half-measures; if a thing was a sin, then it should not exist another
day: it was real anguish to have to think of the sufferings of these
poor people, and he could not rest or be happy for a moment so long
as injustice and such a barbarous state of things existed. Therefore,
the immediate freedom of the negro was the only thing to strive and
live for. Here he and Lundy disagreed—not as to the evil of slavery,
but on the question of the best way to put an end to it. Lundy was not
so extreme as Garrison. His view was that the negro should gradually
be set free and sent to colonize in another country. Garrison asked
for his immediate freedom on American soil. His attitude made the
slave-owners very angry, and also filled them with alarm: they had
heard a good deal of talk about freeing the negro in the future, but
never had the demand been made for his immediate release. So Garrison
now broke his partnership with Lundy and started on his campaign
alone. For a so-called libel on a slave trader he was sent to prison,
and being unable to pay the fine, he was forty-nine days in jail,
until he was released by Arthur Tappan, of New York, a famous Quaker
philanthropist and abolitionist, who paid his fine for him. Garrison
was no martyr, but his anger was aroused against the slave-owners and
he felt more desperately keen about his cause than ever. Once more he
looked to the churches to support him, and again they failed him. In
Boston they closed their doors against him, and it was a society of
free-thinkers who finally gave Garrison a hall to lecture in, and some
who heard him there were moved to join him and assist in his campaign.
Never did a man have more uphill work in trying to move these people
out of their sloth and indifference. He visited all the principal
people in Boston and urged them to think; he implored the clergy to
turn to Christianity and bring it into practice. Coldheartedness and
utter contempt of the negro he met with everywhere. He was disheartened
but undefeated; his hatred of injustice, his loathing of cruelty, his
pity, all these feelings carried him on.
In order to further his views he set up a paper of his own in Boston.
He had no money nor a single subscriber, but he found a sympathetic
partner, and these two printed their own paper, their only helper
being a negro boy. It was called _The Liberator_, and its motto was
“My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.” By this he
meant that he worked for the good of the whole world, not only for that
portion of it to which he himself belonged, for only by treating men of
other countries as your friends and brothers will you have progress,
peace, and true prosperity at home.
In the first number of _The Liberator_, Garrison had a manifesto, or
address, to the public, the words of which became the whole spirit of
his life. He declared that he would work for and think of nothing else
but the freedom of the slave, and ended up with the words, “I am in
earnest: I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat
a single inch, and I will be heard.” This address was signed by twelve
men, all poor, but after they had met together one evening for the
purpose of signing the address they stepped out into the starry night
with glad hearts and an object to live for. This address of Garrison’s
lost him many subscribers, because it went too far and was thought too
extreme, but gradually it gained him influence and power. It was the
seed of many anti-slavery societies, and it started other newspapers
working with the same objects. _The Liberator_ was destined to contain
President Lincoln’s declaration of emancipation.
An anti-slavery society had been started in England, supported by the
great and courageous clergyman Wilberforce, who had been for years
working against slavery and had helped to bring it to an end in the
British possessions. Garrison was asked to go over and speak to the
English society, which he did, and was received with great enthusiasm.
The English were very much impressed by Garrison’s sincerity and the
burning enthusiasm that lay under his quiet and modest manner. He was
not the sort of man they imagined an American agitator to be. He was,
of course, very greatly encouraged, but on his return to America hard
times awaited him, because he had stated in England that the United
States was a sham so long as it allowed the present state of things to
exist. A meeting in New York to start an anti-slavery league was broken
up and the hall emptied by a furious mob. Another mob also besieged
and tried to destroy the offices of _The Liberator_ at Boston. There
was great excitement everywhere: Garrison’s work had begun to tell.
