THE TURNING OF A LONG LANE.
Garrison's forecast of the future, directly after the annexation of
Texas, proved singularly correct. Never, as at that moment, had the
slave-power seemed so secure in its ascendency, yet never, at any
previous period, was it so near its downfall. Freedom had reached that
darkest hour just before dawn; and this, events were speedily to make
clear. If the South could have trammeled up the consequences of
annexation, secure, indeed, for a season, would it have held its
political supremacy in America? But omnipotent as was the slave-power in
the Government, it was not equal to this labor. In the great game, in
which Texas was the stakes, Fate had, unawares, slipped into the seat
between the gamesters with hands full of loaded dice. At the first throw
the South got Texas, at the second the war with Mexico fell out, and at
the third new national territory lay piled upon the boards.
Calhoun, the arch-annexationist, struggled desperately to avert the war.
He saw as no other Southern leader saw its tremendous significance in
the conflict between the two halves of the Union for the political
balance. The admission of Texas had made an adjustment of this balance
in favor of the South. Calhoun's plan was to conciliate Mexico, to sweep
with our diplomatic broom the gathering war-clouds from the national
firmament. War, he knew, would imperil the freshly fortified position of
his section--war which meant at its close the acquisition of new
national territory, with which the North would insist upon retrieving
its reverse in the controversy over Texas. War, therefore, the great
nullifier resolved against. He cried halt to his army, but the army
heard not his voice, heeded not his orders, in the wild uproar and
clamor which arose at the sight of helpless Mexico, and the temptation
of adding fresh slave soil to the United States South, through her
spoliation; Calhoun confessed that, with the breaking out of hostilities
between the two republics an impenetrable curtain had shut from his eyes
the future. The great plot for maintaining the political domination of
the South had miscarried. New national territory had become inevitable
with the firing of the first gun. Seeing this, Calhoun endeavored to
postpone the evil day for the South by proposing a military policy of
"masterly inactivity" whereby time might be gained for his side to
prepare to meet the blow when it fell. But his "masterly inactivity"
policy was swept aside by the momentum of the national passion which the
war had aroused.
California and New Mexico became the strategic points of the slavery
struggle at the close of the war. To open both to the immigration of
slave-labor was thenceforth the grand design of the South. Over Oregon
occurred a fierce preliminary trial of strength between the sections.
The South was thrown in the contest, and the anti-slavery principle of
the Ordinance of 1787 applied to the Territory. Calhoun, who was
apparently of the mind that as Oregon went so would go California and
New Mexico, was violently agitated by this reverse. "The great strife
between the North and the South is ended," he passionately declared.
Immediately the charge was made and widely circulated through the slave
States that the stronger was oppressing the weaker section, wresting
from it its just share in the common fruits of common victories. For had
not California and New Mexico been won by the bravery and blood of the
South as of the North, and how then was the North to deprive the South
of its joint ownership of them without destroying the federal equality
of the two halves of the Union? What was it but to subvert the Union
existing among the States?
Disunion sentiment was thenceforth ladled out to the slave States in
increasing quantities. The turning of the long lane in the domination of
the slave-power was visibly near. With Garrison at one end and Calhoun
at the other the work of dissolution advanced apace. The latter
announced, in 1848, that the separation of the two sections was
complete. Ten years before, Garrison had made proclamation that the
Union, though not in form, was, nevertheless, in fact dissolved. And
possibly they were right. The line of cleavage had at the date of
Calhoun's announcement passed entirely through the grand strata of
national life, industrial, moral, political, and religious. There
remained indeed but a single bond of connection between the
slave-holding and the non-slave-holding States, viz., fealty to party.
But in 1848 not even this slender link was intact.
The anti-slavery uprising was a fast growing factor in the politics of
the free States. This was evinced by the aggressiveness of anti-slavery
legislation, the repeal of slave sojournment laws, the enactment of
personal liberty laws, the increasing preference manifested by Whig and
by Democratic electors for anti-slavery Whig, and anti-slavery
Democratic leaders. Seward and Chase, and Hale and Hamlin, Thaddeus
Stevens and Joshua R. Giddings, were all in Congress in 1849. A
revolution was working in the North; a revolution was working in the
South. New and bolder spirits were rising to leadership in both
sections. On the Southern stage were Jefferson Davis, Barnwell Rhett,
David Atchison, Howell Cobb, Robert Toombs, and James M. Mason. The
outlook was portentous, tempestuous.
