William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

Here the reformer safe from the wrath of his foes, was locked in a cell; and here, during the evening, with no abatement of his customary cheerfulness and serenity of spirit, he received several of his anxious friends, Whittier among them, whom through the grated bars he playfully accosted thus: "You see my accommodations are so limited, that I cannot ask you to spend the night with me." That night in his prison cell, and on his rude prison bed, he slept the sleep of the just man, sweet and long:

"When peace within the bosom reigns,
And conscience gives th' approving voice;
Though bound the human form in chains.
Yet can the soul aloud rejoice.

"'Tis true, my footsteps are confined—
I cannot range beyond this cell—
But what can circumscribe my mind,
To chain the winds attempt as well!"

The above stanzas he wrote the next morning on the walls of his cell. Besides this one he made two other inscriptions there, to stand as memorabilia of the black drama enacted in Boston on the afternoon of October 21, 1835.

After being put through the solemn farce of an examination in a court, extemporized in the jail, Garrison was discharged from arrest as a disturber of the peace! But the authorities, dreading a repetition of the scenes of the day before, prayed him to leave the city for a few days, which he did, a deputy sheriff driving him to Canton, where he boarded the train from Boston to Providence, containing his wife, and together they went thence to her father's at Brooklyn, Conn. The apprehensions of the authorities in respect of the danger of a fresh attack upon him were unquestionably well founded, inasmuch as diligent search was made for him in all of the outgoing stages and cars from the city that morning.

In this wise did pro-slavery, patriotic Boston translate into works her sympathy for the South.

CHAPTER XII.
FLOTSAM AND JETSAM.

The results of the storm became immediately manifest in several ways. Such a commotion did not leave things in precisely the state in which they were on the morning of the memorable day on which it struck the city. The moral landscape and geography of the community had sensibly changed at its close. The full extent of the alteration wrought could not at once be seen, nor was it at once felt. But that there were deep and abiding changes made by it in the court of public opinion in Boston and Massachusetts on the subject of slavery there is little doubt. It disgusted and alarmed many individuals who had hitherto acted in unison with the social, business, and political elements, which were at the bottom of the riot. Francis Jackson, for instance, had been one of the fifteen hundred signers of the call for the great Faneuil Hall meeting of the 21st of August. But on the afternoon of the 21st of October he threw his house open to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, after its meeting had been broken up by the mob. It seemed to him then that it was no longer a mere struggle for the freedom of the slave, but for the right of free speech and free discussion as well. Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, a young man, in 1835, eminent professor and physician subsequently, dates from that afternoon of mob violence his conversion to Abolitionism. In that selfsame hour seeds of resistance to slavery were sown in two minds of the first order in the city and State. Wendell Phillips was a spectator in the streets that day, and the father of Charles Sumner, the sheriff at the time, fought bravely to save Garrison from falling into the hands of the mob. The great riot gave those young men their first summons to enter the service of freedom. It was not long afterward probably that they both began to read the Liberator. From that event many intelligent and conservative people associated slavery with lynch law and outrage upon the rights of free speech and popular assembly.

This anti-slavery reaction of the community received practical demonstration in the immediate increase of subscribers to the Liberator. Twelve new names were added to the subscription list in one day. It received significant illustration also in Garrison's nomination to the legislature. In this way did between seventy and eighty citizens testify their sympathy for him and their reprobation of mob rule. In yet another way was its influence felt, and this was in the renewed zeal and activity which it instantly produced on the part of the Abolitionists themselves. It operated upon the movement as a powerful stimulus to fresh sacrifices and unwearied exertions. George W. Benson, Garrison's brother-in-law, led off bravely in this respect, as the following extract from a letter written by him in Boston, two days after the riot, to Garrison, at Brooklyn, well illustrates. He had come up to the city from Providence the night before, in quest of his sister and her husband. Not finding them, he turned to the cause which had been so ruthlessly attacked, and this is the sort of care which he bestowed upon it. He got Burleigh to write a general relation of the mob for publication in the Liberator, and Whittier to indite another, with an appeal to the public, the same to be published immediately, and of which he ordered three thousand copies for himself.

"I further ordered," he writes, "one thousand copies of A. Grimké's letter, with your introductory remarks, and your address published in the Liberator several weeks since, with your name appended, and Whittier's poetry on the times, in a pamphlet form. I urged all our friends to redouble their exertions. They seemed well disposed to accept the advice, as nothing will now avail but thorough measures. Liberty or Death!"