William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

Garrison championed all of the new ideas, and in doing so arrayed against himself all of the special champions of the existing establishments. In his reduced physical state, the reformer was not equal to the tremendous concussions of this "era of activity," as Emerson named it. At moments he appeared bewildered amid the loud, fierce clamor of contending ideas, each asserting in turn its moral primacy. For an instant the vision of the great soul grew dim, the great heart seemed to have lost its bearings. All of the new ideas thawed and melted into each other, dissolved into one vague and grand solidarity of reforms. The voice of the whole was urging him amid the gathering moral confusion to declare himself for all truth, and he hearkened irresolute, with divided mind. "I feel somewhat at a loss to know what to do"—he confesses at this juncture to George W. Benson, "whether to go into all the principles of holy reform and make the Abolition cause subordinate, or whether still to persevere in the one beaten track as hitherto. Circumstances hereafter must determine this matter." That was written in August, 1837; a couple of months later circumstances had not determined the matter, it would seem, from the following extract from a letter to his brother-in-law: "It is not my intention at present to alter either the general character or course of the Liberator. My work in the anti-slavery cause is not wholly done; as soon as it is, I shall know it, and shall be prepared, I trust, to enter upon a mightier work of reform."

Meanwhile the relations between the editor of the Liberator and the managers of the national organization were becoming decidedly strained. For it seemed to them that Garrison had changed the anti-slavery character of his paper by the course which he had taken in regard to the new ideas which were finding their way into its columns to the manifest harm of the main principle of immediate emancipation. This incipient estrangement between the pioneer and the executive committee of the national society was greatly aggravated by an occurrence, which, at the time, was elevated to an importance that it did not deserve. This occurrence was what is known in anti-slavery annals as the "Clerical Appeal." Five clergymen, who were obviously unfriendly to Garrison, and distrustful of the religious and social heresies which they either saw or fancied that they saw in the Liberator, and withal jealous lest the severities of the paper against particular pro-slavery ministers should diminish the influence and sacred character of their order, published, in August of 1837, in the New England Spectator an acrid arraignment of editor and paper, upon five several charges, designed to bring Garrisonism to the block and speedy death. This document was followed by two other appeals by way of supplement and rejoinder from the same source, an "Andover Appeal" from kindred spirits and a bitter, personal letter from one of the "seventy agents," all of them having a common motive and purpose, viz., sectarian distrust and dislike of Garrison, and desire to reduce his anti-slavery influence to a nullity.

In his diseased and suffering bodily condition, Garrison naturally enough fell into the error of exaggerating the gravity of these attacks upon himself. Insignificant in an historical sense, they really were an episode, an unpleasant one to be sure for the time being, but no more. To Garrison, however, they appeared in a wholly different light. It seemed a rebellion on a pretty grand scale, which called for all his strength, all the batteries of the friends of freedom, all his terrible and unsparing severities of speech to quell it. All his artillery he posted promptly in positions commanding the camp of the mutineers, and began to pour, as only he could, broadside after broadside into the works of the wretched little camp of rebels. He could hardly have expended more energy and ammunition in attacking a strategical point of Southern slavery, than was expended in punishing a handful of deserters and insurgents. But, alas! he was not satisfied to draw upon his own resources for crushing the clerical sedition, he demanded reinforcements from the central authorities in New York as well. And then began a contention between him and the Executive Committee of the National Society, which issued only in ill.

Garrison considered it the duty of the Executive Committee to disapprove officially of the action of the Massachusetts recalcitrants, and also the duty of its organ, the Emancipator, to rebuke the authors of the "appeals." Not so, replied Lewis Tappan and Elizur Wright, your request is unreasonable. If you choose to make a mountain out of a molehill, you choose to make a mistake which the Executive Committee will not repeat. Your troubles are wholly local, of no general importance whatever. "What! Shall a whole army stop its aggressive movements into the territories of its enemies to charge bayonets on five soldiers, subalterns, company, or even staff officers, because they stray into a field to pick berries, throw stones or write an 'appeal?' To be frank with you we shall make bold to say that we do not approve of the appeal, it is very censurable, its spirit is bad, but neither do we approve of your action in the premises, it is also very censurable and its spirit is bad. What then? shall the Executive Committee condemn the authors of the appeal and not condemn the editor of the Liberator also? If strict military justice were done should not both parties be cashiered? Let the Sabbath and the theoretic theology of the priesthood alone for the present." "I could have wished, yes, I have wished from the bottom of my soul," it is Wright who now holds the pen, "that you could conduct that dear paper, the Liberator, in the singleness of purpose of its first years, without traveling off from the ground of our true, noble, heart-stirring Declaration of Sentiments—without breathing sentiments which are novel and shocking to the community, and which seem to me to have no logical sequence from the principles on which we are associated as Abolitionists. I cannot but regard the taking hold of one great moral enterprise while another is in hand and but half achieved, as an outrage upon commonsense, somewhat like that of the dog crossing the river with his meat. But you have seen fit to introduce to the public some novel views—I refer especially to your sentiments on government and religious perfection—and they have produced the effect which was to have been expected. And now considering what stuff human nature is made of, is it to be wondered at that some honest-hearted, thorough-going Abolitionists should have lost their equanimity? As you well know I am comparatively no bigot to any creed, political or theological, yet to tell the plain truth, I look upon your notions of government and religious perfection as downright fanaticism—as harmless as they are absurd. I would not care a pin's head if they were preached to all Christendom; for it is not in the human mind (except in a peculiar and, as I think, diseased state) to believe them."

Barring the extreme plainness of speech with which Wright and Tappan gave their advice to Mr. Garrison, it was in the main singularly sound and wise. But the pioneer did not so regard it. He was possessed with his idea of the importance of chastising the clerical critics, and of the duty of the Executive Committee and of the Emancipator to back him in the undertaking. His temper was, under all circumstances, masterful and peremptory. It was never more masterful and peremptory than in its management of this business. The very reasonable course of the Board at New York suggested to his mind a predominance of "sectarianism at headquarters," seemed to him "criminal and extraordinary." As the Executive Committee and its organ would not rebuke the schismatics, he was moved to rebuke the Executive Committee and its organ for their "blind and temporizing policy." And so matters within the movement against slavery went, with increasing momentum, from bad to worse.

The break in the anti-slavery ranks widened as new causes of controversy arose between the management in Boston and the management at New York. The Massachusetts Abolitionists had stood stanchly by Garrison against the clerical schismatics. They also inclined to his side in his trouble with the national board. Instead of one common center of activity and leadership the anti-slavery reform began now to develop two centers of activity and leadership. Garrison and the Liberator formed the moral nucleus at one end, the Executive Committee and the Emancipator the moral nucleus at the other. Much of the energies of the two sides were in those circumstances, absorbed in stimulating and completing the processes which were to ultimate in the organic division of the body of the movement against slavery. When men once begin to quarrel they will not stop for lack of subjects to dispute over. There will be no lack, for before one disputed point is settled another has arisen. It is the old story of the box of evils. Beginnings must be avoided, else if one evil escapes, others will follow. The anti-slavery Pandora had let out one little imp of discord and many big and little imps were incontinently following.

Against all of the new ideas except one, viz., the idea of anti-slavery political action, the New York leadership, speaking broadly, had opposed itself. But as if by some strange perversity of fate, this particular new idea was the only one of the new ideas to which the Boston leadership did not take kindly. It became in time as the very apple of the eye to the management of the National Society. And the more ardently it was cherished by them, the more hateful did it become with the Boston Board. It was the only one of the new ideas which had any logical sequence from the Abolition cause. In a country where the principle of popular suffrage obtains, all successful moral movements must sometime ultimate in political action. There is no other way of fixing in laws the changes in public sentiment wrought during this period of agitation. The idea of political action was therefore a perfectly natural growth from the moral movement against slavery. The only reasonable objection to it would be one which went to show that it had arrived out of due course, that its appearance at any given time was marked by prematurity in respect of the reasons, so to speak, of the reform. For every movement against a great social wrong as was the anti-slavery movement must have its John-the-Baptist stage, its period of popular awakening to the nature and enormity of sin and the duty of immediate repentance.

The anti-slavery enterprise was at the time of the controversy between the New York and the Boston Boards in this first stage of its growth. It had not yet progressed naturally out of it into its next phase of political agitation. True there were tendencies more or less strong to enter the second stage of its development, but they seem irregular, personal, and forced. The time had not come for the adoption of the principle of associated political action against slavery. But the deep underlying motive of the advocates of the third-party idea was none the less a grand one, viz., "to have a free Northern nucleus," as Elizur Wright put it, "a standard flung to the breeze—something around which to rally." Garrison probed to the quick the question in a passage of an address to the Abolitionists, which is here given: "Abolitionists! you are now feared and respected by all political parties, not because of the number of votes you can throw, so much as in view of the moral integrity and sacred regard to principle which you have exhibited to the country. It is the religious aspect of your enterprise which impresses and overawes men of every sect and party. Hitherto you have seemed to be actuated by no hope of preferment or love of power, and therefore have established, even in the minds of your enemies, confidence in your disinterestedness. If you shall now array yourselves as a political party, and hold out mercenary rewards to induce men to rally under your standard, there is reason to fear that you will be regarded as those who have made the anti-slavery cause a hobby to ride into office, however plausible or sound may be your pretexts for such a course. You cannot, you ought not, to expect that the political action of the State will move faster than the religious action of the Church, in favor of the abolition of slavery; and it is a fact not less encouraging than undeniable, that both the Whig and Democratic parties have consulted the wishes of Abolitionists even beyond the measure of their real political strength. More you cannot expect under any circumstances."