The tide of excitement culminated in the crisis of 1850. The
extraordinary activity of the under-ground railroad system, and its
failure to open the national Territories to slave immigration had
transported the South to the verge of disunion. California, fought over
by the two foes, was in the act of withdrawing herself from the field of
contention to a position of independent Statehood. It was her rap for
admission into the Union as a free State which precipitated upon the
country the last of the compromises between freedom and slavery. It
sounded the opening of the final act of Southern domination in the
republic.
The compromise of 1850, a series of five acts, three of which it took to
conciliate the South, while two were considered sufficient to satisfy
the North, was, after prolonged and stormy debate, adopted to save
Webster's glorious Union. These five acts were, in the agonized accents
of Clay, to heal "the five fire gaping wounds" of the country. But the
wounds were immedicable, as events were soon to prove. Besides, two at
least of the remedies failed to operate as emollients. They irritated
and inflamed the national ulcers and provoked fresh paroxysms of the
disease. The admission of California as a free State was a sort of
perpetual _memento mori_ to the slave-power. It hung forever over the
South the Damoclean blade of Northern political ascendency in the Union.
The fugitive slave law on the other hand produced results undreamt of by
its authors. Who would have ventured to predict the spontaneous,
irresistible insurrection of the humane forces and passions of the North
which broke out on the passage of the infamous bill? Who could have
foretold the moral and political consequences of its execution, for
instance, in Boston, which fifteen years before had mobbed anti-slavery
women and dragged Garrison through its streets? The moral indignation
aroused by the law in Massachusetts swept Webster and the Whigs from
power, carried Sumner to the Senate and crowned Liberty on Beacon Hill.
It worked a revolution in Massachusetts, it wrought changes of the
greatest magnitude in the free States.
From this time the reign of discord became universal. The conflict
between the sections increased in virulence. At the door of every man
sat the fierce figure of strife. It fulmined from the pulpit and frowned
from the pews. The platforms of the free States resounded with the
thunder of tongues. The press exploded with the hot passions of the
hour. Parties warred against each other. Factions arose within parties
and fought among themselves with no less bitterness. Wrath is infectious
and the wrathful temper of the nation became epidemic. The Ishmaelitish
impulse to strike something or someone, was irresistible. The bonds
which had bound men to one another seemed everywhere loosening, and
people in masses were slipping away from old to enter into new
combinations of political activity. It was a period of tumultuous
transition and confusion. The times were topsy-turvy and old Night and
Chaos were the angels who sat by the bubbling abysses of the revolution.
In the midst of this universal and violent agitation of the public mind
the old dread of disunion returned to torment the American
_bourgeoisie_, who through their presses, especially those of the
metropolis of the Union, turned fiercely upon the Abolitionists. While
the compromise measures were the subject of excited debate before
Congress, the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society
fell due. But the New York journals, the _Herald_ in particular, had no
mind to allow the meeting to take place without renewing the reign of
terror of fifteen years before. Garrison was depicted as worse than
Robespierre, with an insatiable appetite for the destruction of
established institutions, both human and divine. The dissolution of the
Union, the "overthrow of the churches, the Sabbath, and the Bible," all
were required to glut his malevolent passion. "Will the men of sense
allow meetings to be held in this city which are calculated to make our
country the arena of blood and murder," roared the _Herald_, "and render
our city an object of horror to the whole South?... Public opinion
should be regulated. These Abolitionists should not be allowed to
misrepresent New York." In order to suppress the Abolitionists that
paper did not blink at any means, however extreme or revolutionary, but
declared boldly in favor of throttling free discussion. "When free
discussion does not promote the public good," argued the editor, "it has
no more right to exist than a bad government that is dangerous and
oppressive to the common weal. It should be overthrown." The mob thus
invoked came forward on the opening of the convention to overthrow free
discussion.
