William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

"Stop, sir! You may not pursue this course of remark. It is insulting to this committee and the legislature which they represent."

The Abolitionists, after this insult, determined to withdraw from the hearing, and appeal to the legislature to be heard, not as a favor but of right. A new hearing was, therefore, ordered, and the reformers appeared a second time before the committee. But the scenes of the first were repeated at the second hearing. The chairman was intolerably insolent to the speakers. His violent behavior to William Goodell, who was paying his respects to the Southern documents lying on the table of the committee, terminated the second hearing. These documents Mr. Goodell described as fetters for Northern freemen, and boldly interrogated the chairman in respect of them thus:

"Mr. Chairman, are you prepared to attempt putting them on?" But the chairman was in no mood to listen to the question. His insolence reached a climax as he exclaimed passionately to Mr. Goodell, "Stop, sir! Sit down, sir! The committee will hear no more of this." But the temper of the Abolitionists had risen also, as had also risen the temper of the great audience of citizens who were present at the hearing which was had in the hall of the House of Representatives. "Freemen we came," retorted Goodell, "and as freemen we shall go away." Scarcely had these words died upon the ears when there rose sharply from the auditory, the stern protest "Let us go quickly, lest we be made slaves."

The attempt to suppress the Abolitionists was a failure. It but stimulated the agitation and deepened the popular interest in the subject. Strong allies within and without the legislature were enlisted on the side of freedom. The turning of the tide of public sentiment in the grand old State had come. Slowly did it rise for awhile, but from that event it never ceased to flow in and with increasing volume. The condemnatory report of the insolent chairman proved as innocuous as the baying of dogs at the moon. The legislature refused to indorse it and the pro-slavery resolutions attached to it. They were both ignominiously laid upon the table, and what is more to the purpose as a straw to show the drift of popular opinion on the slavery question in Massachusetts, their author failed of a renomination as Senator at the hands of his dissatisfied constituents.

The conflict was raging not alone in Massachusetts but all through the free States. In Congress the battle was assuming an intensely bitter character. Here the South was the agitator. Here she kept the political waters in a state of violent ebullition. As the discord grew, sectionalism threw darkening and portentous shadows over the face of the Union. The South was insisting in all stages of passion that the tide of Abolition be checked in the North, that the flood of incendiary publications be suppressed at their sources in the free States. The Southern slave-holding President had suggested the suppression of these by Congress. He would "prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection." But when Webster and a few Northern leaders objected to such a proceeding as unconstitutional and in derogation of the freedom of the press, the South treated the objection as inimical to Southern interest and security. Thereupon the Southern excitement increased all the faster. The slave-power was not disposed to accept anything short of complete submission on the part of the North. And this the North could not well yield. While the slave-holding States were clamoring for the suppression of Abolitionism in the free States, Abolitionism was giving evidences of extraordinary expansion, and activity. It had risen well above the zero point in politics. It was gaining numbers and it was gaining votes. A new element had appeared at the polls and both of the old parties began to exhibit a certain degree of impressibility to the latest attraction. The slave-power with quick instinct recognized in the new comer a dangerous rival, and schemed for its destruction. Southern jealousy took on the character of insanity. Neither Northern Whigs nor Northern Democrats were permitted to show any regard for the rival. They were to snub and utterly abolish her, otherwise they should be snubbed and utterly abolished by the slave-power. They could not with impunity give to Abolitionism the scantiest attention or courtesy. Not even a gallant like John Quincy Adams, who was able to see nothing attractive in the little band of reformers. They seemed to him, in fact, "a small, shallow, and enthusiastic party preaching the abolition of slavery upon the principles of extreme democracy." If Mr. Adams had little love for the South, he had none whatever for the Abolitionists. By no stretch of the imagination could he have been suspected of any sentimental attachment to the Abolition movement. For his unvarying attitude towards it was one of grim contempt. But if the old Roman had no love for the Abolitionists, he did have a deep-seated attachment and reverence for certain ancient rights appertaining to free institutions, which nothing was able to shake. Among these was the great right of petition, viewed by the ex-President as a right of human nature. For a dozen years he stood in Congress its sleepless sentinel. And herein did he perform for freedom most valiant service. It made no difference to the dauntless old man whether he approved of the prayer of a petition or not, if it was sent to him he presented it to the House all the same. He presented petitions for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and one, at least, against it, petitions from black and white, bond and free, with superb fidelity to the precious right which he championed.

This characteristic of the aged statesman kept the Southern members in a state of chronic apprehension and excitement. They bullied him, they raged like so many wild animals against him, they attempted to crush him with votes of censure and expulsion all to no purpose. Then they applied the gag: "That all petitions, memorials, and papers touching the abolition of slavery, or the buying, selling, or transferring slaves, in any State, or district, or territory of the United States, be laid on the table without being debated, printed, read, or referred, and that no action be taken thereon." Mr. Adam's denunciation of this action as a violation of the Constitution, of the right of the people to petition, and of the right to freedom of speech in Congress, found wide echo through the North. The violence, intolerence, and tyranny of the South were disgusting many of the most intelligent and influential minds in the non-slave-holding States, and driving them into more or less close affiliation with the anti-slavery movement.