Disagreeable though violent opposition is, it is often the first step
toward being heard. Now, Garrison undoubtedly criticized his country;
he found fault with it, and used very strong language about the
slave-owners. The commonly held view is that any criticism of one’s
country is treacherous, mischievous, and unpatriotic, but Garrison said:
I speak the truth, painful, humiliating, and terrible as it is,
and because I am bold and faithful to do so, am I to be branded
as the calumniator and enemy of my country? If to suffer sin upon
my brother be to hate him in my heart, then to suffer sin upon my
country would be an evidence not of my love but hatred of her; it is
because my affection for her is intense and paramount to all selfish
considerations that I do not parley with her crime. I know that she
can neither be truly happy nor prosperous while she continues to
manacle every sixth child born on her soil.
Who, then, one may ask, is the true patriot? He who has before his eyes
a high ideal for his country, who wishes it to be the best, the most
civilized and the most prosperous, its people educated, far-seeing,
and humane; who does not shut his eyes to his country’s faults and to
the mistakes of its governments, but who strives to help as he would
help a friend to remedy his faults—to show people how things might
be better and how to set about improving them? Or is the patriot the
man who in the face of monstrous evils cries “It is God’s will,” or
“My country, right or wrong”? Where should we be now were it not for
the men who obeyed their own consciences rather than the commands
of the State? When we think that burning people at the stake for
their religious beliefs, hanging them for sheep-stealing, putting
women to death for petty thefts, or working small children in mines
were considered right, when we remember that these inhuman laws were
regarded by the patriot of the time as the will of God, and the people
who wished to see them altered as disloyal to their rulers, we may be a
little less bitter against the reformer of the present day: the man who
sees that there are still many unjust laws and conditions even in his
own country, and who has the courage to say so.
Garrison, however, found now enough support to start what was known
as “The American Anti-slavery Society.” He called together a meeting
for the purpose at Philadelphia, when he made a striking declaration
of his beliefs. He spoke the most moving and inspiring words about
the state of the slaves and the rights of liberty. He announced what
their work would be: to organize anti-slavery societies everywhere,
to hold meetings unceasingly, to circulate literature, to spare no
efforts whatever to bring the nation, as he expressed it, “to a speedy
repentance.”
Now began what has been called “the martyr age” in America, and the
most active period of Garrison’s life. He and his followers held
meetings night and day, and mobs of rough and brutal men were sent by
their opponents to break them up. Anti-slavery people were in danger
of their lives; they were mobbed wherever they were known, and their
houses burnt or ruined. Halls where meetings were to be held were
destroyed. A young divinity student was flogged publicly for having
anti-slavery literature in his bag. Another lost his life defending a
friend against the ruffians who attacked him. In the South, men even
suspected of favoring the abolition of slaves were lynched, and judges
were all in favor of slavery, and treated the anti-slavery people as
vagabonds. Garrison on one occasion had his clothes torn off him and
was dragged through the streets with a rope round his body. He was
rescued from a raging crowd by the mayor of the town, who saw no way
of protecting him but by putting him in prison. On the wall of his
cell Garrison wrote: “William L. Garrison was put into this cell on
Wednesday afternoon, October 21, 1835, to save him from the violence
of a respectable and influential mob who sought to destroy him for
preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that all men are
created equal and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God.”
A merchant on one occasion spoke in public to the abolitionists. “It
is not a matter of principle with us,” he said; “it is a business
necessity; we cannot afford to let you succeed; we do not mean to allow
you to succeed; we mean to put you down by fair means if we can, by
foul means if we must.” Garrison said that Government and the heads
of commerce were the forces that really kept slavery going; it could
not, he felt, be the will of the people when they began to think and
to understand what the real nature of slavery was. It was the business
of his life to show them, and he devoted all his energies, all his
power of eloquence and persuasion, to move the people, to appeal to
their reason and sense of justice and compassion. He sought to abolish
slavery by moral means alone; he did not attempt political means, such
as asking Congress to use its power. He worked only in the Northern
States, for the South was practically united in its convictions. He
found strong opposition in the North, too, for there were many Northern
people who looked upon the Constitution as sacred, and because the
principle of slavery was incorporated in it, regarded all opposition to
slavery as disloyalty to the State.
