There reached our city, on the morning of the 29th day of July, and
sailed from it on the night of the 31st, the most _remarkable_ person
perhaps by whom our shores have been lately visited. Were we to second
our own feelings, we would apply a higher epithet to William Lloyd
Garrison, but we have chosen one in which we are persuaded all parties
would agree who partook of his intercourse, however much they may differ
from each other and from him in principle and in practice. The object of
this short paper is to leave on the pages of our literature some record
of an extraordinary individual, who is a literary man himself, being the
editor and proprietor of a successful newspaper published at Boston in
Massachusetts; but his name may be best recommended to our readers in
connection with that of the well-known George Thompson, whose eloquence
was so powerful an auxiliary to the unnumbered petitions which at length
wrung from our legislature the just but expensive emancipation of the
West Indian negroes. Community of action and of suffering, as pleaders
for the rights of the black and coloured population of the United States,
has rendered them bosom friends, and each has a child called after the
name of the other. Thompson is now a denizen of the United Kingdom; but
while we write, Garrison is crossing the broad Atlantic to encounter
new dangers: comparatively safe at home, his life is forfeited whenever
he ventures to pass the moral line of demarcation which separates the
free from the slave states--forfeited so surely as there is a rifle in
Kentucky or a bowie knife in Alabama.
We have set Garrison down as “an American nobleman,” and the “peerage”
in which we look for his titles and dignities is “The Martyr Age of the
United States of America,” by Harriet Martineau--a writer to whom none
will deny the possession of discrimination, which is all we contend for.
“William Lloyd Garrison is one of God’s nobility--the head of the moral
aristocracy, whose prerogatives we are contemplating. It is not only
that he is invulnerable to injury--that he early got the world under
his feet in a way which it would have made Zeno stroke his beard with a
complacency to witness; but that in his meekness, his sympathies, his
self-forgetfulness, he appears ‘covered all over with the stars and
orders’ of the spiritual realm whence he derives his dignities and his
powers. At present he is a marked man wherever he turns. The faces of
his friends brighten when his step is heard: the people of colour almost
kneel to him; and the rest of society jeers, pelts, and execrates him.
Amidst all this, his gladsome life rolls on, ‘too busy to be anxious,
and too loving to be sad.’ He springs from his bed singing at sunrise:
and if during the day tears should cloud his serenity, they are never
shed for himself. His countenance of steady compassion gives hope to
the oppressed, who look to him as the Jews looked to Moses. It was this
serene countenance, saint-like in its earnestness and purity, that a man
bought at a print-shop, where it was exposed without a name, and hung
up as the most apostolic face he ever saw. It does not alter the case
that the man took it out of the frame, and hid it when he found that it
was Garrison who had been adorning his parlour.” And he can be no common
man of whom it is recorded in the work to which we have already alluded,
that, on starting a newspaper for the advocacy of abolition principles,
“Garrison and his friend Knapp, a printer, were ere long living in a
garret, on bread and water, expending all their spare earnings and time
on the publication, and that when it sold particularly well (says Knapp),
we treated ourselves with a bowl of milk.”--_The Martyr Age of the United
States of America_, p. 5.
As we are not writing his memoir, we refer such of our readers as may be
curious to inquire further into the subject to the pamphlet just cited,
and to the chapter headed “Garrison,” in the work on America by the same
writer. To one extraordinary feature of his character, however, we cannot
forbear adverting. He belongs to a society instituted for the apparently
negative purpose of _non-resistance_, and is therefore the safest of all
antagonists. Buffet as you list the head and sides of W. L. Garrison,
and you receive no buffet in return. That this is owing to no deficiency
of personal courage, admits of demonstration. Neither the prison into
which he was cast when a mere lad in one state, the price set on his head
in another, nor the tar-kettle to which he would on one occasion have
been dragged but for a stout arm that came to his rescue, has been able
to make Garrison swerve from what he considers to be his line of duty.
Another cause of this disposition to passive endurance must be sought,
and it is easily found: _he is in love_--deeply in love with all mankind.
His principle is to “resist not evil;” and he acts upon it to the fullest
extent. In fact, he appears to be several centuries in advance of his
time, and to live in a millennium of his own creating.
We shall only add, that the effect which this remarkable man produced
on the minds of those who companied with him while in Dublin, was of
a very peculiar nature. Among these were persons of various sects and
parties, and of all varieties of temperament, but nearly all seemed
to concur in their estimate of his character. Though many seemed to
think that he carried out the great principle of love to an unnecessary
extent, none seemed able to gainsay his reasonings. Here and there tears
were seen to start, not called forth by any sublime sentiment or tender
emotion to which he had given words at the moment, but educed as it were
by the abstract contemplation of the image of intense virtue which he
represented; and most agreed in the opinion, that of all individuals
with whom they had ever been acquainted, he was the one of whom it could
be with most justice asserted, that none could hold much intercourse
with him without becoming better. His Dublin host sailed to Liverpool on
Monday evening for the mere purpose of enjoying his company for three
hours more, which was all the arrangements the Boston steamer would
permit, in which he was to leave Liverpool on Tuesday.
It would be an act of great injustice to close this article without
making some mention of Garrison’s congenial friend and companion
Nathaniel Peabody Rogers of Plymouth, in New Hampshire, also the editor
and proprietor of a newspaper, of whom, however, we shall only say,
that if (as the phrase goes) _anything happened_ to W. L. Garrison, he
is the man who would be ready to occupy his place in the admiration and
execration of America.