The storm which the New York press was at so much labor to brew,
Garrison did not doubt would break over the convention. He went to it in
a truly apostolic spirit of self-sacrifice. "Not knowing the things that
shall befall me there, saving that bonds and afflictions abide with me
in every city," he wrote his wife an hour before the commencement of the
convention. His prevision of violence was quickly fulfilled. He had
called Francis Jackson to the chair during the delivery of the opening
speech which fell to the pioneer to make as the president of the
society. His subject was the Religion of the Country, to which he was
paying his respects in genuine Garrisonian fashion. Belief in Jesus in
the United States had no vital influence on conduct or character. The
chief religious denominations were in practice pro-slavery, they had
uttered no protest against the national sin. There was the Roman
Catholic Church whose "priests and members held slaves without incurring
the rebuke of the Church." At this point the orator was interrupted by
one of those monstrous products of the slums of the American metropolis,
compounded of the bully, the blackleg, and the demagogue in about equal
proportions. It was the notorious Captain Isaiah Rynders, perched with
his band of blackguards in the organ loft of the tabernacle and ready to
do the will of the metropolitan journals by over-throwing the right of
free discussion. He was not disposed to permit Mr. Garrison's censure of
the Roman Catholic Church to pass unchallenged, so he begged to ask
"whether there are no other churches as well as the Catholic Church,
whose clergy and lay members hold slaves?" To which the anti-slavery
leader replied with the utmost composure, not inclined to let even
Captain Rynders interrupt the even and orderly progression of his
discourse: "Will the friend wait for a moment, and I will answer him in
reference to other churches?" "The friend" thereupon resumed his seat in
the organ loft, and Garrison proceeded with his indictment of the
churches. There was the Episcopal Church, whose clergy and laity dealt
with impunity in human flesh, and the Presbyterians, whose ministers and
members did likewise without apparently any compunctious visitings of
conscience, ditto the Baptist, ditto the Methodist. In fact "all the
sects are combined," the orator sternly continued, "to prevent that
jubilee which it is the will of God should come."
But the bully in the organ loft, who was not content for long to play
the part of Patience on a monument, interrupted the speaker with a
second question which he looked upon, doubtless, as a hard nut to crack.
"Are you aware," inquired the blackleg "that the slaves in the South
have their prayer-meetings in honor of Christ?" The nut was quickly
crushed between the sharp teeth of the orator's scathing retort. Mr.
Garrison--"Not a slave-holding or a slave-breeding Jesus. (Sensation.)
The slaves believe in a Jesus that strikes off chains. In this country
Jesus has become obsolete. A profession in him is no longer a test. Who
objects to his course in Judæa? The old Pharisees are extinct, and may
safely be denounced. Jesus is the most respectable person in the United
States. (Great sensation and murmurs of disapprobation.) Jesus sits in
the President's chair of the United States. (A thrill of horror here
seemed to run through the assembly.) Zachary Taylor sits there, which is
the same thing, for he believes in Jesus. He believes in war, and the
Jesus that 'gave the Mexicans hell.'" (Sensation, uproar, and
confusion.)
This rather sulphurous allusion to the President of the glorious Union,
albeit in language used by himself in a famous order during the Mexican
War, acted as a red rag upon the human bull in the organ loft, who, now
beside himself with passion, plunged madly down to the platform with his
howling mob at his heels. "I will not allow you to assail the President
of the United States. You shan't do it!" bellowed the blackguard,
shaking his fist at Mr. Garrison. But Mr. Garrison, with that
extraordinary serenity of manner which was all his own, parleyed with
the ruffian, as if he was no ruffian and had no mob at his back. "You
ought not to interrupt us," he remonstrated with gentle dignity. "We go
upon the principle of hearing everybody. If you wish to speak, I will
keep order, and you shall be heard." Rynders was finally quieted by the
offer of Francis Jackson to give him a hearing as soon as Mr. Garrison
had brought his address to an end.
Rev. W.H. Furness, of Philadelphia, who was a member of the convention
and also one of the speakers, has preserved for us the contrasts of the
occasion. "The close of Mr. Garrison's address," says he, "brought down
Rynders again, who vociferated and harangued at one time on the
platform, and then pushing down into the aisles, like a madman followed
by his keepers. Through the whole, nothing could be more patient and
serene than the bearing of Mr. Garrison. I have always revered Mr.
Garrison for his devoted, uncompromising fidelity to his great cause.
Today I was touched to the heart by his calm and gentle manners. There
was no agitation, no scorn, no heat, but the quietness of a man engaged
in simple duties."
The madman and his keepers were quite vanquished on the first day of the
convention by the wit, repartee, and eloquence of Frederick Douglass,
Dr. Furness, and Rev. Samuel R. Ward, whom Wendell Phillips described as
so black that "when he shut his eyes you could not see him." But it was
otherwise on the second day when public opinion was "regulated," and
free discussion overthrown by Captain Rynders and his villainous gang,
who were resolved, with the authors of the compromise, that the Union as
it was should be preserved.