Garrison was undoubtedly helped by the Fugitive Slave Law. It is often
the case that things get worse before they get better. This cruel law
was a case in point. It was this: that those slaves who had escaped
from the Southern States and were living in Canada or the North, some
of them well off, useful, and happy, were to be hunted down and brought
back to slavery; those who housed them and helped them in any way
to escape would also be fined or imprisoned. The result of this new
law was to rouse the people’s feeling for liberty and to touch their
hearts. When they saw the wretched fugitives driven along the streets
in chains great feeling was shown. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was inspired
by incidents resulting from the Fugitive Slave Law. Though written
in an old-fashioned way, with a good deal of religious talk, it is a
moving and sincere book, by a writer whose heart was full of pity and
indignation. It touched many hearts, including those of the clergy, and
stirred people to action. It had perhaps more influence than any book
with a purpose that has ever been written.
The people of the North suffered great humiliation at this period,
for nothing could save them from lending their troops and using all
their forces to help in slave catching, for it was the law of their
Constitution. John Brown also, in connection with this law, appeared
rather violently upon the scene. Most people have heard of him; many
have heard of him who do not know anything about W. L. Garrison. He
became a hero and a martyr by being hanged as a rebel, and the song
written about him, “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave,
but his soul goes marching on,” became a sort of “Marseillaise” of
the North, and has undoubtedly helped to keep his memory alive. John
Brown had been for some time a keen anti-slavery agitator, and when the
Fugitive Slave Law was passed he carried out a scheme of his own for
helping to hide and establish fugitives in a stronghold he had built in
the mountains of Virginia. For an armed raid which he made into that
State with slaves, in which he captured an arsenal, he was brought up
on the charge of high treason and hanged.
Garrison thought John Brown courageous and disinterested, but he also
thought the raid wild and useless; but then Garrison’s views of war and
bloodshed were very different from John Brown’s. One thing he did see
was the wonderful change that thirty years of fighting against slavery
had brought about in the tremendous outburst of sympathy for Brown, for
great indignation was shown and felt at his fate.
Up to this time it would have been almost impossible for a President
to be chosen who was not loyal to slavery. But times had changed,
and Garrison, if he had not been entirely responsible, had been the
principal cause of the change in people’s views; the sympathies of
Lincoln, who was a candidate for the Presidency of the United States,
were known—he was against slavery, and he was elected by the North, for
the hearts of the people had been moved.
Garrison for the first time saw the results of his life’s work, and
it is more than some reformers have done. In the election of Lincoln
as President he could see, though still a long way off, an end to
his labors, to the long and weary battle he had fought. But much
suffering and anguish was to be gone through before anything could
be accomplished. Lincoln was elected by the Northern States, and the
South, furious, declared themselves independent of the Government and
the Union, and forming a Government of their own, called themselves
“The Confederate States of America.” Civil war started, and never
was a war more passionately felt on both sides. It was not a war of
Governments, or a war merely to decide whether the South should be
united to the North, but it involved a living question of right or
wrong between those who believed in slavery and those who did not. The
people knew what they were fighting about, which is more often the case
in civil war than in wars between nations planned by their Governments.
Garrison had been a man of peace. He hated war and preached against it,
yet he saw that the conflict could not be stopped. It had been taken
out of his hands. Slavery must be overthrown, and, hateful though it
was to him, blood, it seemed, must be spilt.
Every American knows the story of that struggle. The war began in 1861
and lasted four years, ending in a victory for the North, though the
South fought desperately and gained much sympathy by their bravery. As
the struggle went on the hatred of slavery grew, and before it ended
many slaves were set free. Various States were asked to free their
slaves, and those who did not were held to be in rebellion against
the State. The total abolition of slavery by an amendment of the
Constitution did not come about till the close of the war in 1865.