And so it was wherever one turned there were conflict and uproar. Everywhere contrary ideas, interests, institutions, tendencies, were colliding with inextinguishable rage. All the opposites and irreconcilables in a people's life had risen and clashed together in a death struggle for mastery. Freedom and slavery, civilization and barbarism had found an Armageddon in the moral consciousness of the Republic. Now the combatants rallied and the battle thickened at one point, now around another. At Washington the tide rolls in with resounding fury about the right of petition and the freedom of debate, then through the free States it surges and beats around the right of free speech and the freedom of the press. Storm clouds are flying from the East and from the West, flying out of the North and out of the South. Everywhere the chaos of the winds has burst, and the anarchy of the "live thunder."

Benton with his customary optimism from a Southern standpoint, rejoiced in the year 1836 that the people of the Northern States had "chased off the foreign emissaries, silenced the gabbling tongues of female dupes, and dispersed the assemblies, whether fanatical, visionary, or incendiary, of all that congregated to preach against evils that afflicted others, not them, and to propose remedies to aggravate the disease which they pretended to cure." Calhoun's pessimism was clearer eyed. The great nullifier perceived at once the insuppressible nature of the Abolition movement and early predicted that the spirit then abroad in the North would not "die away of itself without a shock or convulsion." Yes, it was as he had prophesied, the anti-slavery reform was, at the very moment of Benton's groundless jubilation, rising and spreading with astonishing progress through the free States. It was gaining footholds in the pulpit, the school, and the press. It was a stalwart sower, scattering broadcast as he walked over the fields of the then coming generation truths and antipathies of social principles, which were to make peace impossible between the slave-holding and the non-slave-holding halves of the Union.

In the year 1836 the anti-slavery leaven or residuum for instance, was sufficiently potent to preserve the statutes of the free States, free from repressive laws directed against the Abolitionists. This was much but there was undoubtedly another phase of the agitation, a phase which struck the shallow eye of Benton, and led him into false conclusions. It was not clear sailing for the reform. It was truly a period of stress and storm. Sometimes the reform was in a trough of the sea of public opinion, sometimes on the crest of a billow, and then again on the bosom of a giant ground swell. In Boston in this selfsame year which witnessed Benton's exultation over the fall of Abolitionism, the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society was not able to obtain the use of hall or church for its annual meeting, and was in consequence forced into insufficient accommodations at its rooms on Washington street. The succeeding year the society was obliged, from inability to obtain the use of either hall or church in the city, to occupy for its annual meeting the loft over the stable connected with the Marlborough Hotel. It is a long way from this rude meeting-house to the hall of the House of Representatives, but in this storm and stress period the distance was traversed in a few brief hours. The society applied in its exigency for the use of the hall for an evening meeting, and the application was granted by the members. It was a jeu d'esprit of Henry B. Stanton, "That when Boston votes we go into a stable, but when the State votes we go into the State House." It was even so, for the incident served to reveal what was true everywhere through the free States that the anti-slavery reform was making fastest progress among people away from the great centres of population. It found ready access to the simple American folk in villages, in the smaller towns, and in the rural districts of New England and the North. And already from these independent and uncorrupted sons and daughters of freedom had started the deep ground swell which was to lift the level of Northern public opinion on the question of slavery.

This Walpurgis period of the movement culminated on November 7, 1837, in a terrible tragedy. The place was a little Illinois town, Alton, just over the Mississippi River from St. Louis, and the victim was Elijah P. Lovejoy. He was a minister of the Presbyterian Church, and the editor of a weekly religious newspaper, first published in St. Louis and removed by him later to Alton. His sin was that he did not hold his peace on the subject of slavery in the columns of his paper. He was warned "to pass over in silence everything connected" with that question. But he had no choice, he had to cry aloud against iniquities, which, as a Christian minister and a Christian editor, he dared not ignore. His troubles with the people of St. Louis took in the spring of 1836 a sanguinary turn, when he denounced the lynching of a negro by a St. Louis mob, perpetrated under circumstances of peculiar atrocity. In consequence of his outspoken condemnation of the horror, his office was broken into and destroyed by a mob. Lovejoy thereupon removed his paper to Alton, but the wild-cat-like spirit pursued him across the river and destroyed his press. He replaced his broken press with a new one, only to have his property a second time destroyed. He replaced the second with a third press, but a third time the mob destroyed his property. Then he bought a fourth press, and resolved to defend it with his life. Pierced by bullets he fell, resisting the attack of a mob bent on the destruction of his rights. Lovejoy died a martyr to free speech and the freedom of the press.