While in attendance upon the sessions of the World's Convention Garrison received tidings, of the birth of his third child. The second, whom he named for himself, was born in 1838. The third, who was also a son, the fond father named after Wendell Phillips. Three children and a wife did not tend to a solution of the always difficult problem of family maintenance. The pressure of their needs upon the husband sometimes, simple as indeed they were owing to the good sense and prudence of Mrs. Garrison, seemed to exceed the weight of the atmospheric column to the square inch. The fight for bread was one of the bitterest battles of the reformer's life. The arrangement made in 1837, whereby the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society assumed the responsibility of the publication of the Liberator, Garrison rescinded at the beginning of 1838, for the sake of giving himself greater freedom in the advocacy in its columns of the several other reforms in which he had enlisted, besides Abolitionism. But Garrison and the paper were now widely recognized as anti-slavery essentials and indispensables. Many of the leaders of the movement perceived, as Gerritt Smith expressed it in a letter enclosing fifty dollars for the editor, that "Among the many things in which the Abolitionists of our country should be agreed, are the two following: (1) The Liberator must be sustained; (2) its editor must be kept above want; not only, nor mainly, for his own or his family's happiness; but that, having his own mind unembarrassed by the cares of griping poverty, he may be a more effective advocate of the cause of the Saviour's enslaved poor." A new arrangement, in accordance with this suggestion for the support of the paper and the preservation of the editor from want, was made in 1839, and its performance taken in charge by a committee of gentlemen, who undertook to raise the necessary funds for those objects. Thus it was that Garrison, through the wise and generous provision of friends, was enabled to augment the happiness of an increasing family, and at the same time add to his own effectiveness as an anti-slavery instrument.

Garrison found occasion soon after his return from the World's Convention for the employment of all his added effectiveness for continuing the moral movement against slavery. For what with the strife and schism in the anti-slavery ranks, followed by the excitements of the long Presidential canvass of 1840, wherein the great body of the Abolitionists developed an uncontrollable impulse to political action, some through the medium of the new Liberty party which had nominated James G. Birney for the Presidency, while others reverted to the two old parties with which they had formerly acted—what with all these causes the pure moral movement started by Garrison was in grave danger of getting abolished or at least of being reduced to a nullity in its influence upon public opinion. John A. Collins, the able and resourceful general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, wrote in the deepest anxiety to Garrison from New Bedford, September 1, 1840, on this head. Says he: "I really wish you understood perfectly the exact position the friends of the old organization hold to the two great political parties, and how generally they have been caught up in the whirlwind of political enthusiasm. Could you but go where I have been, and have seen and heard what I have seen and heard; could you see men—aye, and women, too—who have been and still are your warmest advocates, who have eschewed sectarianism, and lost their caste in the circle in which they moved, for their strong adherence to your views and measures, declare that they would sooner forego their Abolitionism than their party.... Now, these are not the views of here and there a straggling Abolitionist, but of seven-tenths of all the voting Abolitionists of the State.... They are entirely unconscious of the demoralizing influence of their course. They need light, warning, entreaty, and rebuke." Besides this demoralization of the Abolitionists, as described by Collins, the parent society at New York fell into bad financial straits. It was absolutely without funds, and without any means of supplying the lack. What should it do in its extremity but appeal to the Massachusetts Society which was already heavily burdened by its own load, the Liberator. The new organ of the national organization, The Anti-Slavery Standard, surely must not be allowed to fail for want of funds in this emergency. The Boston management rose to the occasion. Collins was sent to England in quest of contributions from the Abolitionists of Great Britain. But, great as was the need of money, the relief which it might afford would only prove temporary unless there could be effected a thorough anti-slavery revival. This was vital. And therefore to this end Garrison now bent his remarkable energies.

Agents, during this period when money was scarce, were necessarily few. But the pioneer proved a host in himself. Resigning the editorial charge of the Liberator into the capable hands of Edmund Quincy, Garrison itinerated in the role of an anti-slavery lecturer in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire, reviving everywhere the languishing interest of his disciples. On the return of Collins in the summer of 1841, revival meetings and conventions started up with increased activity, the fruits of which were of a most cheering character. At Nantucket, Garrison made a big catch in his anti-slavery net. It was Frederick Douglass, young, callow, and awkward, but with his splendid and inimitable gifts flashing through all as he, for the first time in his life, addressed an audience of white people. Garrison, with the instinct of leadership, saw at once the value of the runaway slave's oratorical possibilities in their relations to the anti-slavery movement. It was at his instance that Collins added Douglass to the band of anti-slavery agents. The new agent has preserved his recollections of the pioneer's speech on that eventful evening in Nantucket. Says he: "Mr. Garrison followed me, taking me as his text; and now, whether I had made an eloquent plea in behalf of freedom or not, his was one never to be forgotten. Those who had heard him oftenest, and had known him longest, were astonished at his masterly effort. For the time he possessed that almost fabulous inspiration, often referred to but seldom attained, in which a public meeting is transformed, as it were, into a single individuality, the orator swaying a thousand heads and hearts at once, and by the simple majesty of his all-controlling thought, converting his hearers into the express image of his own soul. That night there were, at least, a thousand Garrisonians in Nantucket!"

Here is another picture of Garrison in the lecture-field. It is from the pen of N.P. Rogers, with whom he was making a week's tour among the White Mountains, interspersing the same with anti-slavery meetings. At Plymouth, failing to procure the use of a church for their purpose, they fell back upon the temple not made with hands.

"Semi-circular seats, backed against a line of magnificent trees to accommodate, we should judge, from two to three hundred," Rogers narrates, "were filled, principally with women, and the men who could not find seats stood on the green sward on either hand; and, at length, when wearied with standing, seated themselves on the ground. Garrison, mounted on a rude platform in front, lifted up his voice and spoke to them in prophet tones and surpassing eloquence, from half-past three till I saw the rays of the setting sun playing through the trees on his head.... They (the auditory) heeded it not any more than he, but remained till he ended, apparently indisposed to move, though some came from six, eight, and even twelve miles distance." So bravely prospered the revival agitation, under the vigorous preaching of the indomitable pioneer.

