WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON--A CRITICAL VIEW
In explaining why Wendell Phillips was the target for every shot in
the winter of 1860-1, I said it was because he was the real leader of
the anti-slavery party during all the later and more critical years
of the long struggle for freedom. No doubt, Garrison at one time
held the first place among the Abolitionists. He was the first of
them in time, or one of the first. He had had the good fortune to be
mobbed and led through the streets of Boston with a rope about his
body. He had founded a weekly paper, _The Liberator_. Georgia had
offered five thousand dollars reward for his arrest. He had
unflinching courage and needed it all in the 'thirties and later.
But he had very moderate abilities. His force was a moral force. He
had convictions and would go any length rather than surrender any one
of them. But he had almost no other of those gifts and capacities
which make a leader. He had no organizing power. He was not a good
writer. He was not a good speaker. He could not hold an audience.
He could not keep the attention of the public which he had won in the
beginning. He did not attract to the {114} Abolitionist ranks the
ablest of the men who were ready to make a fight against slavery.
They did not care to serve under Garrison; under a leader who could
not lead. They went into politics.
So it happened that the Abolitionists had become a dwindling force.
If Phillips had not appeared on the scene, with his wonderful
oratory, his natural authority on the platform and off, his brilliant
love of battle, his temperament, at once commanding and sympathetic,
his persuasive charm--the Abolitionists would have been wellnigh
forgotten. He had all the moral force of Garrison, and the
intellectual force which Garrison had not.
Phillips himself would never allow this to be said if he could help
it. He recognized Garrison as leader, and was perfectly loyal to
him. So far as he could, he imposed his own view on the public. It
was so abroad as well as at home. When Garrison came to London a
meeting was held in St. James's Hall in his honour. Mr. Bright spoke
and others spoke, hailing the worn-out champion as the herald of
American Emancipation, which perhaps he was. Boston, which has
periods of generous penitence, gave him thirty thousand dollars,
others than Bostonians paying part of the money, and accepted a
bronze statue and put it up--I forget where. It has ever since been
the fashion to recognize Garrison as the moral educator of the North
on the slavery question; the schoolmaster of his period. Very
possibly my liking for Phillips warped my opinion at the time. But
now, after all these years, I think myself {115} impartial. I had a
knowledge of the situation. If it is a wrong view, why was Phillips
and not Garrison the shining mark at which the pro-slavery people
aimed in those critical years from 1854 to 1861? No other theory
will explain that.
When I used to express an impatient opinion of Garrison, and of
Phillips's submission to him, I was rebuked for it. Said Phillips:
"You are unjust and you do not know the facts, or you do not make
allowance for them. Like other young men, you are of to-day.
Garrison's work had been done before you were old enough to know
anything about it, and he is for all time. I don't say there would
have been no Abolitionist movement but for Garrison, since Abolition
was in the air, and the anti-slavery fight had to be fought. It
would have been fought in a different way without him, and perhaps
later. You underrate the moral forces and Garrison's capacity as a
leader. He was a leader, and is. Intellectual gifts do not make a
leader. The soldier whom other soldiers follow into the breach, and
to death, need not be a great captain, nor understand the art of war.
What he understands is the art of getting himself killed, and of
inducing the men behind him to do the same. Garrison took his life
in his hand. For many years he was leader of a forlorn hope. He
held extreme views. He had to hold them. He drove men away from the
Abolitionist camp. They were better elsewhere. He was not a
politician, but politics were not what we wanted, nor what the cause
wanted. {116} What it wanted was inspiration, and that is what it
got from Garrison."
I have put this in quotation marks, but I do not mean that Phillips
said it all at once, nor perhaps in these words. But the passage
reproduces as accurately as I can the substance of what I have heard
him say in many talks about Garrison. I do not expect anybody to
accept my view against Phillips's. But I must give my own, right or
wrong. I saw something of Garrison, publicly and privately. I had
no dislike for him, but neither had I any enthusiasm. As I recall
the impressions of those days, it seems to me that I have never known
a man of so much renown as Garrison with so slight an equipment for
the business of leadership, or even of apostleship. When I try to
sum him up, I am embarrassed by the want of material. After all,
what did he say or do?