Garrison tells of visiting a camp of twelve hundred slaves just
liberated. He called upon them to give cheers for freedom, and to his
astonishment they were silent: the poor things did not know how to
cheer.
It may be asked how Garrison set the slaves free, for he had not the
power to do so. He had done so by preparing the ground, by educating
the people, rousing them from their selfishness and awakening in them
a moral sense. His efforts were rewarded by the election of Lincoln,
who as President had the power to complete and to crown the work that
Garrison had done.
To the truly great man it is the triumph of his cause, and not
personal success, that will make him glad and thankful. Garrison’s
contemporaries fully realized how he had been the chief cause in
bringing about the emancipation of the slaves. Those who have lived
since may have forgotten, and the great figure of Lincoln stands out as
the man who before all others brought an infamous system to an end.
Garrison’s work was done, and he retired into private life. He had
not been spoilt by publicity; he never really cared for a life of
excitement; he was extraordinarily modest and had no personal ambition
at all. Though most of his life he had been abused and slandered, it
had never made him bitter; he remained happy, serene, and good-tempered
in himself, and kept his warm affections to the end of his life. His
domestic life, too, was very happy, and he was devoted to his wife
and children. He died when he was seventy-three, at Boston, quite
peacefully, his wife having died three years before him.
Garrison had his faults, if faults they could be called. He was too
easily taken in—he had perhaps too open a mind, and at one time got
into the hands of some rather shady people, who led him to take up
spiritualism, quack medicines, phrenology, homeopathy, and so on. He
was always hoping that any one of these things might possibly help to
improve the conditions of mankind. But some of his fads, as they were
then called, have become the beliefs of a great many people in the
world. The supporters of _The Liberator_ were annoyed with Garrison for
preaching in his paper against capital punishment, against governments
and the Church, and in favor of votes for women and temperance. They
did not see why they should have to believe in these things because
they believed in the freeing of the negro. But Garrison’s beliefs were
the result of his experience and circumstances. He hated governments
because his Government had built up its Constitution on slavery; he
despised the Church because it upheld the crime of slavery; if it did
not give it active support, it gave it by silence as to its evils,
by tolerating slave-holding by its ministers and members, and by
preventing whenever it could meetings or discussions being held against
it. The Church, Garrison thought, should not be regarded as the Church
of Christ, but as the foe of freedom, humanity, and religion. He hated
Sunday because on that day no abolition meetings could be held—yet,
as we know, he had been a strict church-goer as a young man, and was
always to the end of his life a Christian, longing for men and women
and the Church to turn to true Christianity, apart from its forms and
dogmas.
Garrison had demanded for the negro full citizenship, but he did not
live to see how strong is the prejudice in many places against black
people. He had not to face this problem of race. It was a great step
in the history of civilization to abolish slavery, but it was not the
end of the negro question. Is the black man to have the same rights as
the white man, the same opportunities for education and improvement?
Is there a place for him in this world? Can he make himself useful and
indispensable? If we read the history of the negroes’ struggles to get
education against fearful difficulties and opposition, of how they
endeavored to learn with their clouded, unused minds, and of how they
succeeded in lifting themselves by their own efforts out of ignorance
and degradation, I think we must believe that there is a place for
them, that, given a share in the world’s work and its responsibilities,
they will show themselves worthy of the trust put in them. But the
white man himself must become more enlightened before an answer to
this problem can be found. In the words of a remarkable negro, Booker
Washington, who rose from being a slave to the position of a great
teacher: “You cannot hold a man down in a ditch without stopping down
there with him yourself.”
D. P.
XI
HENRY THOREAU
1817–1862
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817,
and lived most of his life in or near his native town. The world, if
you were to ask it who Thoreau was, would probably say “a crank,”
because he did not think and act in quite the same way as other people,
and because he practised what he preached. He never went to church
or voted at elections, or drank wine or smoked tobacco, and he went
to live alone in the woods. He was an author and a naturalist; and,
happily for us, he has been able to reveal through his writings what
sort of man he was.
