Ever and anon in the world’s history there has been some one who has
broken out as a living fountain of the _free spirit_ of humanity,
has given bold utterance to the pent-up thought of wrongs, too long
endured, and has made the demand for some God-given right, until then
withheld,--a demand so obviously just, that the tyrants of earth have
trembled as if called to judgment, and the oppressed have rejoiced as
at the voice of their deliverer. “It is thus the spirit of a single
mind makes that of multitudes take one direction.”
Such, as the subsequent history of our country has shown, such was
the spirit of the mind of that man who will be honored through all
coming time, as the leader of the most glorious movement ever made in
humanity’s behalf,--the movement for _perfect, impartial liberty_,
which for the last thirty-nine years has rocked our Republic from
centre to circumference, and will continue to agitate it until every
vestige of slavery is shaken out of our civil fabric.
“When the tourist of Europe has descended from the Black Forest into
Suabia, his guide asks him if he does not wish to see the source of
the Danube. Only one answer can be given to such a question. So he is
conducted into the garden of an obscure nobleman of Baden; and there,
within a small stone enclosure, he is shown the highest spring of
that river, which has worn its channel deeper and wider for sixteen
hundred miles, and, receiving on its way the contributions of thirty
navigable streams, enters the Black Sea by five mouths, thus opening
a communication between the interior of Europe and the Mediterranean,
bearing on its bosom the commerce of fifty millions of people, and
bringing them into the community of nations.”
Soon after Mr. Garrison’s assault upon the institution of American
slavery began to be felt, (and that was almost as soon as it began,)
a Southern governor wrote to the mayor of Boston, demanding to know
what was to be expected, what to be feared, from this attack upon “the
peculiar institution of the South.” In due time the gentleman who was
then the high official addressed replied to his Southern excellency,
that there was no occasion for uneasiness. “He had made diligent search
for the would-be ‘Liberator.’ The city officers had ferreted out the
paper and its editor. His office was an obscure hole, his only visible
auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a few very insignificant
persons of all colors.”
Undoubtedly to that dainty gentleman the rise of the antislavery
enterprise in our country did seem insignificant,--quite as
insignificant as the little spring of water in the garden at Baden. He
may never have learnt among his nursery rhymes, that
“Large streams from little fountains flow,
Tall oaks from little acorns grow,”
and he must have forgotten that Christianity began in a stable,--“that
not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble
were called. But that God chose the _foolish_ things of the world to
confound the wise, and the _weak_ things of the world to confound the
things which are mighty.” Our poet, Lowell, estimated, more justly
“the would-be Liberator,” his office and his humble assistant.
“In a small chamber, friendless and unseen,
Toiled o’er his types one poor, unlearned young man;
The place was dark, unfurnitured, and mean;
Yet there _the freedom of a race_ began.
“Help came but slowly; sure no man yet
Put lever to the heavy world with less.
What need of help? He knew how types to set;
He had a dauntless spirit and a press.
“Such dauntless natures are the fiery pith,
The compact nucleus round which systems grow;
Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith,
And whirls impregnate with the central glow.”
It cannot be denied that the spirit of Mr. Garrison’s mind has made
the minds of multitudes--yes, of the majority of the people of our
country--take a new direction in favor of impartial liberty. Of
course, I do not claim that this new love of liberty originated
with him. He was no more the creator of this moral power, which has
taken our nation in its grasp, and is remoulding all our civil and
religious institutions, than the fountain in the garden at Baden is
the originator of the mighty Danube. Mr. Garrison, no less than that
spring, is but a medium, through which the Father of all mercies pours
from the hollow of his hand the waters that refresh the earth, and,
from the fulness of his heart, the streams that purify the souls,
making glad the children of God on earth and in heaven. But although to
God we must ultimately ascribe all our blessings, yet do we naturally,
and with great reason, revere and love as our _benefactors_ those
persons who have been the means and instruments by which personal,
political, or religious blessings have been conferred upon us.
Especially do we acknowledge our indebtedness to them, if they have
suffered reproach, persecution, loss, death, for the sake of the good
which we enjoy. The time, therefore, is coming, if it be not now, when
the people of our reunited Republic will gratefully own William Lloyd
Garrison among the greatest benefactors of our nation and our race.
