William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

Rev. W.H. Furness, of Philadelphia, who was a member of the convention and also one of the speakers, has preserved for us the contrasts of the occasion. "The close of Mr. Garrison's address," says he, "brought down Rynders again, who vociferated and harangued at one time on the platform, and then pushing down into the aisles, like a madman followed by his keepers. Through the whole, nothing could be more patient and serene than the bearing of Mr. Garrison. I have always revered Mr. Garrison for his devoted, uncompromising fidelity to his great cause. Today I was touched to the heart by his calm and gentle manners. There was no agitation, no scorn, no heat, but the quietness of a man engaged in simple duties."

The madman and his keepers were quite vanquished on the first day of the convention by the wit, repartee, and eloquence of Frederick Douglass, Dr. Furness, and Rev. Samuel R. Ward, whom Wendell Phillips described as so black that "when he shut his eyes you could not see him." But it was otherwise on the second day when public opinion was "regulated," and free discussion overthrown by Captain Rynders and his villainous gang, who were resolved, with the authors of the compromise, that the Union as it was should be preserved.

But, notwithstanding the high authority and achievements of this noble band of patriots and brothers, Garrison's detestation of the Union but increased, and his cry for its dissolution grew deeper and louder. And no wonder. For never had the compact between freedom and slavery seemed more hateful than after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill. The state of panic which it created among the colored people in the free States will form, if ever written down, one of the most heartrending chapters in human history. Hundreds and thousands fled from their homes into the jaws of a Canadian winter to escape the jaws of the slave-hounds, whose fierce baying began presently to fill the land from Massachusetts to Ohio. It made no difference whether these miserable people had been always free or were fugitives from slavery, the terror spread among them all the same. The aged and the young turned their backs upon their homes and hurried precipitately into a strange country. Fathers with wives and children dependant upon them for their daily bread, were forced by the dread of being captured and returned to bondage to abandon their homes and loved ones, sometimes without so much as a touch of their hands or a tone of their voices in token of farewell. Perhaps on his way to work in the morning some husband or son has caught a glimpse among the faces on the street of one face, the remembrance of which to the day of death, he can never lose, a face he had known in some far away Southern town or plantation, and with which are connected in the poor fellow's brain the most frightful sufferings and associations. Crazed at the sight, with no thought of home, of the labors which are awaiting him, oblivious of everything but the abject terror which has suddenly taken possession of him, he hastens away to hide and fly, fly and hide, until he reaches a land where slave-hounds enter not, and panting fugitives find freedom. Wendell Phillips tells of an old woman of seventy who asked his advice about flying, though originally free, and fearful only of being caught up by mistake. The distress everywhere was awful, the excitement indescribable. From Boston alone in the brief space of three weeks after the rescue of Shadrach, nearly a hundred of these panic stricken creatures had fled. The whole number escaping into Canada Charles Sumner placed as high as six thousand souls. But in addition to this large band of fugitives, others emigrated to the interior of New England away from the seaboard centers of trade and commerce where the men-hunters abounded.

The excitement and the perils of this period were not confined to the colored people. Their white friends shared both with them. We are indebted to Mr. Phillips for the following graphic account of these excitements and perils in Boston in March, 1851. He has been describing the situation in the city, in respect of the execution of the infamous law, to Elizabeth Pease, and goes on thus: "I need not enlarge on this; but the long evening sessions—debates about secret escapes—plans to evade where we can't resist—the door watched that no spy may enter—the whispering consultations of the morning—some putting property out of their hands, planning to incur penalties, and planning also that, in case of conviction, the Government may get nothing from them—the doing, and answering no questions—intimates forbearing to ask the knowledge which it may be dangerous to have—all remind one of those foreign scenes which have hitherto been known to us, transatlantic republicans, only in books."

On the passage of the Black Bill, as the Abolitionists stigmatised the law, it was not believed that the moral sentiment of Boston would execute it, so horrified did the community seem. But it was soon apparent to the venerable Josiah Quincy that "The Boston of 1851 is not the Boston of 1775. Boston," the sage goes on to remark, "has now become a mere shop—a place for buying and selling goods; and, I suppose, also of buying and selling men." The great idol of her shopkeepers, Daniel Webster, having striven mightily for the enactment of the hateful bill while Senator of the United States, had gone into Millard Fillmore's Cabinet, to labor yet more mightily for its enforcement. The rescue of Shadrach, which Mr. Secretary of State characterized "as a case of treason," set him to thundering for the Union as it was, and against the "fanatics," who were stirring up the people of the free States to resist the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. But he was no longer "the God-like" Webster, for he appeared to the editor of the Liberator as "an ordinary-looking, poor, decrepit old man, whose limbs could scarce support him; lank with age; whose sluggish legs were somewhat concealed by an over-shadowing abdomen; with head downcast and arms shriveled, and dangling almost helpless by his side, and incapable of being magnetized for the use of the orator." The voice and the front of "the God-like" had preceded the "poor decrepit old man" to the grave. Garrison dealt no less roughly and irreverently with another of the authors of the wicked law and another of the superannuated divinities of a shopkeeping North, Henry Clay. "HENRY CLAY, with one foot in the grave," exclaimed the reformer, "and just ready to have both body and soul cast into hell, as if eager to make his damnation doubly sure, rises in the United States Senate and proposes an inquiry into the expediency of passing yet another law, by which every one who shall dare peep or mutter against the execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill shall have his life crushed out."

In those trial times words from the mouth or the pen of Abolitionists had the force of deadly missiles. Incapacitated as Garrison was to resort to physical resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law by his non-resistant doctrine, it seemed that all the energy and belligerency of the man went into the most tremendous verbal expressions. They were like adamantine projectiles flung with the savage strength of a catapult against the walls of slavery. The big sinners, like Webster and Clay, he singled out for condign punishment, were objects of his utmost severities of speech. It was thus that he essayed to breach the iron dungeon in which the national iniquity had shut the national conscience. Saturated was the reformer's mind with the thought of the Bible, its solemn and awful imagery, its fiery and prophetic abhorrence and denunciations of national sins, all of which furnished him an unfailing magazine whence were drawn the bolts which he launched against the giant sin and the giant sinners of his time. And so Clay had not only "one foot in the grave," but was "just ready to have both body and soul cast into hell."

While physical resistance of the Slave Law was wholly out of the question with Garrison, he, nevertheless, refused to condemn the men with whom it was otherwise. Here he was anything but a fanatic. All that he required was that each should be consistent with his principles. If those principles bade him resist the enforcement of the Black Bill, the apostle of non-resistance was sorry enough, but in this emergency, though he possessed the gentleness of the dove, he also practised the wisdom of the serpent. That truth moves with men upon lower as well as higher planes he well knew. It is always partial and many-colored, refracted as it is through the prisms of human passion and prejudice. If it appear unto some minds in the red bar of strife and blood, so be it. Each must follow the light which it is given him to discern, whether the blue of love or the red of war. Great coadjutors, like Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, were for forcible resistance to the execution of the law. So were the colored people. Preparations to this end went on vigorously in Boston under the direction of the Vigilance Committee. The Crafts escaped the clutches of the slave-hunters, so did Shadrach escape them, but Sims and Burns fell into them and were returned to bondage.

From this time on Wendell Phillips became in Boston and in the North more distinctly the leader of the Abolition sentiment. The period of pure moral agitation ended with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. That act opened a new era in the movement, an era in which non-resistance had no place, an era in which a resort to physical force in settlement of sectional differences, the whole trend of things were making inevitable. Fighting, the Anglo-Saxon method, as Theodore Parker characterized it, of making a final settlement of just such controversies as was the slavery question, was in the air, had become without any general consciousness of it at the time appearing in the popular mind, a foregone conclusion, from the moment that the South wrested from the National Government the right to defy and override the moral sentiment of free State communities. With this advance of the anti-slavery agitation a stage nearer the end, when fighting would supersede all other methods, the fighters gravitated naturally to the front of the conflict, and the apostle of non-resistance fell somewhat into the background of the great movement started by him.

Garrison had begun, indeed, to recognize that there were other ways besides his way of abolishing slavery—had begun to see that these with his led to Rome, to the ultimate extinction of the evil, to which anti-slavery unionists and disunionists were alike devoted. His innate sagacity and strong sense of justice lifted the reformer to larger toleration of mind. At a dinner given in Boston in May, 1853, by the Free Democracy to John P. Hale, he was not only present to testify his appreciation of the courage and services of Mr. Hale to the common cause, but while there was able to speak thus tolerantly—tolerantly for him certainly—of a Union dear to the company about the table yet hateful beyond measure to himself: "Sir, you will pardon me," spoke the arch anti-slavery disunionist, "for the reference. I have heard something here about our Union, about the value of the Union, and the importance of preserving the Union, Gentlemen, if you have been so fortunate as to find a Union worth preserving, I heartily congratulate you. Cling to it with all your souls!" For himself, he has not been so fortunate. With a price set on his head in one of the Southern States, and outlawed in all of them, he begs to be pardoned if found lacking in loyalty to the existing Union, which to him, alas: "is but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power. We have no common country as yet. God grant we may have. We shall have it when the jubilee comes—and not till then," he declared, mindful of the convictions of others, yet bravely true to his own. The seeds of liberty, of hatred of the slave-power, planted by Garrison were springing up in a splendid crop through the North. Much of the political anti-slavery of the times were the fruit of his endeavor. Wendell Phillips has pointed out how the Liberty party was benefited by the meetings and speeches of Garrisonian Abolitionists. What was true of the Liberty party was equally true of Free Soil and Free Democracy. Although the little band remained small, it was potent in swelling, year after year, the anti-slavery membership of all the parties, Whig and Democratic, as well as of those already mentioned. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" might fairly be classed among the large indirect results produced by Garrison. "But," as Phillips justly remarked, "'Uncle Tom' would never have been written had not Garrison developed the facts; and never would have succeeded had he not created readers and purchasers." Garrisonism had become an influence, a power that made for liberty and against slavery in the United States. It had become such also in Great Britain. George Thompson, writing the pioneer of the marvelous sale of "Uncle Tom" in England, and of the unprecedented demand for anti-slavery literature, traced their source to his friend: "Behold the fruit of your labors," he exclaimed, "and rejoice."

Mr. Garrison's pungent characterization of the "Union" at the dinner of the Free Democracy as "but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power," found almost instant illustration of its truth in the startling demand of that power for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In 1850 the South lost California, but it received at the time an advantage of far-reaching consequence, viz., the admission of the principle of federal non-intervention upon the subject of slavery in the national Territories into the bill organizing Territorial Governments for New Mexico and Utah. The train which was to blow down the slave wall of 1820 and open to slave immigration the northern half of the Louisiana Territory, was laid in the compromise measures of 1850.