In the midst of the growing activities of the revival season of the anti-slavery movement, Garrison had some personal experiences of a distressing nature. One of these was the case of his quondam friend and partner in the publication of the Liberator, Isaac Knapp. He, poor fellow, was no longer the publisher of the paper. His wretched business management of his department tended to keep the Liberator in a state of chronic financial embarrassment. When the committee, who assumed charge of the finances of the paper, took hold of the problem, they determined to let Knapp go. He was paid $150 or $175 as a quid pro quo for his interest in the Liberator. Unfortunate in the business of a publisher, he was yet more unfortunate in another respect. He had become a victim of intemperance. His inebriety increased upon him, accelerated, no doubt, by his business failure. Notwithstanding Garrison's strong and tender friendship for Knapp, the broken man came to regard him as an enemy, and showed in many ways his jealousy and hatred of his old friend and partner. Very painful was this experience to the pioneer.

An experience which touched Garrison more nearly arose out of the sad case of his brother James, who, the reader will recall, ran away from his mother in Baltimore and went to sea. He ultimately enlisted in the United States Navy, and what with the brutalities which he suffered at the hands of his superiors, by way of discipline, and with those of his own uncontrolled passions and appetites, he was, when recovered by his brother William, a total moral and physical wreck. But the prodigal was gathered to the reformer's heart, and taken to his home where in memory of a mother long dead, whose darling was James, he was nursed and watched over with deep and pious love. There were sad lapses of the profligate man even in the sanctuary of his brother's home. The craving for liquor was omnipotent in the wretched creature, and he was attacked by uncontrollable desire for drink. But William's patience was infinite, and his yearning and pity at such times were as sweet and strong as a mother's. Death rung the curtain down in the fall of 1842, on this miserable life with its sorry and pathetic scenes.

About this time a trial of a different sort fell to the lot of Garrison to endure. The tongue of detraction was never more busy with his alleged infidel doctrines or to more damaging effect. Collins, in England, seeking to obtain contributions for the support of the agitation in America found Garrison's infidelity the great lion in the way of success. Even the good dispositions of the venerable Clarkson were affected by the injurious reports in this regard, circulated in England mainly by Nathaniel Colver, a narrow and violent sectary of the Baptist denomination of the United States. It was, of course, painful to Garrison to feel that he had become a rock of offence in the path of the great movement, which he had started and to which he was devoting himself so energetically. To Elizabeth Pease, one of the noblest of the English Abolitionists, and one of his stanchest transatlantic friends, he defended himself against the false and cruel statements touching his religious beliefs. "I esteem the Holy Scriptures," he wrote her, "above all other books in the universe, and always appeal to 'the law and the testimony' to prove all my peculiar doctrines." His religious sentiments and Sabbatical views are almost if not quite identical with those held by the Quakers. "I believe in an indwelling Christ," he goes on to furnish a summary of his confession of faith, "and in His righteousness alone; I glory in nothing here below, save in Christ and in Him crucified; I believe all the works of the devil are to be destroyed, and Our Lord is to reign from sea to sea, even to the ends of the earth; and I profess to have passed from death unto life, and know by happy experience, that there is no condemnation to them who are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit." These were the pioneer's articles of faith. Their extreme simplicity and theological conservatism it would seem ought to have satisfied the evangelicals of all denominations. They were in essentials thoroughly orthodox. But in the composition of the shibboleths of beliefs non-essentials as well as essentials enter, the former to the latter in the proportion of two to one. It is not surprising, therefore, that Garrison's essentials proved unequal to the test set up by sectarianism, inasmuch as his spiritual life dropped the aspirate of the non-essentials of religious forms and observances.

But the good man had his compensation as well as his trials. Such of a very noble kind was the great Irish address brought over from Ireland by Remond in December 1841. It was signed by Daniel O'Connell, Father Mathew, and sixty thousand Roman Catholics of Ireland, who called upon the Irish Roman Catholics of America to make the cause of the slaves of the United States their cause. Large expectations of Irish assistance in the anti-slavery agitation were excited in the bosoms of Abolitionists by this imposing appeal. Garrison shared the high hopes of its beneficent influence upon the Ireland of America, with many others. Alas! for the "best laid schemes of mice and men," for the new Ireland was not populated with saints, but a fiercely human race who had come to their new home to better their own condition, not that of the negro. Hardly had they touched these shores before they were Americanized in the colorphobia sense, out-Heroded Herod in hatred of the colored people and their anti-slavery friends. Indeed, it was quite one thing to preach Abolitionism with three thousand miles of sea-wall between one and his audience, and quite another to rise and do the preaching with no sea-wall to guard the preacher from the popular consequences of his preaching, as Father Mathew quickly perceived and reduced to practice eight years later, when he made his memorable visit to this country. In vain was the monster document unrolled in Faneuil Hall, and many Abolitionists with Irish blood were put forward to sweep the chords of Erin's heart, and to conjure by their eloquence the disciples of St. Patrick to rally under the banner of freedom. There was no response, except the response of bitter foes. Erin's harp vibrated to no breeze which did not come out of the South. The slave-power had been erected into patron saint by the new Ireland in America, and the new Ireland in America was very well content with his saintship's patronage and service. Thus it happened that the great expectations, which were excited by the Irish address, were never realized. But the pioneer had other fish in his net, had, in fact, meanwhile, got himself in readiness for a launch into a new and startling agitation. As to just what this new and startling agitation was we must refer the reader to the next chapter.



CHAPTER XVI.



THE PIONEER MAKES A NEW AND STARTLING DEPARTURE.