Borrowing from Isaiah a phrase of condensed passion, Garrison had
called the Constitution a covenant with death and an agreement with
hell. Without Isaiah's help, he produced the only other phrase
which, out of all his writings and speakings has kept a place in the
general memory: "I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not
retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." That was his pledge in
the first number of _The Liberator_. It was finely said, and well he
kept it; so long as it mattered what he kept. I have often heard him
speak. I cannot recall one single effort of anything that could be
thought oratory. He was a tiresome speaker. Of rhetoric, or of that
art {117} which goes to the making of good speeches, he had no trace
or tinge. Between him and his audiences there was no give and take.
He just stood up on the platform and hammered away.
He was a fanatic, pure and simple. He had a message to deliver, and
he delivered it as a gramophone delivers its messages. He was what
they call a record. If he impressed his hearers, as he sometimes
did, it was by the passionate fervour of his beliefs, and of his
animosities. He was at white heat. More often he wearied them.
They got up and went away. I suppose people read _The Liberator_.
Dr. Johnson said you could write anything if you set yourself to it
doggedly, and so it is of reading. But the average reader feels
himself entitled to a little help from the writer, and from Garrison
he got none.
This, however, was in the early days of journalism--it was ten years
before Horace Greeley founded _The New York Tribune_ that _The
Liberator_ was born. A newspaper was then a newspaper, whether it
had any news or not; and even when its editorials were written, as
the elder Bennett said _The New York Herald_ editorials were written,
for men who could not read. The printed page had an authority
because it was printed; an authority which hardly survived Prince
Bismarck's epigram on the newspaper: "Just printer's ink on paper."
_The Liberator_ was violent, bitter, prolix, and dull. But the
Puritan preachers were all this, yet men sat contentedly for hours
beneath their intolerable outpourings, as do the Scotch to this day.
Carlyle {118} had heard Irving preach for hours on end. I have
sometimes had to sit under the Scottish preachers, when staying at a
highly ecclesiastical house. On these occasions I used to dream that
I was reading _The Liberator_ or listening to Garrison in the Boston
Melodeon. The a priori method was common to both, and the absence of
accurate knowledge. They did not master their subjects, nor their
trade.
As to what Garrison did, I am quite willing to accept the history of
his time as it is commonly told. I take all that for granted; all
his services to the anti-slavery cause; and, with all drawbacks, they
were great. Still, I do not think they explain his immense fame. He
was a Captain in the army of the Lord, if you like, but a Captain who
won no battles. There was one final victory, based on a long series
of defeats; a victory in which he had a share, though not a great
share. Perhaps a better Saint than Captain, but in Rome's long
catalogue of the canonized how many first-rate names are there? You
can become a saint quite cheaply if you know how. There are fifty or
more huge volumes of the _Acta Sanctorum_, mostly lies, yet extremely
interesting as examples of the use to which the human imagination can
be put for ecclesiastical purposes. A Benedictine labour, ere yet
science had shaken the foundations of clerical fairy tales by its
demand for evidence. The acutest minds accepted them. So late as
the nineteenth century they were still accepted. After his
"conversion," Newman, perhaps the {119} finest mind of his time,
swallowed whole all the fictions to which the Church of Rome had
given the imprimatur of infallibility. Garrison's exploits are less
legendary, but are they much more substantial? His fame rests on
generalities.
To look at, he was neither soldier nor saint. He had not, on the one
hand, the air of command, nor, on the other, the sweetness or
benignity we expect from one of the heavenly host. His face was both
angry and weak. His attitude on the platform was half apologetic and
half passionate. His speech at times was almost shrewish. It was
never authoritative though always self-complacent. So was the
expression of his face, with its smile which tried to be amiable and
succeeded in being self-conscious. There was no fire in his pale
eyes; if there had been, his spectacles would have dulled it. He
stooped, and his most vehement appeals--they were often extremely
vehement came to you sideways. It was an unlucky effect, for there
was nothing shifty or crooked in the man's nature. But he had a rôle
to play--Isaiah, if you like--and played it as well as his means
would allow.
It was the indomitable honesty of the man which gave him such
authority as he had. That is not a bad eulogy in itself. Bad or
good, nothing I can say will diminish his reputation, nor do I wish
it should. When a legend has once grown up about a man it keeps on
growing. It has been decreed that Dickens shall be a great novelist,
and Gladstone a great statesman, and Browning a great {120} poet, and
Herbert Spencer a great philosopher. Each of these men was great in
other ways, but the legend is invincible. So, no doubt, with
Garrison. He will remain the Liberator of the Slave. By the time
the cold analysis of History reverses that verdict, personal
partialities will have ceased to count.
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