However much our gratitude to the fathers of our Revolution may dispose
us to hide their shortcomings of the goal of impartial liberty, however
much we may find or devise to excuse or extenuate their infidelity to
the cause of down-trodden humanity, there the shameful facts stand, and
never can be effaced from the record;--the _fact_ that (notwithstanding
their glorious Declaration) the American revolutionists did not intend
the deliverance of _all_ men from oppression; no, not of all the men
who heroically fought for it side by side with themselves; no, not of
the men who, of all others, needed that deliverance the most;--the
_fact_ that the Constitution of this Republic (notwithstanding its
avowed purpose) did not mean to secure liberty to _all_ the dwellers
in the land over which it was to preside; nor did it provide that
those might depart from under it who were not to have any share in
its blessings, nor allow the spirit of liberty in them to assert its
claims;--the shameful _fact_ that the aim, the tendency, and the
result of that great struggle for freedom were partial, restricted,
selfish;--the terrible fact that the American revolutionists of 1776
left more firmly established in our country a system of bondage, a
slavery, “one hour of which” was known and acknowledged by them to be
“more intolerable than whole ages of that from which they had revolted.”
To complete, _by moral and religious means and instruments_, the great
work which the American revolutionists commenced; to do what they left
undone; to exterminate from our land the worst form of oppression, the
tremendous sin of slavery, was the sole purpose of the enterprise of
the Abolitionists, commenced in January, 1831. In this great work Mr.
Garrison has been the leader from the beginning. Of him, therefore, I
shall have the most to say. But of many other noble men and women I
shall have occasion to make most grateful mention.
Although I claim that Mr. Garrison has done more than any one else for
the liberation of the immense slave population of America, I am not
ignorant or forgetful of those who, before his day, made some attempts
for their deliverance. Not to mention the many eminent divines and
statesmen of England and the Colonies, before the Revolution, who
utterly condemned slavery,--the prominent leaders in that momentous
conflict with Great Britain, and in the institution of our Republic,
felt and acknowledged its glaring inconsistency with a democratic
government. Some of that day predicted, with almost prophetic
foresight, the evils, the ruin, which it would bring upon our nation,
if slavery should be permitted to abide in our midst. Many protested
against the Constitution, because of those articles in it which favored
the continuance and indefinite extension of “the great iniquity.” But
their objections were too generally overruled by plausible expositions
of the potency of other parts of our Magna Charta; and they acquiesced,
in the vain hope that the _spirit_ of the Constitution would prove to
be better than the letter.
For twenty years after the re-formation of our General Government in
1787, true-hearted men and women spoke and wrote in terms of strong
condemnation of slavery, as well as the slave-trade. They spoke and
wrote and published what the spirit of liberty dictated, in Maryland,
Virginia, and North Carolina, not less than in Pennsylvania, New York,
and the New England States. Nay, more, they instituted “societies for
the amelioration of the condition of the enslaved, and their _gradual_
emancipation.” Headed by no less a man than Dr. Franklin, they besieged
Congress with petitions for the suppression of the African slave-trade,
and the _gradual_ abolition of slavery. But after, in 1808, they had
obtained the prohibition of the trade, they subsided, as did the
abolitionists of Great Britain, into the belief that the subversion
of the whole evil of slavery would soon follow as a consequence; not
foreseeing that, so long as the _market_ for slaves should be kept
open, the commodity demanded there would be forthcoming, let the
hazard of procuring it be ever so great. It is now notorious that the
traffic in human beings has never been carried on so briskly as since
its nominal abolition, while the sufferings of the victims, and the
destruction of their lives, have been threefold greater than before.
Owing to this mistaken expectation of the effect of the Act of 1808
abolishing the slave-trade, the attention of philanthropists was
in a great measure withdrawn from the subject of slavery for ten
years or more. Meanwhile, the friends of “the peculiar institution”
were busily engaged in extending its borders and strengthening its
defences. The purchase of the Louisiana and Florida territories threw
open countless acres of _virgin_ soil, on which the labor of slaves
was more profitable than elsewhere. The invention of the “cotton-gin”
rendered the preparation of that staple so easy, that our Southern
planters could compete with any producers of it the world over. Cotton
plantations, therefore, multiplied apace. The value of slaves was more
than doubled. The spirit of private manumission, which in Virginia
alone, between 1798 and 1808, had set free more than a thousand bondmen
annually, was checked by avarice, and then forbidden by law. And
the “Ancient Dominion,” proud Virginia, rapidly became the home of
slave-breeders; and from that American Guinea was carried on a traffic
in human beings as brisk and horrible as ever desolated the coast of
Africa.
The free colored population at the South were subjected to new
disabilities, were exposed to most vexatious annoyances, and were
denied the protection of law against encroachments or personal injuries
by the “whites”; and very many of them, on slight pretexts, were
reduced to slavery again.