But, notwithstanding the high authority and achievements of this noble
band of patriots and brothers, Garrison's detestation of the Union but
increased, and his cry for its dissolution grew deeper and louder. And
no wonder. For never had the compact between freedom and slavery seemed
more hateful than after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill. The
state of panic which it created among the colored people in the free
States will form, if ever written down, one of the most heartrending
chapters in human history. Hundreds and thousands fled from their homes
into the jaws of a Canadian winter to escape the jaws of the
slave-hounds, whose fierce baying began presently to fill the land from
Massachusetts to Ohio. It made no difference whether these miserable
people had been always free or were fugitives from slavery, the terror
spread among them all the same. The aged and the young turned their
backs upon their homes and hurried precipitately into a strange country.
Fathers with wives and children dependant upon them for their daily
bread, were forced by the dread of being captured and returned to
bondage to abandon their homes and loved ones, sometimes without so much
as a touch of their hands or a tone of their voices in token of
farewell. Perhaps on his way to work in the morning some husband or son
has caught a glimpse among the faces on the street of one face, the
remembrance of which to the day of death, he can never lose, a face he
had known in some far away Southern town or plantation, and with which
are connected in the poor fellow's brain the most frightful sufferings
and associations. Crazed at the sight, with no thought of home, of the
labors which are awaiting him, oblivious of everything but the abject
terror which has suddenly taken possession of him, he hastens away to
hide and fly, fly and hide, until he reaches a land where slave-hounds
enter not, and panting fugitives find freedom. Wendell Phillips tells of
an old woman of seventy who asked his advice about flying, though
originally free, and fearful only of being caught up by mistake. The
distress everywhere was awful, the excitement indescribable. From Boston
alone in the brief space of three weeks after the rescue of Shadrach,
nearly a hundred of these panic stricken creatures had fled. The whole
number escaping into Canada Charles Sumner placed as high as six
thousand souls. But in addition to this large band of fugitives, others
emigrated to the interior of New England away from the seaboard centers
of trade and commerce where the men-hunters abounded.
The excitement and the perils of this period were not confined to the
colored people. Their white friends shared both with them. We are
indebted to Mr. Phillips for the following graphic account of these
excitements and perils in Boston in March, 1851. He has been describing
the situation in the city, in respect of the execution of the infamous
law, to Elizabeth Pease, and goes on thus: "I need not enlarge on this;
but the long evening sessions--debates about secret escapes--plans to
evade where we can't resist--the door watched that no spy may enter--the
whispering consultations of the morning--some putting property out of
their hands, planning to incur penalties, and planning also that, in
case of conviction, the Government may get nothing from them--the doing,
and answering no questions--intimates forbearing to ask the knowledge
which it may be dangerous to have--all remind one of those foreign
scenes which have hitherto been known to us, transatlantic republicans,
only in books."
On the passage of the Black Bill, as the Abolitionists stigmatised the
law, it was not believed that the moral sentiment of Boston would
execute it, so horrified did the community seem. But it was soon
apparent to the venerable Josiah Quincy that "The Boston of 1851 is not
the Boston of 1775. Boston," the sage goes on to remark, "has now become
a mere shop--a place for buying and selling goods; and, I suppose, also
of _buying and selling men_." The great idol of her shopkeepers, Daniel
Webster, having striven mightily for the enactment of the hateful bill
while Senator of the United States, had gone into Millard Fillmore's
Cabinet, to labor yet more mightily for its enforcement. The rescue of
Shadrach, which Mr. Secretary of State characterized "as a case of
treason," set him to thundering for the Union as it was, and against the
"fanatics," who were stirring up the people of the free States to resist
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. But he was no longer "the
God-like" Webster, for he appeared to the editor of the _Liberator_ as
"an ordinary-looking, poor, decrepit old man, whose limbs could scarce
support him; lank with age; whose sluggish legs were somewhat concealed
by an over-shadowing abdomen; with head downcast and arms shriveled, and
dangling almost helpless by his side, and incapable of being magnetized
for the use of the orator." The voice and the front of "the God-like"
had preceded the "poor decrepit old man" to the grave. Garrison dealt no
less roughly and irreverently with another of the authors of the wicked
law and another of the superannuated divinities of a shopkeeping North,
Henry Clay. "HENRY CLAY, with one foot in the grave," exclaimed the
reformer, "and just ready to have both body and soul cast into hell, as
if eager to make his damnation doubly sure, rises in the United States
Senate and proposes an inquiry into the expediency of passing yet
another law, by which every one who shall dare peep or mutter against
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill shall have his life crushed
out."
