A suffering people are not apt to reason clearly or justly on the causes which have brought them to indigence. They feel their wretchedness and reach out for a victim. And the law-making power usually happens to be that victim. As the distress of the South increased, the belief that Federal legislation was responsible for it increased likewise. The spread and deepening of this conviction in the Southern States precipitated among them an ominous crisis in their attachment to the Union. Nullification and an embittered sectionalism was the hateful legacy bequeathed to the republic by the tariff controversy. It left the South in a hyper-sensitive state in all matters relating to her domestic interests. It left the North in a hyper-sensitive condition on all matters touching the peace and stability of the Union. The silence and oblivion policy on the subject of slavery was renewed with tenfold intensity. Ulysses-like the free States bound themselves, their right of free speech, and their freedom of the press on this subject, for fear of the Siren voices which came thrilling on every breeze from the South. Quiet was the word, and quiet the leaders in Church and State sought to enforce upon the people, to the end that the vision of "States dissevered, discordant, belligerent, of a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched it may be, in fraternal blood," might not come to pass for their "glorious Union."
The increasing friction and heat between the sections during twenty-five years, had effected every portion of the Federal system, and created conditions favorable to a violent explosion. Sectional differences of a political and industrial complexion, forty years had sufficed to develop. Sectional differences of a moral and social character forty years had also sufficed to generate. To kindle all those differences, all that mass of combustible feelings and forces into a general conflagration a spark only was wanted. And out of the glowing humanity of one man the spark was suddenly struck.
It is curious to note that in the year 1829, the very year in which William Lloyd Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began the editorship of The Genius of Universal Emancipation, the American Convention, or national assembly of the old State societies for the abolition of slavery, fell into desuetude. It was as if Providence was clearing the debris of an old dispensation out of the way of the new one which his prophet was beginning to herald, as if guarding against all possibility of having the new wine, then soon to be pressed from the moral vintage of the nation, put into old bottles. The Hour for a new movement against slavery had come, and with its arrival the Man to hail it had also come.
Other men had spoken and written against slavery, and labored for the freedom of the slave before Garrison had thought upon the subject at all. Washington and Jefferson, Franklin, Jay, and Hamilton had been Abolitionists before he was born, but theirs was a divided interest. The establishment of a more perfect union was the paramount object of their lives. John Wesley had denounced slavery in language quite as harsh as Garrison's, but his, too, was a divided interest, the religious revival of the eighteenth century being his distinctive mission. Benezet, Woolman, and Lundy were saints, who had yearned with unspeakable sympathy for the black bondmen, and were indefatigable in good works in his behalf, but they had not that stern and iron quality without which reforms cannot be launched upon the attention of mankind. What his predecessors lacked, Garrison possessed to a marvelous degree—the undivided interest, the supremacy of a single purpose, the stern stuff out of which the moral reformer is made, and in which he is panoplied. They were all his, but there was another besides—immediatism. This element distinguished the movement against slavery, started by him, from all other movements begun before he arrived on the stage, for the emancipation of the slaves in the Union.
This doctrine of immediate as opposed to gradual emancipation, was not original with Garrison, nor was he the first to enunciate it. More than a dozen years before he was converted to it, Rev. George Bourne, in "The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable," had shown that "the system (of slavery) is so entirely corrupt that it admits of no cure but by a total and immediate abolition. For a gradual emancipation is a virtual recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice. If it be just for one moment, it is hallowed forever; and if it be inequitable, not a day should it be tolerated." In 1824, eight years after the publication of Bourne's book, and five years before Garrison announced the doctrine in the Genius, the Rev. James Duncan maintained it, in his "Treatise on Slavery," with no uncertainty of sense or conviction. But neither Bourne nor Duncan had been able to effect an incarnation of the doctrine, without which the good which it aimed at could not be achieved. What they failed to effect, it is the glory of Garrison that he achieved in his own person. He was "total and immediate Abolition" personified. "Truth is mighty and will prevail," is a wise saying and worthy of acceptation. But this ultimate prevailing of TRUTH depends mainly upon individual effort, applied not intermittently, but steadily to a particular segment of the circle of conduct. It is the long, strong, never-ending pull and tug upon the wheels of conduct, which marks the great reformer. He finds his age or country stuck in some Serbonian bog of iniquity. He prays, but he prays with his shoulders braced strenuously against the body of society, and he does not cease his endeavors until a revolution in conduct places his age or country on firm ground beyond its Serbonian bog. The coming of such a man is no accident. When the Hour is ready and the Man comes, a new epoch in the life of a people arises from the conjunction. Of such vast consequence verily was the coming into American history of William Lloyd Garrison.
CHAPTER V.
THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS.
After leaving Baltimore, Garrison clung pathetically to the belief that, if he told what he had seen of the barbarism of slavery to the North, he would be certain to enlist the sympathy and aid of its leaders, political and ecclesiastical, in the cause of emancipation. The sequel to his efforts in this regard proved that he was never more mistaken in his life. He addressed letters to men like Webster, Jeremiah Mason, Lyman Beecher, and Dr. Channing, "holding up to their view the tremendous iniquity of the land, and begging them, ere it should be too late, to interpose their great power in the Church and State, to save our country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery was bringing upon us." But there is no evidence that this appeal produced the feeblest ripple in the lives of the two first; and upon the two last it was equally barren of result. Dr. Channing, indeed, did not take the trouble to hear any one of the three lectures of the young philanthropist. Dr. Beecher, however, was at the pains to be present at the first lecture given at Julien Hall. But he betrayed no real interest in the subject. He had no time to devote to anti-slavery, had, in fine, too many irons in the fire already. To this impotent apology of the great preacher of immediatism in his dealing with all kinds of sin, except the sin of slave-holding, for not espousing the cause of the slave, Mr. Garrison made his famous retort:
"Then you had better let all your irons burn than neglect your duty to the slave."
What more did this poor and friendless man, with his one idea and his harsh language, know of duties and dangers than Daniel Webster, who was busy saving the Union; than Lyman Beecher, who was not less busy saving souls; or than Dr. Channing, who was quite as busy saving liberalism in matters of religion? What folly and presumption it must have seemed to these mighty men this attempt of Garrison to impress upon them a proper sense of their obligations to their country.
"Your zeal," said Dr. Beecher to him, with unlimited condescension of tone—"your zeal is commendable, but you are misguided. If you will give up your fanatical notions and be guided by us (the clergy) we will make you the Wilberforce of America."