notice, engaged a hall, and invited George Thompson to
address them. Now the foreign emissary was particularly exasperating to
Boston sensibility on the subject of slavery. He was the veritable red
rag to the pro-slavery bull. The public announcement, therefore, that he
was to speak in the city threw the public mind into violent agitation.
The _Gazette_ and the _Courier_ augmented the excitement by the
recklessness with which they denounced the proposed meeting, the former
promising to Thompson a lynching, while the latter endeavored to involve
his associates who were to the "manner born" in the popular outbreak,
which was confidently predicted in case the "foreign vagrant" wagged his
tongue at the time appointed.
Notwithstanding the rage of press and people the meeting was postponed
through no willingness on the part of the ladies, but because of the
panic of the owners of the hall lest their property should be damaged or
destroyed in case of a riot. The ladies, thereupon, appointed three
o'clock in the afternoon of October 21st as the time, and the hall
adjoining the Anti-Slavery Office, at 46 Washington street, as the place
where they would hold their adjourned meeting. This time they made no
mention of Mr. Thompson's addressing them, merely announcing several
addresses. In fact, an address from Mr. Thompson, in view of the squally
outlook, was not deemed expedient. To provide against accidents and
disasters, he left the city on the day before the meeting. But this his
enemies did not know. They confidently expected that he was to be one of
the speakers. An inflammatory handbill distributed on the streets at
noon of the 21st seemed to leave no doubt of this circumstance in the
pro-slavery portion of the city.
The handbill referred to ran as follows:
THOMPSON,
THE ABOLITIONIST!
That infamous foreign scoundrel, THOMPSON, will hold forth _this
afternoon_ at the _Liberator_ office. No. 48 Washington street.
The present is a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union
to _snake Thompson out_! It will be a contest between the
Abolitionists and the friends of the Union. A purse of $100 has
been raised by a number of patriotic citizens to reward the
individual who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson, so
that he may be brought to the tar-kettle before dark. Friends of
the Union, be vigilant!
_Boston, Wednesday, 12 o'clock._
That Wednesday forenoon Garrison spent at the anti-slavery office,
little dreaming of the peril which was to overtake him in that very spot
in the afternoon. He went home to an early dinner, since his wife was a
member of the society, and he himself was set down for an address. As he
wended his way homeward, Mischief and her gang were afoot distributing
the aforesaid handbills "in the insurance offices, the reading-rooms,
all along State street, in the hotels, bar-rooms, etc.," and scattering
it "among mechanics at the North End, who were mightily taken with it."
Garrison returned about a half hour before the time appointed for the
meeting. He found a small crowd of about a hundred individuals collected
in front of the building where the hall was situated, and on ascending
to the hall more of the same sort, mostly young men, choking the access
to it. They were noisy, and Garrison pushed his way through them with
difficulty. As he entered the place of meeting and took his seat among
the ladies, twenty had already arrived, the gang of young rowdies
recognized him and evinced this by the exclamation: "That's Garrison!"
The full significance of the crowd just without the hall did not seem to
have occurred to the man whom they had identified. He did not know that
they were the foam blown from the mouth of a great mob at the moment
filling the streets in the neighborhood of the building where he sat
with such serenity of spirit. His wife who had followed him from their
home saw what Garrison did not see. The crowd of a hundred had swelled
to thousands. It lay in a huge irregular cross, jammed in between the
buildings on Washington street, the head lowering in front of the
anti-slavery office, the foot reaching to the site where stood Joy
building, now occupied by the Rogers, the right arm stretching along
Court street to the Court House, and the left encircling the old State
House, City Hall and Post-office then, in a gigantic embrace. All hope
of urging her way through that dense mass was abandoned by Mrs.
Garrison, and a friend, Mr. John E. Fuller, escorted her to his home,
where she passed the night.