In those trial times words from the mouth or the pen of Abolitionists
had the force of deadly missiles. Incapacitated as Garrison was to
resort to physical resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law by his
non-resistant doctrine, it seemed that all the energy and belligerency
of the man went into the most tremendous verbal expressions. They were
like adamantine projectiles flung with the savage strength of a catapult
against the walls of slavery. The big sinners, like Webster and Clay, he
singled out for condign punishment, were objects of his utmost
severities of speech. It was thus that he essayed to breach the iron
dungeon in which the national iniquity had shut the national conscience.
Saturated was the reformer's mind with the thought of the Bible, its
solemn and awful imagery, its fiery and prophetic abhorrence and
denunciations of national sins, all of which furnished him an unfailing
magazine whence were drawn the bolts which he launched against the giant
sin and the giant sinners of his time. And so Clay had not only "one
foot in the grave," but was "just ready to have both body and soul cast
into hell."
While physical resistance of the Slave Law was wholly out of the
question with Garrison, he, nevertheless, refused to condemn the men
with whom it was otherwise. Here he was anything but a fanatic. All that
he required was that each should be consistent with his principles. If
those principles bade him resist the enforcement of the Black Bill, the
apostle of non-resistance was sorry enough, but in this emergency,
though he possessed the gentleness of the dove, he also practised the
wisdom of the serpent. That truth moves with men upon lower as well as
higher planes he well knew. It is always partial and many-colored,
refracted as it is through the prisms of human passion and prejudice. If
it appear unto some minds in the red bar of strife and blood, so be it.
Each must follow the light which it is given him to discern, whether the
blue of love or the red of war. Great coadjutors, like Wendell Phillips,
Theodore Parker, and Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, were for forcible resistance
to the execution of the law. So were the colored people. Preparations to
this end went on vigorously in Boston under the direction of the
Vigilance Committee. The Crafts escaped the clutches of the
slave-hunters, so did Shadrach escape them, but Sims and Burns fell into
them and were returned to bondage.
From this time on Wendell Phillips became in Boston and in the North
more distinctly the leader of the Abolition sentiment. The period of
pure moral agitation ended with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law.
That act opened a new era in the movement, an era in which
non-resistance had no place, an era in which a resort to physical force
in settlement of sectional differences, the whole trend of things were
making inevitable. Fighting, the Anglo-Saxon method, as Theodore Parker
characterized it, of making a final settlement of just such
controversies as was the slavery question, was in the air, had become
without any general consciousness of it at the time appearing in the
popular mind, a foregone conclusion, from the moment that the South
wrested from the National Government the right to defy and override the
moral sentiment of free State communities. With this advance of the
anti-slavery agitation a stage nearer the end, when fighting would
supersede all other methods, the fighters gravitated naturally to the
front of the conflict, and the apostle of non-resistance fell somewhat
into the background of the great movement started by him.
Garrison had begun, indeed, to recognize that there were other ways
besides his way of abolishing slavery--had begun to see that these with
his led to Rome, to the ultimate extinction of the evil, to which
anti-slavery unionists and disunionists were alike devoted. His innate
sagacity and strong sense of justice lifted the reformer to larger
toleration of mind. At a dinner given in Boston in May, 1853, by the
Free Democracy to John P. Hale, he was not only present to testify his
appreciation of the courage and services of Mr. Hale to the common
cause, but while there was able to speak thus tolerantly--tolerantly for
him certainly--of a Union dear to the company about the table yet
hateful beyond measure to himself: "Sir, you will pardon me," spoke the
arch anti-slavery disunionist, "for the reference. I have heard
something here about our Union, about the value of the Union, and the
importance of preserving the Union, Gentlemen, if you have been so
fortunate as to find a Union worth preserving, I heartily congratulate
you. Cling to it with all your souls!" For himself, he has not been so
fortunate. With a price set on his head in one of the Southern States,
and outlawed in all of them, he begs to be pardoned if found lacking in
loyalty to the existing Union, which to him, alas: "is but another name
for the iron reign of the slave-power. We have no common country as yet.