When Garrison hoisted the banner of immediate emancipation he was over-confident of success through the instrumentality of the church. It did not enter his heart to conceive that after he had delivered his message touching the barbarism of slavery that a church calling itself Christian, or that a ministry arrogating to itself the character of the Christ, could possibly say him nay. But he learned sadly enough the utter folly of such expectations. For from pew and pulpit the first stones were hurled against him, and the most cruel and persistent opposition and persecution issued. Then as the movement which he had started advanced, he saw how it was, why the church had played him false and the cause of freedom. It was because the poison of slavery which the evil one had injected into the nation's arteries had corrupted the springs of justice and mercy in that body. The Church was not free, it, too, was in bonds to slavery, how then could it help to free the slaves? That was the reason that pulpit and pew cried out against him and persecuted him. It was not they but the slave despotism, which ruled them, which wrought its fell purpose within them.

If the reformer cast his eyes about him for other help it was the same; the slime of the serpent was upon State as well as Church. Both of the two great political parties were bound hands and feet, and given over to the will of the slave tyranny. In all departments of Government, State and National, the positive, all-powerful principle was slavery. Its dread nolo me tangere had forced Congress into the denial of the right of petition, and into the imposition of a gag upon its own freedom of debate. It was the grand President-maker, and the judiciary bent without a blush to do its service. What, then, in these circumstances could the friends of freedom hope to achieve? The nation had been caught in the snare of slavery, and was in Church and State helpless in the vast spider-like web of wrong. The more the reformer pondered the problem, the more hopeless did success look under a Constitution which united right and wrong, freedom and slavery. As his reflections deepened, the conviction forced its way into his mind that the Union was the strong tower of the slave-power, which could never be destroyed until the fortress which protected it was first utterly demolished. In the spring of 1842 the pioneer was prepared to strike into this new path to effect his purpose.

"We must dissolve all connection with those murderers of fathers," he wrote his brother-in-law, "and murderers of mothers, and murderers of liberty, and traffickers of human flesh, and blasphemers against the Almighty at the South. What have we in common with them? What have we gained? What have we not lost by our alliance with them? Are not their principles, their pursuits, their policies, their interests, their designs, their feelings, utterly diverse from ours? Why, then, be subject to their dominion? Why not have the Union dissolved in form as it is in fact, especially if the form gives ample protection to the slave system, by securing for it all the physical force of the North? It is not treason against the cause of liberty to cry, "Down with every slave-holding Union!" Therefore, I raise that cry. And O that I had a voice louder than a thousand thunders, that it might shake the land and electrify the dead—the dead in sin, I mean—those slain by the hand of slavery."

A few weeks later the first peal of this thunder broke upon the startled ears of the country through the columns of the Liberator. The May meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society was drawing near, and the reformer, now entirely ready to enter upon an agitation looking to the dissolution of the Union, suggested "the duty of making the REPEAL OF THE UNION between the North and the South the grand rallying point until it be accomplished, or slavery cease to pollute our soil. We are for throwing all the means, energies, actions, purposes, and appliances of the genuine friends of liberty and republicanism into this one channel," he goes on to announce, "and for measuring the humanity, patriotism, and piety of every man by this one standard. This question can no longer be avoided, and a right decision of it will settle the controversy between freedom and slavery." The stern message of Isaiah to the Jews, beginning, "Hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this people. Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with DEATH and with HELL are we at agreement," seemed to the American Isaiah to describe exactly the character of the National Constitution. "Slavery is a combination of DEATH and HELL," he declares, with righteous wrath, "and with it the North have made a covenant, and are at agreement. As an element of the Government it is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. As a component part of the Union, it is necessarily a national interest. Divorced from Northern protection, it dies; with that protection it enlarges its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and extends its ravages."

The announcement of this new radicalism caused a sensation. Many genuine Garrisonian Abolitionists recoiled from a policy of disunion. Lydia Maria Child and James S. Gibbon of the Executive Committee of the National Society hastened to disavow for the society all responsibility for the disunion sentiment of the editor of the Liberator. His new departure seemed to them "foreign to the purpose for which it was organized." Like all new ideas, it was a sword-bearer, and proved a decided disturber of the peace. The Union-loving portion of the free States had never taken to the Abolition movement, for the reason that it tended to disturb the stability of their idol. But now the popular hatred of Abolitionism was intensified by the avowal of a distinct purpose on the part of its leader to labor for the separation of the sections. The press of the North made the most of this design to render altogether odious the small band of moral reformers, to reduce to a nullity their influence upon public opinion.

Notwithstanding its rejection by James Gibbons and Lydia Maria Child the new idea of the dissolution of the Union, as an anti-slavery object, found instant favor with many of the leading Abolitionists, like Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster and Abby Kelley. At the anniversary meeting of the American Society in 1842, the subject was mooted, and, although there was no official action taken, yet it was apparent that a majority of the delegates were favorable to its adoption as the sentiment of the society.

The ultimate object of Garrison was the abolition of slavery. Disunion led directly to this goal, therefore he planted his feet in that way. But while he shot the agitation at a distant mark, he did not mean to miss less remote results. There was remarkable method in his madness. He agitated the question of the dissolution of the Union "in order that the people of the North might be induced to reflect upon their debasement, guilt, and danger in continuing in partnership with heaven-daring oppressors, and thus be led to repentance."

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at its annual meeting in January, 1843 "dissolved the Union," wrote Quincy to R.D. Webb, "by a handsome vote, after a warm debate. The question was afterward reconsidered and passed in another shape, being wrapped up by Garrison in some of his favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of vehicle, as the apothecaries say." This is the final shape which Garrison's "favorite Old Testament Hebraisms" gave to the action of the society:

"Resolved, That the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell—involving both parties in atrocious criminality—and should be immediately annulled."

At its tenth anniversary, in 1844, the American Society resolved likewise that there should be no Union with slaveholders; and in May of the same year the New England Society voted by a large majority to dissolve the 'covenant with death, and the agreement with hell.' Almost the whole number of the Garrisonian Abolitionists had by this time placed upon their banner of immediate emancipation the revolutionary legend "No Union with slaveholders." Cathago est delenda were now ever on the lips of the pioneer. 'The Union it must and shall be destroyed' became the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his utterances on the slavery question.

The attitude of the anti-slavery disunionists to the Government which they were seeking to overthrow was clearly stated by Francis Jackson in a letter returning to the Governor of Massachusetts his commission as a justice of the peace. Says he, "To me it appears that the vices of slavery, introduced into the constitution of our body politic by a few slight punctures, has now so pervaded and poisoned the whole system of our National Government that literally there is no health in it. The only remedy that I can see for the disease is to be found in the dissolution of the patient.... Henceforth it (the Constitution) is dead to me, and I to it. I withdraw all profession of allegiance to it, and all my voluntary efforts to sustain it. The burdens that it lays upon me, while it is held up by others, I shall endeavor to bear patiently, yet acting with reference to a higher law, and distinctly declaring that, while I retain my own liberty, I will be a party to no compact which helps to rob any other man of his."

The Abolition agitation for the dissolution of the Union was assisted not a little by sundry occurrences of national importance. The increasing arrogance and violence of the South in Congress on all matters relating to the subject of slavery was one of these occurrences. Freedom of debate and the right of petition, Southern intolerance had rendered well nigh worthless in the National Legislature. In this way the North, during several months in every year, was forced to look at the reverse and the obverse faces, of the Union. These object-lessons taught many minds, no doubt, to count the cost which the preservation of the Union entailed upon the free States—"to reflect upon their debasement, guilt, and danger" in their partnership with slaveholders. Another circumstance which induced to this kind of reflection was the case of George Latimer, who was seized as a fugitive slave in Boston in the autumn of 1842. From beginning to end the Latimer case revealed how completely had Massachusetts tied her own hands as a party to the original compact with slavery whose will was the supreme law of the land. In obedience to this supreme law Chief-Justice Shaw refused to the captive the writ of habeas corpus, and Judge Story granted the owner possession of the fugitive, and time to procure evidence of his ownership. But worse still Massachusetts officials and one of her jails were employed to aid in the return of a man to slavery. This degradation aroused the greatest indignation in the State and led to the enactment of a law prohibiting its officials from taking part in the return of fugitive slaves, and the use of its jails and prisons for their detention. The passage of this personal liberty measure served to increase the activity of the anti-Union working forces in the South.

Then, again, the serious difficulty between Massachusetts and two of the slave States in regard to their treatment of her colored seamen aided Garrison in his agitation for the dissolution of the Union by the keen sense of insult and injury which the trouble begat and left upon the popular mind. Colored men in Massachusetts enjoyed a fair degree of equality before her laws, were endowed with the right to vote, and were, barring the prejudice against color, treated by the commonwealth as citizens. They were employed in the merchant service of her interstate trade. But at two of the Southern ports where her vessels entered, the colored seamen were seized by the local police and confined in houses of detention until the vessels to which they belonged were ready to depart, when they were released and allowed to join the vessels. This was a most outrageous proceeding, outrageous to the colored men who were thus deprived of their liberty, outrageous also to the owners of the vessels who were deprived of the service of their employes. Of what avail was the constitutional guaranty that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States", many men began to question? The South was evidently disposed to support only that portion of the national compact which sustained the slave system, all the rest upon occasion it trampled on and nullified. This lesson was enforced anew upon Massachusetts by the affair of her colored seamen. Unable to obtain redress of the wrong done her citizens, the State appointed agents to go to Charleston and New Orleans and test the constitutionality of the State laws under which the local authorities had acted. But South Carolina and Louisiana, especially the former, to whom Samuel Hoar was accredited, evinced themselves quite equal to the exigency to which the presence of the Massachusetts agents gave rise. To cut a long story short, these gentlemen, honored citizens of a sister State, and covered with the aegis of the Constitution, found that they could make no success of the business which they had in hand, found indeed that as soon as that business was made public that they stood in imminent peril of their lives. Whereupon, wisely conceiving discretion to be the better part of valor, they beat a hasty retreat back to their native air. The Massachusetts agents were driven out of Charleston and New Orleans. Where was the sacred and glorious union between Massachusetts and South Carolina and Louisiana that such things were possible—were constantly occurring? The circumstance made a strong impression on the State whose rights were thus grossly violated. It helped to convert Massachusetts to its later opposition to slavery, and to make its public sentiment more tolerant of the Garrisonian opposition to the covenant with death and the agreement with hell. To the agitation growing out of the scheme for the annexation of Texas must, however, be ascribed the premium among all the anti-Union working facts and forces of the first few years after Garrison and his coadjutors had raised the cry of "No union with slaveholders." This agitation renewed the intensity and sectionalism of the then almost forgotten struggle over the admission of Missouri nearly a quarter of a century before, and which was concluded by the Missouri compromise. This settlement was at the time considered quite satisfactory to the South. But Calhoun took an altogether different view of the matter twenty years later. The arrangement by which the South was excluded from the upper portion of the Louisiana Territory he came to regard as a cardinal blunder on the part of his section. The fact is that within those two decades the slave-holding had been completely outstripped by the non-slave-holding States in wealth, population, and social growth. The latter had obtained over the former States an indisputable supremacy in those respects. Would not the political balance settle also in the natural order of things in the Northern half of the Union unless it could be kept where it then was to the south of Mason and Dixon's line by an artificial political make-weight. This artificial political make-weight was nothing less than the acquisition of new slave territory to supply the demand for new slave States. Texas, with the territorial dimensions of an empire, answered the agrarian needs of the slave system. And the South, under the leadership of Calhoun, determined to make good their fancied loss in the settlement of the Missouri controversy by annexing Texas.

But all the smouldering dread of slave domination, all the passionate opposition to the extension of slavery, to the acquisition of new slave territory and the admission of new slave States, awoke hotly in the heart of the North. "No more slave territory." "No more slave States," resounded during this crisis, through the free States. "Texas or disunion," was the counter cry which reverberated through the slave States. Even Dr. Channing, who had no love for Garrison or his anti-slavery ultraism, was so wrought upon by the scheme for the annexation of Texas as to profess his preference for the dissolution of the Union, "rather than receive Texas into the Confederacy." "This measure, besides entailing on us evils of all sorts," the doctor boldly pointed out, "would have for its chief end to bring the whole country under the slave-power, to make the general Government the agent of slavery; and this we are bound to resist at all hazards. The free States should declare that the very act of admitting Texas will be construed as a dissolution of the Union."

The Northern blood was at fever heat, and an unwonted defiance of consequences, a fierce contempt of ancient political bugaboos marked the utterances of men erstwhile timid of speech upon all questions relating to slavery. In the anti-Texas convention held in Faneuil Hall January 29, 1845, all this timidity disappeared in the presence of the new peril. It was not a convention of Abolitionists, although Garrison was a member, but of politicians, mostly of the Whig party. "The anti-slavery spirit of the convention," wrote Edmund Quincy to R.D. Webb, "was surprising. The address and the speeches of the gentlemen, not Abolitionists, were such as caused Garrison to be mobbed ten years ago, and such as we thought thorough three or four years ago. There were no qualifications, or excuses, or twaddle."

Garrison flung himself into the anti-Texas movement with all his customary force and fire. Elected a delegate to the Faneuil Hall Convention by the influence of Francis Jackson, he took a leading part in its proceedings, "created the most stir in the whole matter," Wendell Phillips thought. Charles Sumner, who heard him speak for the first time, was struck with his "natural eloquence," and described his words as falling "in fiery rain." Again at a mass meeting for Middlesex County, held at Concord, to consider the aggressions of the slave-power, did the words of the pioneer fall "in fiery rain." Apprehensive that the performance of Massachusetts, when the emergency arose, would fall far short of her protestations, he exclaimed, "I have nothing to say, sir, nothing. I am tired of words, tired of hearing strong things said, where there is no heart to carry them out. When we are prepared to state the whole truth, and die for it, if necessary—when, like our fathers, we are prepared to take our ground, and not shrink from it, counting not our lives dear unto us—when we are prepared to let all earthly hopes go back to the board—then let us say so; till then, the less we say the better, in such an emergency as this. 'But who are we, will men ask.' that talk of such things? 'Are we enough to make a revolution?' No, sir; but we are enough to begin one, and, once begun, it never can be turned back. I am for revolution were I utterly alone. I am there because I must be there. I must cleave to the right. I cannot choose but obey the voice of God.

" ... Do not tell me of our past Union, and for how many years we have been one. We were only one while we were ready to hunt, shoot down, and deliver up the slave, and allow the slave-power to form an oligarchy on the floor of Congress! The moment we say no to this, the Union ceases—the Government falls."

The Texan struggle terminated in the usual way, in the triumph of the slave-power. Texas was annexed and admitted into the sisterhood of States, giving to the Southern section increased slave representation in both branches of Congress, and thereby aiding to fasten, what at the moment appeared to be its permanent domination in national affairs. As Garrison had apprehended, the performance of the North fell far short of its protestations when the crisis came. It swallowed all its brave words, and collapsed into feeble and disheartened submission to its jubilant and hitherto invincible antagonist. The whole North except the small and irrepressible band of Garrisonian Abolitionists were cast down by the revulsive wave of this disastrous event. Writing to his friend Webb, Garrison discourses thus upon the great defeat: "Apparently the slave-holding power has never been so strong, has never seemed to be so invincible, has never held such complete mastery over the whole, has never so successfully hurled defiance at the Eternal and Just One, as at the present time; and yet never has it in reality been so weak, never has it had so many uncompromising assailants, never has it been so filled with doubt and consternation, never has it been so near its downfall, as at this moment. Upon the face of it, this statement looks absurdly paradoxical; but it is true, nevertheless. We are groping in thick darkness; but it is that darkest hour which is said to precede the dawn of day."



CHAPTER XVII.



AS IN A LOOKING GLASS.

Garrison was the most dogmatic, as he was the most earnest of men. It was almost next to impossible for him to understand that his way was not the only way to attain a given end. A position reached by him, he was curiously apt to look upon as a sort of ultima thule of human endeavor in that direction of the moral universe. And, notwithstanding instances of honest self-depreciation, there, nevertheless, hung around his personality an air and assumption of moral infallibility, as a reformer. His was not a tolerant mind. Differences with him he was prone to treat as gross departures from principle, as evidences of faithlessness to freedom. He fell upon the men who did not see eye to eye with him with tomahawk and scalping knife. He was strangely deficient in a sense of proportion in such matters. His terrible severities of speech, he visited upon the slave-power and the Liberty party alike. And although a non-resistent, in that he eschewed the use of physical force, yet there never was born among the sons of men a more militant soul in the use of moral force, in the quickness with which he would whip out the rapiers, or hurl the bolts and bombs of his mother tongue at opponents. The pioneer must have been an unconscious believer in the annihilation of the wicked, as he must have been an unconscious believer in the wickedness of all opposition to his idea of right and duty. This, of course, must be taken only as a broad description of the reformer's character. He was a man, one of the grandest America has given to the world, but still a man with his tendon of Achilles, like the rest of his kind.

His narrow intolerance of the idea of anti-slavery political action, and his fierce and unjust censure of the champions of that idea, well illustrate the trait in point. Birney and Whittier, and Wright and Gerritt Smith, and Joshua Leavitt, he apparently quite forgot, were actuated by motives singularly noble, were in their way as true to their convictions as he was to his. No, there was but one right way, and in that way stood the feet of the pioneer. His way led directly, unerringly, to the land of freedom. All other ways, and especially the Liberty party way, twisted, doubled upon themselves, branched into labyrinths of folly and self-seeking. "Ho! all ye that desire the freedom of the slave, who would labor for liberty, follow me and I will show you the only true way," was the tone which the editor of the Liberator held to men, who were battering with might and main to breach the walls of the Southern Bastile. They were plainly not against the slave, although opposed to Mr. Garrison, narrowly, unjustly opposed to him, without doubt, but working strenuously according to their lights for the destruction of a common enemy and tyrant. This was the test, which Garrison should have taken as conclusive. The leaders of the Liberty party, though personally opposed to him and to his line of action, were, nevertheless, friends of the slaves, and ought to have been so accounted and treated by the man who more than any other was devoted to the abolition of slavery.

But the whole mental and moral frame of the man precluded such liberality of treatment of opponents. They had rejected his way, which was the only true way, and were, therefore, anathema maranatha. When a moral idea which has been the subject of widespread agitation, and has thereby gained a numerous following, reaches out, as reach out it must, sooner or later, for incorporation into law, it will, in a republic like ours, do so naturally and necessarily through political action—along the lines of an organized party movement. The Liberty party formation was the product of this strong tendency in America. Premature it possibly was, but none the less perfectly natural. Now every political party, that is worthy of the name, is a compound rather than a simple fact, consisteth of a bundle of ideas rather than a single idea. Parties depend upon the people for success, upon the people not of one interest but of many interests and of diversities of views upon public questions. One plank is not broad enough to accommodate their differences and multiplicity of desires. There must be a platform built of many planks to support the number of votes requisite to victory at the polls. There will always be one idea or interest of the many ideas or interests, that will dominate the organization, be erected into a paramount issue upon which the party throws itself upon the country, but the secondary ideas or interests must be there all the same to give strength and support to the main idea and interest.

Besides this peculiarity in the composition of the great political parties in America, there is another not less distinct and marked, and that is the Constitutional limitations of the Federal political power. Every party which looks for ultimate success at the polls must observe strictly these limitations in its aims and issues. Accordingly when the moral movement against slavery sought a political expression of the idea of Abolition it was constrained within the metes and bounds set up by the National Constitution. Slavery within the States lay outside of the political boundaries of the general Government. Slavery within the States, therefore, the more sagacious of the Liberty party leaders placed not among its bundle of ideas, into its platform of national issues. But it was otherwise with slavery in the District of Columbia, in the national territories, under the national flag on the high seas, for it lay within the constitutional reach of the federal political power, and its abolition was demanded in the Third party platform. These leaders were confident that the existence of slavery depended upon its connection with the National Government. Their aim was to destroy the evil by cutting this connection through which it drew its blood and nerve supplies. They planted themselves upon the anti-slavery character of the Constitution, believing that it "does not sanction nor nationalize slavery but condemns and localizes it."

This last position of the Liberty party leaders struck Garrison as a kind of mental and moral enormity. At it and its authors, the anti-slavery Jupiter, launched his bolts, fast and furious. Here is a specimen of his chain lightning: "We have a very poor opinion of the intelligence of any man, and very great distrust of his candor or honesty, who tries to make it appear that no pro-slavery compromise was made between the North and the South, at the adoption of the Constitution. We cherish feelings of profound contempt for the quibbling spirit of criticism which is endeavoring to explain away the meaning of language, the design of which as a matter of practice, and the adoption of which as a matter of bargain, were intelligently and clearly understood by the contracting parties. The truth is the misnamed 'Liberty party' is under the control of as ambitious, unprincipled, and crafty leaders as is either the Whig or Democratic party; and no other proof of this assertion is needed than their unblushing denial of the great object of the national compact, namely, union at the sacrifice of the colored population of the United States. Their new interpretations of the Constitution are a bold rejection of the facts of history, and a gross insult to the intelligence of the age, and certainly never can be carried into effect without dissolving the Union by provoking a civil war." All the same, the pioneer to the contrary notwithstanding, many of these very Liberty party leaders were men of the most undoubted candor and honesty and of extraordinary intelligence.

Garrison was never able to see the Liberty party, and for that matter Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, and others of the old organization leaders could not either, except through the darkened glass of personal antagonisms growing out of the schism of 1840. It was always, under all circumstances, to borrow a phrase of Phillips, "Our old enemy, Liberty party." And, as Quincy naively confesses in an article in the Liberator pointing out the reasons why Abolitionists should give to the Free-soil party incidental aid and comfort, which were forbidden to their "old enemy, Liberty party," the significant and amusing fact that the latter was "officered by deserters." Ay, there was indeed the rub! The military principle of the great leader forbade him to recognize deserters as allies. Discipline must be maintained, and so he proceeded to maintain the anti-slavery discipline of his army by keeping up a constant fusillade into the ranks of the deserter band, who, in turn, were every whit as blinded by the old quarrel and separation, and who slyly cherished the modest conviction that, when they seceded, the salt of old organization lost its savor, and was thenceforth fit only to be trampled under the Liberty party's feet. Without doubt, those old Abolitionists and Liberty party people belonged to the category of "humans."

The scales of the old grudge dropped from Garrison's eyes directly the Free-Soil party loomed upon the political horizon. He recognized at once that, if it was not against the slave, it was for the slave; apprehended clearly that, in so far as the new party, which, by the way, was only the second stage in the development of the central idea of his old enemy, Liberty party, as the then future Republican party was to be its third and final expression, apprehended clearly I say that, in so far as the new party resisted the aggressions and pretensions of the slave-power, it was fighting for Abolition—was an ally of Abolitionism.