Hotly around this point raged the strife among brethren. Actuated by the noblest motives were both sides in the main, yet, both sides displayed in the maintenance of their respective positions an amount of weak human nature, which proves that perfection is not attainable even by the most disinterested of men. Harsh and abusive language good men uttered against good men. Distrust, suspicion, anger, and alienation took possession of the thoughts of the grandest souls. Saints and heroes beseemed themselves like very ordinary folk, who, when they come to differences, come directly afterward to high words and thumping blows. The love of David and Jonathan which once united Garrison and Phelps, has died. Garrison and Stanton meet and only exchange civilities. They, too, have become completely alienated, and so on down the long list of the "goodliest fellowship ... whereof this land holds record." To a sweet and gentle spirit like Samuel J. May, the acrimony and scenes of strife among his old associates was unspeakably painful. Writing to Garrison from South Scituate, May 1, 1839, he touches thus upon this head: "I now think I shall not go to New York next week. In the first place, I cannot afford the expense.... But I confess, I do not lament my inability to go so much as I should do if the prospect of an agreeable meeting was fairer. I am apprehensive that it will be not so much an anti-slavery as anti-Garrison and anti-Phelps meeting, or anti-board-of-managers and anti-executive committee meeting. Division has done its work, I fear, effectually. The two parties seem to me to misunderstand, and therefore sadly misrepresent one another. I am not satisfied with the course you and your partisans have pursued. It appears to me not consistent with the non-resistant, patient, long-suffering spirit of the Gospel. And I do not believe that either the cause of the slave, or the cause of peace and righteousness has been advanced."

The situation was further complicated by the discovery of a fresh bone of contention. As if to give just a shade of sordidness to the strife there must needs arise a money difficulty between the two rival boards of leaders. This is how our recent band of brothers happened to stumble upon their new apple of discord. Soon after the formation of the National Society an arrangement was made with each of the State societies whereby they agreed to operate financially their respective territories and to turn into the national treasury the several sums which at the annual meeting they obligated themselves to contribute to the general work. This arrangement was intended to avoid the expense, conflict, and confusion consequent upon the employment of two sets of agents to work the same territory. Matters went on quite smoothly under this plan between the Massachusetts Board and the National Board until the beginning of the year 1839, when the former fell into arrears in the payment of its instalments to the latter. Money from one cause or another, was hard to get at by the Massachusetts Board, and the treasury in New York was in an extremely low state. The relations between the two boards were, as we have seen, much strained and neither side was in the mood to cover with charity the shortcomings of the other. Perhaps the board at New York was too exacting, perhaps the board at Boston was not sufficiently zealous, under the circumstances. But what were the real irritating causes which kept the two boards at loggerheads over the matter need not here be determined. This fact is clear that the arrangement was rescinded by the New York management, and their agents thrown into Massachusetts. This action only added fuel to a fire which was fast assuming the proportions of a conflagration. All the anti-Garrisonians formed themselves into a new anti-slavery society, and the National Board, as if to burn its bridges, and to make reconciliation impossible, established a new paper in Boston in opposition to the Liberator. The work of division was ended. There was no longer any vital connection between the two warring members of the anti-slavery reform. To tear the dead tissues asunder which still joined them, all that was wanted was another sharp shock, and this came at the annual meeting of the National Society in 1840 over the woman's question. The issue, "Shall a woman serve with men on a committee?" was precipitated upon the convention by the appointment of that brilliant young Quakeress, Abby Kelley, on the business committee with ten men. The convention confirmed her appointment by about a hundred majority in a total vote of 1,008. Whereupon those opposed to this determination of the question, withdrew from the convention and organized the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Garrison had triumphed and he was immensely elated with his victory. His moral leadership was definitely established, never again to be disputed by his disciples and followers.