Meantime the atmosphere upstairs at the hall began to betoken a fast
approaching storm. The noises ominously increased on the landing just
outside. The door of the hall was swung wide open and the entrance
filled with rioters. Garrison, all unconscious of danger, walked over to
these persons and remonstrated in his grave way with them in regard to
the disturbance which they were producing, winding up with a
characteristic bit of pleasantry: "Gentlemen," said he, "perhaps you are
not aware that this is a meeting of the Boston _Female_ Anti-Slavery
Society, called and intended exclusively for _ladies_, and those only
who have been invited to address them. Understanding this fact you will
not be so rude and indecorous as to thrust your presence upon this
meeting." But he added, "If, _gentlemen_, any of you are _ladies_ in
disguise--why only apprise me of the fact, give me your names, and I
will introduce you to the rest of your sex, and you can take seats among
them accordingly." The power of benignity over malignity lasted a few
moments after this little speech, when the situation changed rapidly
from bad to worse. "The tumult continually increased," says an
eye-witness, "with horrible execrations, howling, stamping, and finally
shrieking with rage. They seemed not to dare to enter, notwithstanding
their fury, but mounted on each other's shoulders, so that a row of
hostile heads appeared over the slight partition, of half the height of
the wall which divides the society's rooms from the landing place. We
requested them to allow the door to be shut; but they could not decide
as to whether the request should be granted, and the door was opened and
shut with violence, till it hung useless from its hinges."
Garrison thinking that his absence might quiet these perturbed spirits
and so enable the ladies to hold their meeting without further
molestation volunteered at this juncture to the president of the society
to retire from the hall unless she desired him to remain. She did not
wish him to stay but urged him to go at once not only for the peace of
the meeting but for his own safety. Garrison thereupon left the hall
meaning at the time to leave the building as well, but egress by the way
of the landing and the stairs, he directly perceived was impossible, and
did what seemed the next best thing, entered the anti-slavery office,
separated from the hall by a board partition. Charles C. Burleigh
accompanied him within this retreat. The door between the hall and the
office was securely locked, and Garrison with that marvelous serenity of
mind, which was a part of him, busied himself immediately with writing
to a friend an account of the scenes which were enacting in the next
room.
The tempest had begun in the streets also. The mob from its five
thousand throats were howling "Thompson! Thompson!" The mayor of the
city, Theodore Lyman, appeared upon the scene, and announced to the
gentlemen of property and standing, who were thus exercising their vocal
organs, that Mr. Thompson was not at the meeting, was not in the city.
But the mayor was a modern Canute before the sea of human passion, which
was rushing in over law and authority. He besought the rioters to
disperse, but he might as well have besought the waves breaking on
Nastasket Beach to disperse. Higher, higher rose the voices; fiercer,
fiercer waxed the multitude; more and more frightful became the uproar.
The long-pent-up excitement of the city and its hatred of Abolitionists
had broken loose at last and the deluge had come. The mayor tossed upon
the human inundation as a twig on a mountain stream, and with him for
the nonce struggled helplessly the police power of the town also.
Upstairs in the hall the society and its president are quite as
powerless as the mayor and the police below. Miss Mary S. Parker, the
president, is struggling with the customary opening exercises. She has
called the meeting to order, read to the ladies some passages from the
Bible, and has lifted up her voice in prayer to the All Wise and
Merciful One "for direction and succor, and the forgiveness of enemies
and revilers." It is a wonderful scene, a marvelous example of Christian
heroism, for in the midst of the hisses and threats and curses of the
rioters, the prayer of the brave woman rose clear and untremulous. But
now the rioters have thrown themselves against the partition between the
landing-place and the hall. They are trying to break it down; now, they
have partially succeeded. In another moment they have thrown themselves
against the door of the office where Garrison is locked. The lower panel
is dashed in. Through the opening they have caught sight of their
object, Garrison, serenely writing at his desk. "There he is! That's
Garrison! Out with the scoundrel!" and other such words of recognition
and execration, burst from one and another of the mob. The shattering of
the partition, the noise of splitting and ripping boards, the sharp
crash caused by the shivering of the office door, the loud and angry
outcries of the rioters warn the serene occupant of the office that his
position has become one of extreme peril. But he does not become
excited. His composure does not forsake him. Instead of attempting to
escape, he simply turns to his friend, Burleigh, with the words, "You
may as well open the door, and let them come in and do their worst." But
fortunately, Burleigh was in no such extremely non-resistant mood.
The advent of the mayor and the constables upon the scene at this point
rescued Garrison from immediately falling into the hands of the mob, who
were cleared out of the hall and from the stairway. Now the voice of the
mayor was heard urging the ladies to go home as it was dangerous to
remain; and now the voice of Maria Weston Chapman, replying: "If this is
the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere." The
ladies finally decided to retire, and their exit diverted, while the
operation lasted, the attention of the huge, cat-like creature from
their object in the anti-slavery office. When the passing of the ladies
had ceased, the old fury of the mob against Garrison returned. "Out with
him!" "Lynch him!" rose in wild uproar from thousands in the streets.
But again the attention of the huge, cat-like creature was diverted from
its object in the second story of the building before which it was
lashing itself into frenzy. This time it was the anti-slavery sign which
hung from the rooms of the society over the sidewalk. The mob had caught
sight of it, and directly set up a yell for it. The sensation of utter
helplessness in the presence of the multitude seemed at this juncture to
return to the chief magistrate of the city. It was impossible to control
the cataract-like passions of the rioters. He heard their awful roar for
the sign. The din had risen to terrific proportions. The thought of what
might happen next appalled him. The mob might begin to bombard the sign
with brickbats, and from the sign pass to the building, and from the
building to the constables, and then--but the mayor glanced not beyond,
for he had determined to appease the fury of the mob by throwing down to
it the hateful sign. A constable detached it, and hurled it down to the
rioters in the street. But by the act the mayor had signified that the
rule of law had collapsed, and the rule of the mob had really begun.
When the rioters had wreaked their wrath upon the emblem of freedom,
they were in the mood for more violence. The appetite for destruction,
it was seen, had not been glutted; only whetted. Garrison's situation
was now extremely critical. He could no longer remain where he was, for
the mob would invade the building and hunt him like hounds from cellar
to garret. He must leave the building without delay. To escape from the
front was out of the question. A way of escape must, therefore, be found
in the rear. All of these considerations the mayor and Garrison's
friends urged upon him. The good man fell in with this counsel, and,
with a faithful friend, proceeded to the rear of the building, where
from a window he dropped to a shed, but in doing so was very nearly
precipitated to the ground. After picking himself up he passed into a
carpenter's shop, meaning to let himself down into Wilson's Lane, now
Devonshire street, but the myriad-eyed mob, which was searching every
portion of the building for their game, espied him at this point, and
with that set up a great shout. The workmen came to the aid of the
fugitive by closing the door of the carpenter's shop in the face of his
pursuers. The situation seemed desperate. Retreat from the front was cut
off; escape from the rear anticipated and foiled. Garrison perceived the
futility of any further attempts to elude the mob, and proposed in his
calm way to deliver himself up to them. But his faithful Achates, John
Reid Campbell, advised him that it was his duty to avoid the mob as long
as it was possible to do so. Garrison thereupon made a final effort to
get away. He retreated up stairs, where his friend and a lad got him
into a corner of the room and tried to conceal his whereabouts by piling
some boards in front of him. But, by that time, the rioters had entered
the building, and within a few moments had broken into the room where
Garrison was in hiding. They found Mr. Reid, and demanded of him where
Garrison was. But Reid firmly refused to tell. They then led him to a
window, and exhibited him to the mob in the Lane, advising them that it
was not Garrison, but Garrison's and Thompson's friend, who knows where
Garrison is, but refuses to tell. A shout of fierce exultation from
below greeted this announcement. Almost immediately afterward, Garrison
was discovered and dragged furiously to the window, with the intention
of hurling him thence to the pavement. Some of the rioters were for
doing this, while others were for milder measures. "Don't let us kill
him outright!" they begged. So his persecutors relented, coiled a rope
around his body instead, and bade him descend to the street. The great
man was never greater than at that moment. With extraordinary meekness
and benignity he saluted his enemies in the street. From the window he
bowed to the multitude who were thirsting for his destruction,
requesting them to wait patiently, for he was coming to them. Then he
stepped intrepidly down the ladder raised for the purpose, and into the
seething sea of human passion.
