William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

The announcement of this new radicalism caused a sensation. Many genuine Garrisonian Abolitionists recoiled from a policy of disunion. Lydia Maria Child and James S. Gibbon of the Executive Committee of the National Society hastened to disavow for the society all responsibility for the disunion sentiment of the editor of the Liberator. His new departure seemed to them "foreign to the purpose for which it was organized." Like all new ideas, it was a sword-bearer, and proved a decided disturber of the peace. The Union-loving portion of the free States had never taken to the Abolition movement, for the reason that it tended to disturb the stability of their idol. But now the popular hatred of Abolitionism was intensified by the avowal of a distinct purpose on the part of its leader to labor for the separation of the sections. The press of the North made the most of this design to render altogether odious the small band of moral reformers, to reduce to a nullity their influence upon public opinion.

Notwithstanding its rejection by James Gibbons and Lydia Maria Child the new idea of the dissolution of the Union, as an anti-slavery object, found instant favor with many of the leading Abolitionists, like Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, Parker Pillsbury, Stephen S. Foster and Abby Kelley. At the anniversary meeting of the American Society in 1842, the subject was mooted, and, although there was no official action taken, yet it was apparent that a majority of the delegates were favorable to its adoption as the sentiment of the society.

The ultimate object of Garrison was the abolition of slavery. Disunion led directly to this goal, therefore he planted his feet in that way. But while he shot the agitation at a distant mark, he did not mean to miss less remote results. There was remarkable method in his madness. He agitated the question of the dissolution of the Union "in order that the people of the North might be induced to reflect upon their debasement, guilt, and danger in continuing in partnership with heaven-daring oppressors, and thus be led to repentance."

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at its annual meeting in January, 1843 "dissolved the Union," wrote Quincy to R.D. Webb, "by a handsome vote, after a warm debate. The question was afterward reconsidered and passed in another shape, being wrapped up by Garrison in some of his favorite Old Testament Hebraisms by way of vehicle, as the apothecaries say." This is the final shape which Garrison's "favorite Old Testament Hebraisms" gave to the action of the society:

"Resolved, That the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell—involving both parties in atrocious criminality—and should be immediately annulled."

At its tenth anniversary, in 1844, the American Society resolved likewise that there should be no Union with slaveholders; and in May of the same year the New England Society voted by a large majority to dissolve the 'covenant with death, and the agreement with hell.' Almost the whole number of the Garrisonian Abolitionists had by this time placed upon their banner of immediate emancipation the revolutionary legend "No Union with slaveholders." Cathago est delenda were now ever on the lips of the pioneer. 'The Union it must and shall be destroyed' became the beginning, the middle, and the end of all his utterances on the slavery question.

The attitude of the anti-slavery disunionists to the Government which they were seeking to overthrow was clearly stated by Francis Jackson in a letter returning to the Governor of Massachusetts his commission as a justice of the peace. Says he, "To me it appears that the vices of slavery, introduced into the constitution of our body politic by a few slight punctures, has now so pervaded and poisoned the whole system of our National Government that literally there is no health in it. The only remedy that I can see for the disease is to be found in the dissolution of the patient.... Henceforth it (the Constitution) is dead to me, and I to it. I withdraw all profession of allegiance to it, and all my voluntary efforts to sustain it. The burdens that it lays upon me, while it is held up by others, I shall endeavor to bear patiently, yet acting with reference to a higher law, and distinctly declaring that, while I retain my own liberty, I will be a party to no compact which helps to rob any other man of his."

The Abolition agitation for the dissolution of the Union was assisted not a little by sundry occurrences of national importance. The increasing arrogance and violence of the South in Congress on all matters relating to the subject of slavery was one of these occurrences. Freedom of debate and the right of petition, Southern intolerance had rendered well nigh worthless in the National Legislature. In this way the North, during several months in every year, was forced to look at the reverse and the obverse faces, of the Union. These object-lessons taught many minds, no doubt, to count the cost which the preservation of the Union entailed upon the free States—"to reflect upon their debasement, guilt, and danger" in their partnership with slaveholders. Another circumstance which induced to this kind of reflection was the case of George Latimer, who was seized as a fugitive slave in Boston in the autumn of 1842. From beginning to end the Latimer case revealed how completely had Massachusetts tied her own hands as a party to the original compact with slavery whose will was the supreme law of the land. In obedience to this supreme law Chief-Justice Shaw refused to the captive the writ of habeas corpus, and Judge Story granted the owner possession of the fugitive, and time to procure evidence of his ownership. But worse still Massachusetts officials and one of her jails were employed to aid in the return of a man to slavery. This degradation aroused the greatest indignation in the State and led to the enactment of a law prohibiting its officials from taking part in the return of fugitive slaves, and the use of its jails and prisons for their detention. The passage of this personal liberty measure served to increase the activity of the anti-Union working forces in the South.

Then, again, the serious difficulty between Massachusetts and two of the slave States in regard to their treatment of her colored seamen aided Garrison in his agitation for the dissolution of the Union by the keen sense of insult and injury which the trouble begat and left upon the popular mind. Colored men in Massachusetts enjoyed a fair degree of equality before her laws, were endowed with the right to vote, and were, barring the prejudice against color, treated by the commonwealth as citizens. They were employed in the merchant service of her interstate trade. But at two of the Southern ports where her vessels entered, the colored seamen were seized by the local police and confined in houses of detention until the vessels to which they belonged were ready to depart, when they were released and allowed to join the vessels. This was a most outrageous proceeding, outrageous to the colored men who were thus deprived of their liberty, outrageous also to the owners of the vessels who were deprived of the service of their employés. Of what avail was the constitutional guaranty that "the citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States", many men began to question? The South was evidently disposed to support only that portion of the national compact which sustained the slave system, all the rest upon occasion it trampled on and nullified. This lesson was enforced anew upon Massachusetts by the affair of her colored seamen. Unable to obtain redress of the wrong done her citizens, the State appointed agents to go to Charleston and New Orleans and test the constitutionality of the State laws under which the local authorities had acted. But South Carolina and Louisiana, especially the former, to whom Samuel Hoar was accredited, evinced themselves quite equal to the exigency to which the presence of the Massachusetts agents gave rise. To cut a long story short, these gentlemen, honored citizens of a sister State, and covered with the ægis of the Constitution, found that they could make no success of the business which they had in hand, found indeed that as soon as that business was made public that they stood in imminent peril of their lives. Whereupon, wisely conceiving discretion to be the better part of valor, they beat a hasty retreat back to their native air. The Massachusetts agents were driven out of Charleston and New Orleans. Where was the sacred and glorious union between Massachusetts and South Carolina and Louisiana that such things were possible—were constantly occurring? The circumstance made a strong impression on the State whose rights were thus grossly violated. It helped to convert Massachusetts to its later opposition to slavery, and to make its public sentiment more tolerant of the Garrisonian opposition to the covenant with death and the agreement with hell. To the agitation growing out of the scheme for the annexation of Texas must, however, be ascribed the premium among all the anti-Union working facts and forces of the first few years after Garrison and his coadjutors had raised the cry of "No union with slaveholders." This agitation renewed the intensity and sectionalism of the then almost forgotten struggle over the admission of Missouri nearly a quarter of a century before, and which was concluded by the Missouri compromise. This settlement was at the time considered quite satisfactory to the South. But Calhoun took an altogether different view of the matter twenty years later. The arrangement by which the South was excluded from the upper portion of the Louisiana Territory he came to regard as a cardinal blunder on the part of his section. The fact is that within those two decades the slave-holding had been completely outstripped by the non-slave-holding States in wealth, population, and social growth. The latter had obtained over the former States an indisputable supremacy in those respects. Would not the political balance settle also in the natural order of things in the Northern half of the Union unless it could be kept where it then was to the south of Mason and Dixon's line by an artificial political make-weight. This artificial political make-weight was nothing less than the acquisition of new slave territory to supply the demand for new slave States. Texas, with the territorial dimensions of an empire, answered the agrarian needs of the slave system. And the South, under the leadership of Calhoun, determined to make good their fancied loss in the settlement of the Missouri controversy by annexing Texas.

But all the smouldering dread of slave domination, all the passionate opposition to the extension of slavery, to the acquisition of new slave territory and the admission of new slave States, awoke hotly in the heart of the North. "No more slave territory." "No more slave States," resounded during this crisis, through the free States. "Texas or disunion," was the counter cry which reverberated through the slave States. Even Dr. Channing, who had no love for Garrison or his anti-slavery ultraism, was so wrought upon by the scheme for the annexation of Texas as to profess his preference for the dissolution of the Union, "rather than receive Texas into the Confederacy." "This measure, besides entailing on us evils of all sorts," the doctor boldly pointed out, "would have for its chief end to bring the whole country under the slave-power, to make the general Government the agent of slavery; and this we are bound to resist at all hazards. The free States should declare that the very act of admitting Texas will be construed as a dissolution of the Union."