God grant we may have. We shall have it when the jubilee comes--and not
till then," he declared, mindful of the convictions of others, yet
bravely true to his own. The seeds of liberty, of hatred of the
slave-power, planted by Garrison were springing up in a splendid crop
through the North. Much of the political anti-slavery of the times were
the fruit of his endeavor. Wendell Phillips has pointed out how the
Liberty party was benefited by the meetings and speeches of Garrisonian
Abolitionists. What was true of the Liberty party was equally true of
Free Soil and Free Democracy. Although the little band remained small,
it was potent in swelling, year after year, the anti-slavery membership
of all the parties, Whig and Democratic, as well as of those already
mentioned. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" might fairly be classed among the large
indirect results produced by Garrison. "But," as Phillips justly
remarked, "'Uncle Tom' would never have been written had not Garrison
developed the facts; and never would have succeeded had he not created
readers and purchasers." Garrisonism had become an influence, a power
that made for liberty and against slavery in the United States. It had
become such also in Great Britain. George Thompson, writing the pioneer
of the marvelous sale of "Uncle Tom" in England, and of the
unprecedented demand for anti-slavery literature, traced their source to
his friend: "Behold the fruit of your labors," he exclaimed, "and
rejoice."
Mr. Garrison's pungent characterization of the "Union" at the dinner of
the Free Democracy as "but another name for the iron reign of the
slave-power," found almost instant illustration of its truth in the
startling demand of that power for the repeal of the Missouri
Compromise. In 1850 the South lost California, but it received at the
time an advantage of far-reaching consequence, viz., the admission of
the principle of federal non-intervention upon the subject of slavery in
the national Territories into the bill organizing Territorial
Governments for New Mexico and Utah. The train which was to blow down
the slave wall of 1820 and open to slave immigration the northern half
of the Louisiana Territory, was laid in the compromise measures of 1850.
Calhoun, strongly dissatisfied as he was with the Missouri settlement,
recoiled from countenancing any agitation on the part of the South
looking to its repeal on the ground that such action was calculated to
disturb "the peace and harmony of the Union." But four years after the
death of the great nullifier, his disciples and followers dared to
consummate a crime, the consequences of which he shrank from inviting.
The political conditions four years had indeed modified in one important
particular at least. In Calhoun's lifetime, there was no Northern leader
bold enough to undertake to engineer an act of abrogation through
Congress. If the North were willing, possessed sufficient magnanimity,
to surrender, in the interest of brotherly love between the sections,
the benefits which inured to it under the Missouri Compromise, neither
Calhoun nor the South would have declined the proffered sacrifice. The
selection of Stephen A. Douglas in 1854 as the leader of the movement
for repeal put a new face on the business, which was thereby made to
appear to proceed from the free, not from the slave States. This was
adroit, the fixing upon the losing section the initiative and the
responsibility of the act of abrogation.
Besides this element, there was another not less specious which lent to
the scheme an air of fairness, and that was the application to the
Territories of the American principle of local self-government, in other
words, the leaving to the people of the Territories the right to vote
slavery up or vote it down, as they might elect. The game was a deep
one, worthy of the machinations of its Northern and Southern authors.
But, like other elaborate schemes of mice and men, it went to pieces
under the fatal stroke of an unexpected circumstance. The act which
abrogated the Missouri Compromise broke the much-enduring back of
Northern patience at the same time. In the struggle for the repeal
Southern Whigs and Southern Democrats forgot their traditionary party
differences in battling for Southern interests, which was not more or
less than the extension to the national Territories of the peculiar
institution. The final recognition of this ugly fact on the part of the
free States, raised a popular flood in them big enough to whelm the Whig
party and to float a great political organization, devoted to
uncompromising opposition to the farther extension of slavery. The
sectionalism of slavery was at last met by the sectionalism of freedom.
From that moment the old Union, with its slave compromises, was doomed.
In the conflict then impending its dissolution was merely a matter of
time, unless indeed the North should prove strong enough to preserve it
by the might of its arms, seeing that the North still clung passionately
to the idea of national unity.
Not so, however, was it with Garrison. Sharper and sterner rose his
voice against any union with Slaveholders. On the Fourth of July
following the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the reformer at
Framingham, Mass., gave a fresh and startling sign of his hatred of the
Union by burning publicly the Constitution of the United States. Before
doing so however, he consigned to the flames a copy of the _Fugitive
Slave Law_, next the decision of Judge Loring remanding Anthony Burns to
slavery, also the charge of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis to the Grand Jury
touching the assault upon the court-house for the rescue of Burns. Then
holding up the United States Constitution, he branded it as the source
and parent of all the other atrocities--a covenant with death and an
agreement with hell--and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming,
"So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say,
Amen!" This dramatic act and the "tremendous shout" which "went up to
heaven in ratification of the deed" from the assembled multitude, what
were they but the prophecy of a fiercer fire already burning in the
land, soon to blaze about the pillars of the Union, of a more tremendous
shout soon to burst with the wrath of a divided people over that
"perfidious bark
Built i' th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark."