William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

The instrument closes by pledging the utmost of its signers to the overthrow of slavery—"come what may to our persons, our interests, or our reputations—whether we live to witness the triumph of Liberty, Justice, and Humanity, or perish untimely as martyrs in this great, benevolent, and holy cause." Twin pledge it was to that ancestral, historic one made in 1776: "And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of DIVINE PROVIDENCE, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor."

Whittier has predicted for the Declaration of Sentiments an enduring fame: "It will live," he declares, "as long as our national history." Samuel J. May was equally confident that this "Declaration of the Rights of Man," as he proudly cherished it, would "live a perpetual, impressive protest against every form of oppression, until it shall have given place to that brotherly kindness which all the children of the common Father owe to one another." As a particular act and parchment-roll of high thoughts and resolves, highly expressed, it will not, I think, attain to the immortality predicted for it. For as such it has in less than two generations passed almost entirely out of the knowledge and recollection of Americans. But in another sense it is destined to realize all that has been foreshadowed for it by its friends. Like elemental fire its influence will glow and flame at the center of our national life long after as a separate and sovereign entity it shall have been forgotten by the descendants of its illustrious author and signers.

The convention was in session three days, and its proceedings were filled with good resolutions and effective work. Arthur Tappan was elected President of the national organization, and William Green, Jr., Treasurer. Elizur Wright, Jr., was chosen Secretary of Domestic Correspondence, William Lloyd Garrison Secretary of Foreign Correspondence, and Abraham L. Cox Recording Secretary. Besides these officers there were a Board of Management and a number of Vice-Presidents selected. For three days the hearts of the delegates burned within them toward white-browed Duty and the master, Justice, who stood in their midst and talked with divine accents to their spirits of how men were enslaved and cruelly oppressed by men, their own brothers, and how the cry of these bondmen came up to them for help. And with one accord there fell upon the delegates a pang and pity, an uplifting, impelling sense of 'woe unto us' if we withhold from our brethren in bonds the help required of us. This rising tide of emotion and enthusiasm gathering mass at each sitting of the convention, culminated during the several readings of the Declaration of Sentiments. And when on the third day Beriah Green brought the congress to a close in a valedictory address of apostolic power and grandeur, and with a prayer so sweet, so fervent, and strong as to melt all hearts, the pent-up waters of the reform was ready to hurl themselves into an agitation the like of which had never before, nor has since, been seen or felt in the Union. Thenceforth freedom's little ones were not without great allies, who were "exultations, agonies, and love, and man's unconquerable mind."

Everywhere the flood of Abolitionism burst upon the land, everywhere the moral deluge spread through the free States. Anti-slavery societies rose as it were, out of the ground, so rapid, so astonishing were their growth during the year following the formation of the national society. In nearly every free State they had appeared doubling and quadrupling in number, until new societies reached in that first year to upwards of forty. Anti-slavery agents and lecturers kept pace with the anti-slavery societies. They began to preach, to remonstrate, to warn, entreat, and rebuke until their voices sounded like the roar of many waters in the ears of the people. Wherever there was a school-house, a hall, or a church, there they were, ubiquitous, irrepressible, a cry in the wilderness of a nation's iniquity. Anti-slavery tracts and periodicals multiplied and started from New York and Boston in swarms, and clouds, the thunder of their wings were as the thunder of falling avalanches to the guilty conscience of the country. There was no State, city, town, or village in the Republic where their voice was not heard.

The Rev. Amos A Phelp's "Lectures on Slavery and Its Remedy;" "the Rev. J.D. Paxton's 'Letters on Slavery'; the Rev. S.J. May's letters to Andrew T. Judson, 'The Rights of Colored People to Education Vindicated'; Prof. Elizur Wright, Jr.'s, 'Sin of Slavery and Its Remedy'; Whittier's 'Justice and Expediency'; and, above all, Mrs. Lydia Maria Child's startling 'Appeal in favor of that class of Americans called Africans' were the more potent of the new crop of writings betokening the vigor of Mr. Garrison's Propagandism," says that storehouse of anti-slavery facts the "Life of Garrison" by his children. Swift poured the flood, widespread the inundation of anti-slavery publications. Money, although not commensurate with the vast wants of the crusade, came in copious and generous streams. A marvelous munificence characterized the charity of wealthy Abolitionists. The poor gave freely of their mite, and the rich as freely of their thousands. Something of the state of simplicity and community of goods which marked the early disciples of Christianity seemed to have revived in the hearts of this band of American reformers. A spirit of renunciation, of self-sacrifice, of brotherly kindness, of passionate love of righteousness, of passionate hatred of wrong, of self-consecration to truth and of martyrdom lifted the reform to as high a moral level as had risen any movement for the betterment of mankind in any age of the world.

The resolutions of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiment, to enlist the pulpit in the cause of the suffering and dumb, and to attempt the purification of the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery, encountered determined opposition from the pulpits and the churches themselves. The Abolitionists were grieved and indignant at the pro-slavery spirit which pulpits and churches displayed. But what happened was as we now look back at those proceedings, an inevitable occurrence, a foregone conclusion. The pulpits were only representative of the religion of the pews, and the pews were occupied by the same sort of humanity that toil and spin and haggle over dollars and cents six out of every seven days. They have their selfish and invested interests, fixed social notions, relationships, and prejudices, which an episode like Sunday, churches, and sermons do not seriously affect. Indeed, Sunday, churches, and sermons constitute an institution of modern civilization highly conservative of invested interests, fixed social notions, relationships, and prejudices. Who advances a new idea, a reformatory movement, disturbs the status quo, stirs up the human bees in that great hive called society, and that lesser one called the church, and he must needs expect to have the swarm about his head.

This was precisely what happened in the case of the anti-slavery movement. It threatened the then status quo of property rights, it attacked the fixed social notions, relationships, and prejudices of the South and of the North alike. The revolution which this new idea involved in the slave States, was of the most radical character, going down to a complete reconstruction of their entire social system. At once the human hornets were aroused, and in these circumstances, the innocent and the guilty were furiously beset. Because the new idea which disturbed the South had originated in the North, the wrath of the South rose hot against not the authors of the new idea alone but against the people of that section as well. But this sectional unpleasantness endangered the stability of the Union, and menaced with obstructions and diversions the golden stream of Northern traffic, dollars, and dividends. This was intolerable, and forthwith the Apiarian brotherhood of the free States put together their heads with those of the slave States to attack, sting, and utterly abolish the new idea, and the new idea's supporters. The Northern churches were, of course, in the Northern brotherhood. And when the new fanaticism threatened the financial stability of the pews, the pulpits instead of exerting themselves in behalf of the suffering and dumb slaves, exerted themselves to preserve the prosperity of the pews by frowning down the friends of the slaves. They were among the first to stone the new idea and its fiery prophets. "Away with them!" shouted in chorus pulpit and pews. Sad? yes, but alas! natural, too. These men were not better nor worse than the average man. They were the average men of their generation, selfish, narrow, material, encrusted in their prejudices like snails in their shells, struggling upward at a snail's pace to the larger life, with its added sweetness and humanities, but experiencing many a discomfiture by the way from those foul and triple fiends, the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

Nowhere in the churches was their opposition to the Abolition movement more persistent and illiberal than in the theological seminaries, whence the pulpits drew their supplies of preachers. Like master, like servant, these institutions were indentured to the public, and reflected as in a mirror the body and pressure of its life and sentiment. That a stream cannot rise higher than its source, although a theological stream, found remarkable demonstration in the case of Lane Seminary. Here after the publication of the "Thoughts on Colonization," and the formation of the National Society, an earnest spirit of inquiry broke out among the students on the subject of slavery. It was at first encouraged by the President, Lyman Beecher, who offered to go in and discuss the question with his "boys." That eminent man did not long remain in this mind. The discussions which he so lightly allowed swept through the institution with the force of a great moral awakening. They were continued during nine evenings and turned the seminary at their close, so far as the students went, into an anti-slavery society. This is not the place to go at length into the history of that anti-slavery debate, which, in its consequences, proved one of the events of the anti-slavery conflict. Its leader was Theodore D. Weld, who was until Wendell Phillips appeared upon the scene, the great orator of the agitation.

Dr. Beecher had no notion of raising such a ghost when he said, "Go ahead, boys, I'll go in and discuss with you." It was such an apparition of independence and righteousness as neither the power of the trustees nor the authority of the faculty was ever able to dismiss. The virtue of a gag rule was tried to suppress Abolition among the students, but instead of suppressing Abolition, it well-nigh suppressed the seminary; for, rather than wear a gag on the obnoxious subject, the students—to between seventy and eighty, comprising nearly the whole muster-roll of the school—withdrew from an institution where the exercise of the right of free inquiry and free speech on a great moral question was denied and repressed. The same spirit of repression arose later in the Theological School at Andover, Mass. There the gag was effectively applied by the faculty, and all inquiry and discussion relating to slavery disappeared among the students. But the attempt to impose silence upon the students of Phillips's Academy near-by was followed by the secession of forty or fifty of the students.

Ah! the Abolitionists had undertaken to achieve the impossible, when they undertook to enlist the pulpit in the cause of the slaves, and to purify the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery. For the average man, whether within or without the church, is not controlled in his conduct toward his brother man by the principles and precepts of Jesus, but by the laws of social and individual selfishness. These selfish forces may at epochal moments align themselves with justice and liberty, and they not infrequently do, otherwise human progress must be at an end. In advancing themselves, they perforce advance justice and liberty. Thus do men love their neighbors as themselves, and move forward to fraternity and equality in kingdoms and commonwealths. The special province of moral reformers, like Garrison and the Abolitionists, seems to be to set these egoistic and altruistic elements of human society at war, the one against the other, thereby compelling its members and classes, willy nilly, to choose between the belligerents. Some will enlist on one side, some on the other, but in the furnace heat of the passions which ensues, an ancient evil, or a bad custom or institution, gets the vitality burned out of it, which in due time falls as slag out of the new order that arises at the close of the conflict.