William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

Calhoun, strongly dissatisfied as he was with the Missouri settlement, recoiled from countenancing any agitation on the part of the South looking to its repeal on the ground that such action was calculated to disturb "the peace and harmony of the Union." But four years after the death of the great nullifier, his disciples and followers dared to consummate a crime, the consequences of which he shrank from inviting. The political conditions four years had indeed modified in one important particular at least. In Calhoun's lifetime, there was no Northern leader bold enough to undertake to engineer an act of abrogation through Congress. If the North were willing, possessed sufficient magnanimity, to surrender, in the interest of brotherly love between the sections, the benefits which inured to it under the Missouri Compromise, neither Calhoun nor the South would have declined the proffered sacrifice. The selection of Stephen A. Douglas in 1854 as the leader of the movement for repeal put a new face on the business, which was thereby made to appear to proceed from the free, not from the slave States. This was adroit, the fixing upon the losing section the initiative and the responsibility of the act of abrogation.

Besides this element, there was another not less specious which lent to the scheme an air of fairness, and that was the application to the Territories of the American principle of local self-government, in other words, the leaving to the people of the Territories the right to vote slavery up or vote it down, as they might elect. The game was a deep one, worthy of the machinations of its Northern and Southern authors. But, like other elaborate schemes of mice and men, it went to pieces under the fatal stroke of an unexpected circumstance. The act which abrogated the Missouri Compromise broke the much-enduring back of Northern patience at the same time. In the struggle for the repeal Southern Whigs and Southern Democrats forgot their traditionary party differences in battling for Southern interests, which was not more or less than the extension to the national Territories of the peculiar institution. The final recognition of this ugly fact on the part of the free States, raised a popular flood in them big enough to whelm the Whig party and to float a great political organization, devoted to uncompromising opposition to the farther extension of slavery. The sectionalism of slavery was at last met by the sectionalism of freedom. From that moment the old Union, with its slave compromises, was doomed. In the conflict then impending its dissolution was merely a matter of time, unless indeed the North should prove strong enough to preserve it by the might of its arms, seeing that the North still clung passionately to the idea of national unity.

Not so, however, was it with Garrison. Sharper and sterner rose his voice against any union with Slaveholders. On the Fourth of July following the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the reformer at Framingham, Mass., gave a fresh and startling sign of his hatred of the Union by burning publicly the Constitution of the United States. Before doing so however, he consigned to the flames a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law, next the decision of Judge Loring remanding Anthony Burns to slavery, also the charge of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis to the Grand Jury touching the assault upon the court-house for the rescue of Burns. Then holding up the United States Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all the other atrocities—a covenant with death and an agreement with hell—and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, "So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!" This dramatic act and the "tremendous shout" which "went up to heaven in ratification of the deed" from the assembled multitude, what were they but the prophecy of a fiercer fire already burning in the land, soon to blaze about the pillars of the Union, of a more tremendous shout soon to burst with the wrath of a divided people over that

"perfidious bark
Built i' th' eclipse, and rigged with curses dark."

CHAPTER XIX.
FACE TO FACE.

Face to face at last were freedom and slavery. The final struggle between them for mastery had come. Narrow, indeed, was the issue that divided the combatants, slavery extension on the one side, and slavery restriction on the other, not total and immediate emancipation, but it was none the less vital and supreme to the two enemies. Back of the Southern demand for "More slave soil" stood a solid South, back of the Northern position, "No more slave soil" was rallying a fast uniting North. The political revolution, produced by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, advanced apace through the free States from Maine to Michigan. A flood-tide of Northern resistance had suddenly risen against the slave-power.

Higher than anywhere else rose this flood-tide in Massachusetts. The judge who remanded Anthony Burns to slavery was removed from office, and a Personal Liberty Law, with provisions as bold as they were thorough, enacted for the protection of fugitive slaves. Mr. Garrison sat beside the President of the State Senate when that body voted to remove Judge Loring from his office. Such was Massachusetts's answer to the abrogation of the Missouri Compromise, and a triumphant slave-power. Its instant effect was to accelerate in the South the action of the disunion working forces there, to hurry the inevitable moment when the two sections would rush together in a death-grapple within or without Webster's once glorious Union.

Indeed the foes had already closed in a frightful wrestle for the possession of Kansas. When the National Government adopted the popular sovereignty doctrine in solution of the Territorial problem between the two halves of the Union, freedom and slavery thereupon precipitated their forces upon the debatable land, and, for the first time, the men of the North and the men of the South came into actual physical collision in defence of their respective ideas and institutions. The possession of land is nine points of the law among Anglo-Saxons, and for this immense advantage both sides flung themselves into Kansas—the North by means of emigrant aid societies, the South by means of bands of Border ruffians under the direction of a United States Senator. It was distinctly understood and ordained in connection with the repeal of the compromise of 1820, that final possession of the Territories then thrown open to slave labor should be determined by the people inhabiting the same. In the contest for peopling Kansas the superior colonizing resources of the free States was presently made manifest. They, in any fair contest with ballots, had a majority of the polls, and were, therefore, able to vote slavery down. Worsted as the South clearly was in a show of heads, it threw itself back upon fraud and force to decide the issue in its favor. The cartridge-box took the place of the ballot-box in bleeding Kansas, and violence and anarchy, as a consequence, reigned therein for the space of several years.

This is no place to depict those scenes of slave-holding outrages, supported as they were by a Northern President with Southern principles. The sight of them rapidly changed the pacific character of the free States. Many a peace man dropped his peace principles before this bloody duel between the civilization of the South and that of the North. Ministers and churches took up collections to send, not Bibles, but Sharp's rifles to their brethren in Kansas. The South had appealed to the sword, and the North had sternly accepted the challenge. War was in the air, and the Northern temper, without there being any general consciousness of it, was fast mounting to the war point in the thermometer of the passions, thanks to the perfidy and ruffianism of the slave-power in Congress and Kansas.

This trend and strong undertow of the nation toward a civil outbreak and commotion, though unnoted by the multitude, was yet, nevertheless, seen and felt by many thoughtful and far-seeing minds; and by no one more clearly than by T.W. Higginson, who at the twentieth anniversary of the Boston mob, discoursed thus on this head: "Mr. Phillips told us that on this day, twenty years ago, the military could not protect the meeting, because the guns were outside in the mob—or the men who should have carried them! There has been a time since when the men were on the outside and the guns too; and as surely as this earth turns on its axis, that time will come again! And it is for you, men, who hear me, to think what you will do when that time comes; and it is for you, women, who hear me, to think what you will do, and what you are willing—I will not say, to consent that those you love should do, but what you are willing to urge them to do, and to send them from your homes, knowing that they will do it, whether they live or die." The murderous assault upon Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber at Washington by Preston S. Brooks, served to intensify the increasing belligerency of the Northern temper, to deepen the spreading conviction that the irrepressible conflict would be settled not with the pen through any more fruitless compromises, but in Anglo-Saxon fashion by blood and iron.