Social intercourse between the Northern and the Southern States
was then infrequent. It was kept up mainly by the wealthy and
pleasure-seeking, who, in their enjoyment of the hospitality of the
planters, could learn little of the condition and character of their
bondmen, and were easily led to take “South-side views of slavery.”
Whatsoever we gathered from these sources of information led us too
readily to acquiesce in the common assumption, that the negroes were
a thick-skulled, stupid, kind-hearted, jolly people, not much if any
worse off in slavery at the South than most of the free people of
color, and some other poor folks were at the North. So, when we were
disquieted at all on their account, it was but for a little time, and
we relieved ourselves of the burden by a sigh or two over the misery
that everywhere “flesh is heir to.”
The first event that fixed the attention of Northern men seriously
upon the subject of slavery, over which they had slumbered since
1808, was the dispute that arose in 1819, upon the proposal to admit
Missouri into the Union as a slave State. The contest was a vehement
one. Mr. Webster was _then_ upon the side of liberty. He led the van
of the opposition that arrayed itself in New England, and would have
averted the catastrophe, but for the cry “dissolution of the Union,”
then first raised at the South, and the necromancy of Henry Clay, who,
with his wand of compromise, conjured the people into acquiescence.
Words, however, significant words, touching the evil and the awful
wrong of slavery, were uttered in that controversy which were not to
be forgotten. And feelings of compassion for the bondmen were awakened
which were not allayed by the result.
Shortly before the Missouri controversy a movement had commenced in
the slave States, which was pregnant with effects very different from
those intended by the projectors of it. Often was it roughly demanded
of us Abolitionists, “Why we espoused so zealously the cause of the
enslaved?” “why we meddled so with the civil and domestic institutions
of the Southern States?” Our first answer always was, in the memorable
words of old Terence, “Because we are men, and, therefore, cannot be
indifferent to anything that concerns humanity.” Liberty cannot be
enjoyed, nor long preserved, at the North, if slavery be tolerated at
the South. But to those who felt so slightly the cords of love and
the bonds of a common humanity that they could not appreciate these
reasons, we gave another reason for our interference with the slavery
in our Southern States, even this: _we were solicited, we were urged,
entreated by the slaveholders themselves to interfere_.
About the year 1816, while intent upon their projects for perpetuating
and extending their “peculiar institution,” the slaveholders were
alarmed by symptoms of discontent among the free colored people,
imagined that they were promoting insubordination amongst the slaves,
and so conceived the project of colonizing them in Africa. To insure
the accomplishment of so mighty an undertaking, it was obviously
necessary to obtain the aid of the general government. In order to
sustain that government in making such a large appropriation of the
public money as would be needed, the people of the North, as well as of
the South, were to be conciliated to the plan; and to conciliate them
it was necessary to make it appear to be a philanthropic enterprise,
conferring great benefits immediately upon the free colored people,
and tending certainly, though indirectly, to the entire abolition of
slavery. Accordingly, agents, eloquent and cunning men, were sent into
all the free States, especially into Pennsylvania, New York, and New
England, to press the claims of the oppressed people of the South upon
the compassion and generosity of the Northern philanthropists. Never
did agents do their work better. Never were more exciting appeals
made to the humane than were pressed home upon us by such men as Mr.
Gurley, Mr. Cresson, and their fellow-laborers. They kept out of sight
the real design, the primal object, the animus of the founders and
Southern patrons of the American Colonization Society. They presented
to us views of the debasing, dehumanizing effects of slavery upon its
victims; the need of a far-distant removal from its overshadowing
presence of those who had been blighted by it, that they might revive,
unfold their humanity, exhibit their capacities, command the respect of
those who had known them only in degradation, and, by their new-born
activities, not only secure comfort and plenty for themselves on the
shores of their fatherland, but prepare homes there for the reception
of millions still pining in slavery, who, we were assured, would be
gladly released whenever it should be known that the bestowment of
freedom would be a blessing and not a curse to them. Such appeals were
not made to our hearts in vain. Suffice it to say that Mr. Garrison,
Gerrit Smith, Arthur Tappan, William Goodell, and all the early
Abolitionists, were induced to espouse the cause of our oppressed
and enslaved countrymen, by the speeches and tracts of Southern
Colonizationists.
If I were intending to write a complete history of the conflict with
slavery in our country, gratitude would impel me to give some account
of a number of philanthropists who, in different parts of the Union,
some of them in the midst of slaveholding communities, before Mr.
Garrison’s day, had fully exposed and faithfully denounced “the great
iniquity,” I should make especial mention of