Garrison must now have been speedily torn to pieces had he not been
quickly seized by two or three powerful men, who were determined to save
him from falling into the hands of the mob. They were men of great
muscular strength, but the muscular strength of two or three giants
would have proven utterly unequal to the rescue, and this Mr. Garrison's
deliverers evidently appreciated. For while they employed their powerful
arms, they also employed stratagem as well to effect their purpose. They
shouted anon as they fought their way through the excited throng, "He is
an American! He shan't be hurt!" and other such words which divided the
mind of the mob, arousing among some sympathy for the good man. By this
means he was with difficulty got out of Wilson's lane into State street,
in the rear of the old State House. The champion was now on historic
ground, ground consecrated by the blood of Crispus Attucks and his
fellow-martyrs sixty-five years before. His hat was lost, much of his
clothing was stripped from his body, he was without his customary
glasses, and was therefore practically blind. He could hear the awful
clamor, the mighty uproar of the mob, but he could not distinguish them
one from another, friend from foe. Nevertheless he "walked with head
erect, calm countenance flashing eyes like a martyr going to the stake,
full of faith and manly hope" according to the testimony of an
eye-witness. Garrison himself has thrown light on the state of his mind
during the ordeal. "The promises of God," he afterward remembered,
sustained his soul, "so that it was not only divested of fear, but ready
to sing aloud for joy."
The news now reached the ears of the mayor that Garrison was in the
hands of the mob. Thereupon the feeble but kindly magistrate began to
act afresh the role of the twig in the mountain stream. He and his
constables struggled helplessly in the human current rushing and raging
around City Hall, the head and seat of municipal law and authority.
Without the aid of private citizens Garrison must inevitably have
perished in the commotions which presently reached their climax in
violence and terror. He was in the rear of City Hall when the mayor
caught up to him and his would-be rescuers. The mayor perceived the
extremity of the situation, and said to the Faneuil Hall giants who had
hold of Garrison, "Take him into my office," which was altogether more
easily said than done. For the rioters have raised the cry "to the Frog
Pond with him!" Which order will be carried out, that of the magistrate
or that of the mob?
These were horrible moments while the two hung trembling in the balance.
But other private citizens coming to the assistance of the mayor struck
the scales for the moment in his favor, and Garrison was finally
hustled, and thrust by main force into the south door of the City Hall
and carried up to the mayor's room. But the mob had immediately effected
an entrance into the building through the north door and filled the
lower hall. The mayor now addressed the pack, strove manfully in his
feeble way to prevail upon the human wolves to observe order, to sustain
the law and the honor of the city, he even intimated to them that he was
ready to lay down his life on the spot to maintain the law and preserve
order. Then he got out on the ledge over the south door and spoke in a
similar strain to the mob on the street. But alas! he knew not the
secret for reversing the Circean spell by which gentlemen of property
and standing in the community had been suddenly transformed into a
wolfish rabble.
The increasing tumult without soon warned the authorities that what
advantage the mayor may have obtained in the contest with the mob was
only temporary and that their position was momentarily becoming more
perilous and less tenable. It was impossible to say to what extreme of
violence a multitude so infuriated would not go to get their prey. It
seemed to the now thoroughly alarmed mayor that the mob might in their
frenzy attack the City Hall to effect their purpose. There was one
building in the city, which the guardians of the law evidently agreed
could resist the rage of the populace, and that building was the jail.
To this last stronghold of Puritan civilization the authorities and the
powers that were, fell back as a dernier resort to save Garrison's life.
But even in this utmost pitch and extremity, when law was trampled in
the streets, when authority was a reed shaken in a storm, when anarchy
had drowned order in the bosom of the town, the Anglo-Saxon passion for
legal forms asserted itself. The good man, hunted for his life, must
forsooth be got into the only refuge which promised him security from
his pursuers by a regular judicial commitment as a disturber of the
peace. Is there anything at once so pathetic and farcical in the
Universal history of mobs?