In the summer of 1848, from Northampton, whither he had gone to take the water cure, Garrison counseled Quincy, who was filling the editorial chair, in the interim, at the Liberator office, in this sage fashion: "As for the Free-Soil movement, I feel that great care is demanded of us disunionists, both in the Standard and the Liberator, in giving credit to whom credit is due, and yet in no case even seeming to be satisfied with it." In the winter of 1848 in a letter to Samuel May, Jr., he is more explicit on this head. "As for the Free-Soil movement," he observes, "I am for hailing it as a cheering sign of the times, and an unmistakable proof of the progress we have made, under God, in changing public sentiment. Those who have left the Whig and Democratic parties for conscience's sake, and joined the movement, deserve our commendation and sympathy; at the same time, it is our duty to show them, and all others, that there is a higher position to be attained by them or they will have the blood of the slave staining their garments. This can be done charitably yet faithfully. On the two old parties, especially the Whig-Taylor party, I would expend—pro tempore, at least—our heaviest ammunition." This is as it should be, the tone of wise and vigilant leadership, the application of the true test to the circumstances, viz., for freedom if against slavery; not to be satisfied, to be sure, with any thing less than the whole but disposed to give credit to whom it was due, whether much or little. Pity that the pioneer could not have placed himself in this just and discriminating point of view in respect of his old enemy, Liberty party, praising in it what he found praiseworthy, while blaming it for what he felt was blameworthy. But perfection weak human nature doth not attain to in this terrestrial garden of the passions, and so very likely the magnanimity which we have desired of Garrison is not for that garden to grow but another and a heavenly.

Garrison ill brooked opposition, came it from friends or foes. He was so confident in his own positions that he could not but distrust their opposites. Of course, if his were right, and of that doubt in his mind there was apparently none, then the positions of all others had to be wrong. This masterful quality of the man was constantly betrayed in the acts of his life and felt by his closest friends and associates in the anti-slavery movement. Quincy, writing to Richard Webb, narrates how, at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1843, Garrison was for removing it to Boston, but that he and Wendell Phillips were for keeping it where it then was in New York, giving at the same time sundry good and sufficient reasons for the faith that was in them, and how, thereupon, "Garrison dilated his nostrils like a war-horse, and snuffed indignation at us." "If the Boston friends were unwilling to take the trouble and responsibility," were the petulant, accusative words put by Quincy into his chief's mouth on the occasion, "then there was nothing more to be said; we must try to get along as well as we could in the old way." And how they disclaimed "any unwillingness to take trouble and responsibility," while affirming "the necessity of their acting on their own idea."

Another characteristic of the pioneer is touched upon by the same writer in a relation which he was making to Webb of Garrison's election to the presidency of the parent society. Says Quincy: "Garrison makes an excellent president at a public meeting where the order of speakers is in some measure arranged, as he has great felicity in introducing and interlocuting remarks; but at a meeting for debate he does not answer so well, as he is rather too apt, with all the innocence and simplicity in the world, to do all the talking himself."

The same friendly critic has left his judgment of other traits of the leader, traits not so much of the man as of the editor. It is delivered in a private letter of Quincy to Garrison on resigning the temporary editorship of the Liberator to "its legitimate possessor." who had been for several months health-hunting at Northampton in the beautiful Connecticut Valley. Quincy made bold to beard the Abolition lion in his lair, and twist his tail in an extremely lively manner. "Now, my dear friend," wrote the disciple to the master, "you must know that to the microscopic eyes of its friends, as well as to the telescopic eyes of its enemies, the Liberator has faults, these they keep to themselves as much as they honestly may, but they are not the less sensible of them, and are all the more desirous to see them immediately abolished. Luckily, they are not faults of principle—neither moral nor intellectual deficiencies—but faults the cure of which rests solely with yourself.

"I hardly know how to tell you what the faults are that we find with it, lest you should think them none at all, or else unavoidable. But no matter, of that you must be the judge; we only ask you to listen to our opinion. We think the paper often bears the mark of haste and carelessness in its getting up; that the matter seems to be hastily selected and put in higgledy-piggledy, without any very apparent reason why it should be in at all, or why it should be in the place where it is. I suppose this is often caused by your selecting articles with a view to connect remarks of your own with them, which afterward in your haste you omit. Then we complain that each paper is not so nearly a complete work in itself as it might be made, but that things are often left at loose ends, and important matters broken off in the middle. I assure you, that Brother Harriman is not the only one of the friends of the Liberator who grieves over your 'more anon' and 'more next week'—which 'anon' and 'next week' never arrive.

"Then we complain that your editorials are too often wanting, or else such, from apparent haste, as those who love your fame cannot wish to see; that important topics, which you feel to be such, are too often either entirely passed over or very cursorily treated, and important moments like the present neglected....

"We have our suspicions, too, that good friends have been disaffected by the neglect of their communications; but of this we can only speak by conjecture. In short, it appears to those who are your warmest friends and the stanchest supporters of the paper, that you might make the Liberator a more powerful and useful instrumentality than it is, powerful and useful as it is, by additional exertions on your part. It is very unpleasant to hear invidious comparisons drawn between the Liberator and Emancipator with regard to the manner of getting it up, and to have not to deny but to excuse them—and we knowing all the time that you have all the tact and technical talent for getting up a good newspaper that Leavitt has, with as much more, intellectual ability as you have more moral honesty, and only wanting some of his (pardon me) industry, application, and method."

Garrison, to his honor, did not allow the exceeding candor of his mentor to disturb their friendship. The pioneer was not wholly without defence to the impeachment. He might have pleaded ill health, of which he had had quantum suf. since 1836 for himself and family. He might have pleaded also the dissipation of too much of his energies in consequence of more or less pecuniary embarrassments from which he was never wholly freed; but, above all, he might have pleaded his increasing activity as an anti-slavery lecturer. His contributions to the movement against slavery were of a notable character in this direction, both in respect of quantity and quality. He was not alone the editor of the Liberator, he was unquestionably besides one of the most effective and interesting of the anti-slavery speakers—indeed in the judgment of so competent an authority as James Russell Lowell, he was regarded as the most effective of the anti-slavery speakers. Still, after all is placed to his credit that can possibly be, Quincy's complaints would be supported by an altogether too solid basis of fact. The pioneer was much given to procrastination. What was not urgent he was strongly tempted to put off for a more convenient time. His work accumulated. He labored hard and he accomplished much, but because of this habit of postponing for to-morrow what need not be done to-day, he was necessarily forced to leave undone many things which he ought to have done and which he might have accomplished had he been given to putting off for to-morrow nothing which might be finished to-day.