But people trouble themselves nowadays very little about the quiet,
retiring souls, and so “Walden,” the book Thoreau wrote on his
Experiment—as he called his period of retirement in the woods, is not
so well known as it ought to be; for it seems to stand alone in its
beauty and originality; no other book is like it. As we hurry and
scurry through this mechanical century, we might do well to turn to its
quiet pages, and if we do we may wonder if Thoreau was not the wise one
and we the cranks after all.
Henry Thoreau’s childhood was a calm and happy one. He was brought
up under the best possible conditions for forming a steadfast and
unworldly character. Concord was a large, quiet village of plain white
houses and shady elm-trees—a specially good example of a New England
village community. There were no very rich people and no very poor: the
inhabitants managed all their little affairs for themselves, and were
perfectly capable of so doing. They were shrewd, honest, good people,
and friendly towards one another. They seemed to have few worldly
ambitions and were naturally inclined to be simple and democratic. They
had simple occupations and amusements and did not crave for excitement,
as we do now. Concord produced a very fine race of people and a few
remarkable individuals—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau himself; there
were others less well known, but equally stalwart in character.
Emerson, the poet and philosopher, no doubt helped his neighbors to
become more cultivated and ideal: he brought them into touch with all
the enlightened thought of that day, for it was the period when Carlyle
and Wordsworth and Coleridge were living in England, and when the
civilized world was beginning to wake up to many problems it had never
thought about before, or had accepted as dispensations of Providence.
[Illustration: H. D. THOREAU, 1861]
In this safe and peaceful atmosphere of good-will and honest endeavor
the Thoreaus lived. They were poor and had no worldly advantages; but
they had what was far better, the position which comes from having
qualities of independence and courage, and they were respected and
looked up to by their neighbors. Henry Thoreau’s father made lead
pencils for a living, and Henry learnt to make them too—very skilfully,
it is said. He had two sisters and a brother, but even as a child Henry
Thoreau showed the most marked character of the lot. He was always
determined to go his own way, and was quite sure of what he liked and
disliked. But he was also very like other children, for when he was
told that he would one day go to heaven, he said he did not want to,
because he would not be allowed to take his sled with him. He had heard
that only very grand things were allowed in heaven, and his sled was
quite common and had been made at home.
Thoreau went to college—to Harvard—like any other young man, and did
nothing very brilliant while he was there; when he left, he took to
teaching and to writing, which was his great talent. He had always
written from quite early days, keeping a diary about all the things he
observed in nature—the tints of morning and evening skies, the songs
of birds, the habits of animals, and the flowering and growth of
plants and trees. He had extraordinary powers of observation and was
a very remarkable naturalist; his understanding of animals was almost
uncanny—they seemed to realize how akin he was to them. Hunted foxes
would come to him for protection, and wild squirrels would nestle in
his coat; he could thrust his hand into a pool and pull out a fish,
which seemed to trust him and show no objection! Thoreau was absolutely
at home in the open air; he could skate and swim and row and sail. He
thought that every boy between the ages of ten and fourteen should
shoulder a gun, but that it should only be wild shooting, limitless,
and not enclosed like the shooting of English noblemen. Fishermen
and hunters, he observed, seemed to get into peculiar touch with
nature in the intervals of their sport. But Thoreau himself gave up
shooting entirely as he grew older, and studied the habits of birds
with a spy-glass; he learnt to remain absolutely motionless, as still
as the wall or ground he rested on. From earliest childhood he made
collections of Indian relics and of turtles and fishes. He liked to
take immense journeys in search of interesting new plants and animals;
once he went three hundred and twenty-five miles in a canoe with an
Indian. He would camp out and be exposed to all weathers; often he was
cold and hungry. A friend describes with a shiver how he slept out with
Thoreau on the bare rocks of a mountain without enough blankets; but
Thoreau, if he loved a thing, could not do it moderately, and, though
he was so hardy, he ended by hurting himself and destroying his health.