Pathetic and farcical to be sure, but it was also well meant, and
therefore we will not stop to quarrel with men who were equal to the
perpetration of a legal fiction so full of the comedy and tragedy of
civilized society. But enough--the municipal wiseacres having put their
heads together and evolved the brilliant plan of committing the prophet
as a disturber of the peace, immediately set about its execution, which
developed in the sequence into a bird of altogether another color. For a
more perilous and desperate device to preserve Garrison's life could not
well have been hit upon. How was he ever to be got out of the building
and through that sea of ferocious faces surging and foaming around it.
First then by disguising his identity by sundry changes in his apparel.
He obtained a pair of trousers from one kindly soul, another gave him a
coat, a third lent him a stock, a fourth furnished him a cap. A hack was
summoned and stationed at the south door, a posse of constables drew up
and made an open way from the door to it. Another hack was placed in
readiness at the north door. The hack at the south door was only a ruse
to throw the mob off the scent of their prey, while he was got out of
the north door and smuggled into the other hack. Up to this point, the
plan worked well, but the instant after Garrison had been smuggled into
the hack he was identified by the mob, and then ensued a scene which
defies description; no writer however skillful, may hope to reproduce
it. The rioters rushed madly upon the vehicle with the cry: "Cut the
traces! Cut the reins!" They flung themselves upon the horses, hung upon
the wheels, dashed open the doors, the driver the while belaboring their
heads right and left with a powerful whip, which he also laid vigorously
on the backs of his horses. For a moment it looked as if a catastrophe
was unavoidable, but the next saw the startled horses plunging at
break-neck speed with the hack up Court street and the mob pursuing it
with yells of baffled rage. Then began a thrilling, a tremendous race
for life and Leverett street jail. The vehicle flew along Court street
to Bodoin square, but the rioters, with fell purpose flew hardly less
swiftly in its track. Indeed the pursuit of the pack was so close that
the hackman did not dare to drive directly to the jail but reached it by
a detour through Cambridge and Blossom streets. Even then the mob
pressed upon the heels of the horses as they drew up before the portals
of the old prison, which shut not an instant too soon upon the editor of
the _Liberator_, who was saved from a frightful fate to use a Biblical
phrase but by the skin of his teeth.
Here the reformer safe from the wrath of his foes, was locked in a cell;
and here, during the evening, with no abatement of his customary
cheerfulness and serenity of spirit, he received several of his anxious
friends, Whittier among them, whom through the grated bars he playfully
accosted thus: "You see my accommodations are so limited, that I cannot
ask you to spend the night with me." That night in his prison cell, and
on his rude prison bed, he slept the sleep of the just man, sweet and
long:
"When peace within the bosom reigns,
And conscience gives th' approving voice;
Though bound the human form in chains.
Yet can the soul aloud rejoice.
"'Tis true, my footsteps are confined--
I cannot range beyond this cell--
But what can circumscribe my mind,
To chain the winds attempt as well!"
The above stanzas he wrote the next morning on the walls of his cell.
Besides this one he made two other inscriptions there, to stand as
memorabilia of the black drama enacted in Boston on the afternoon of
October 21, 1835.
After being put through the solemn farce of an examination in a court,
extemporized in the jail, Garrison was discharged from arrest as a
disturber of the peace! But the authorities, dreading a repetition of
the scenes of the day before, prayed him to leave the city for a few
days, which he did, a deputy sheriff driving him to Canton, where he
boarded the train from Boston to Providence, containing his wife, and
together they went thence to her father's at Brooklyn, Conn. The
apprehensions of the authorities in respect of the danger of a fresh
attack upon him were unquestionably well founded, inasmuch as diligent
search was made for him in all of the outgoing stages and cars from the
city that morning.
In this wise did pro-slavery, patriotic Boston translate into _works_
her sympathy for the South.