The pioneer was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, but never was he wholly cast down by his misfortunes. His cheerful and bouyant spirit kept him afloat above his sorrows, above his griefs. The organ of mirthfulness in him was very large. He was an optimist in the best sense of that word, viz., that all things work together for good to them that love goodness. In the darkest moments which the Abolition cause encountered his own countenance was full of light, his own heart pierced through the gloom and communicated its glow to those about him, his own voice rang bugle-like through reverse and disaster.

In his family the reformer was seen at his best. His wife was his friend and equal, his children his playfellows and companions. The dust of the great conflict he never carried with him into his home to choke the love which burned ever brightly on its hearth and in the hearts which it contained. What he professed in the Liberator, what he preached in the world, of non-resistance, woman's rights, perfectionism, he practiced in his home, he embodied as father, and husband, and host. Never lived reformer who more completely realized his own ideals to those nearest and dearest to him than William Lloyd Garrison.

He had seven children, five boys and two girls. The last, Francis Jackson, was born to him in the year 1848. Two of them died in childhood, a boy and a girl. The loss of the boy, whom the father had "named admiringly, gratefully, reverently," Charles Pollen, was a terrible blow to the reformer, and a life-long grief to the mother. He seemed to have been a singularly beautiful, winning, and affectionate little man and to have inspired sweet hopes of future "usefulness and excellence" in the breasts of his parents. "He seemed born to take a century on his shoulders, without stooping; his eyes were large, lustrous, and charged with electric light; his voice was clear as a bugle, melodious, and ever ringing in our ears, from the dawn of day to the ushering in of night, so that since it has been stilled, our dwelling has seemed to be almost without an occupant," lamented the stricken father to Elizabeth Pease, of Darlington, England.

"Death itself to me is not terrible, is not repulsive," poured the heartbroken pioneer into the ears of his English friend, "is not to be deplored. I see in it as clear an evidence of Divine wisdom and beneficence as I do in the birth of a child, in the works of creation, in all the arrangements and operations of nature. I neither fear nor regret its power. I neither expect nor supplicate to be exempted from its legitimate action. It is not to be chronicled among calamities; it is not to be styled "a mysterious dispensation of Divine Providence"; it is scarcely rational to talk of being resigned to it. For what is more rational, what more universal, what more impartial, what more serviceable, what more desirable, in God's own time, hastened neither by our ignorance or folly?...

"When, therefore, my dear friend, I tell you that the loss of my dear boy has overwhelmed me with sadness, has affected my peace by day and my repose by night, has been a staggering blow, from the shock of which I find it very difficult to recover, you will not understand me as referring to anything pertaining to another state of existence, or as gloomily affected by a change inevitable to all; far from it. Where the cherished one who has been snatched from us is, what is his situation, or what his employment, I know not, of course; and it gives me no anxiety whatever. Until I join him at least my responsibility to him as his guardian and protector has ceased; he does not need my aid, he cannot be benefited by my counsel. That he will still be kindly cared for by Him who numbers the very hairs of our heads, and without whose notice a sparrow cannot fall to the ground; that he is still living, having thrown aside his mortal drapery, and occupying a higher sphere of existence, I do not entertain a doubt. My grief arises mainly from the conviction that his death was premature; that he was actually defrauded of his life through unskillful treatment; that he might have been saved, if we had not been so unfortunately situated at that time. This to be sure, is not certain; and not being certain, it is only an ingredient of consolation that we find in our cup of bitterness."

The pioneer was one of the most generous of givers. Poor indeed he was, much beyond the common allotment of men of his intelligence and abilities, but he was never too indigent to answer the appeals of poverty. If the asker's needs were greater than his own he divided with him the little which he had. To his home all sorts of people were attracted, Abolitionists, peace men, temperance reformers, perfectionists, homoeopathists, hydropathists, mesmerists, spiritualists, Grahamites, clairvoyants, whom he received with unfailing hospitality, giving welcome and sympathy to the new ideas, food and shelter for the material sustenance of the fleshly vehicles of the new ideas. He evidently was strongly of the opinion that there are "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in the philosophy of any particular period in the intellectual development of man. No age knows it all. It was almost a lo, here, and a lo, there, with him, so large was his bump of wonder, so unlimited was his appetite for the incredible and the improbable in the domain of human knowledge and speculation. Great was the man's faith, great was his hope, great was his charity.

He was one of the most observant of men in all matters affecting the rights of others; he was one of the least observant in all matters appertaining to himself. With a decided taste for dress, yet his actual knowledge of the kind of clothes worn by him from day to day was amusingly inexact, as the following incident shows: Before wearing out an only pair of trousers, the pioneer had indulged in the unusual luxury of a new pair. But as there was still considerable service to be got out of the old pair, he, like a prudent man, laid aside the new ones for future use. His wife, however, who managed all this part of the domestic business, determined, without consulting him, the morning when the new trousers should be donned. She made the necessary changes when her lord was in bed, putting the new in the place of the old. Garrison wore for several days the new trousers, thinking all the time that they were his old ones until his illusions in this regard were dispelled by an incident which cost him the former. Some poor wretch of a tramp, knocking in an evil hour at the pioneer's door and asking for clothes, decided the magnificent possessor of two pairs of trousers, to don his new ones and to pass the old ones on to the tramp. But when he communicated the transaction to his wife, she hoped, with a good deal of emphasis, that he had not given away the pair of breeches which he was wearing, for if he had she would beg to inform him that he had given away his best ones! But the pioneer's splendid indifference to meum and tuum where his own possessions were concerned was equal to the occasion. He got his compensation in the thought that his loss was another's gain. That, indeed, was not to be accounted loss which had gone to a brother-man whose needs were greater than his own.



CHAPTER XVIII.



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 Judaea? 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."