William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

Garrison did not have to wait for posthumous appreciation from his countrymen. His steady and discriminating support of the Government, and his ardent sympathy with the arms of the North won him appreciation in his lifetime. Indeed, there came to him, if not popularity, something closely akin to it during the war. His visit to the capital in June, 1864, well illustrates the marvelous changes which had taken place in the Union touching himself and his cause. On his way to Washington the pioneer stopped over at Baltimore, which he had not revisited for thirty-four years, and where the Republican Convention, which renominated Lincoln was in session. He watched the proceedings from the gallery, and witnessed with indescribable emotions the enthusiastic demonstrations of joy with which the whole body of delegates greeted the radical anti-slavery resolution of the Convention. To the reformer it was "a full indorsement of all the Abolition fanaticism and incendiarism" with which he had been branded for years. The jail where he had been held a prisoner for seven weeks, like the evil which he had denounced, was gone, and a new one stood in its place, which knew not Garrison. In the court-house where he was tried and sentenced he was received by a United States judge as an illustrious visitor. Judge Bond hunted up the old indictment against the junior editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, where it had lain for a generation, during which that guiltless prisoner had started a movement which had shaken the nation by its mighty power, and slavery out of it. "Eight or nine of the original jurymen who gave the verdict against Mr. Garrison are still living," wrote Theodore Tilton, at the time, to the Independent, "and Judge Bond jocosely threatened to summon them all into Court, that Mr. Garrison might forgive them in public."

At Washington the pioneer's reception seemed to him like a dream. And no wonder. He was heartily received by President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton. He was accorded the most marked attentions on the floor of both branches of Congress. On every side there rose up witnesses to the vastness of the revolution which had taken place, and to the fact that the great Abolitionist was no longer esteemed an enemy of the Republic but one of its illustrious citizens. This was evinced in a signal and memorable manner a little later when the National Government extended to him an invitation to visit Fort Sumter as its guest on the occasion of the re-raising over it of the Stars and Stripes. He went, and so also went George Thompson, his lifelong friend and coadjutor, who was the recipient of a similar invitation from the Secretary of War.

This visit of Mr. Garrison, taken in all its dramatic features, is more like a chapter of fiction, with its strange and improbable incidents and situations, than a story of real life. The pioneer entered Georgia and trod the streets of Savannah, whose legislature thirty-three years before had set a price upon his head. In Charleston he witnessed the vast ruin which the war had wrought, realized how tremendous had been the death-struggle between Freedom and Slavery, and saw everywhere he turned that slavery was beaten, was dead in its proud, rebellious center. Thousands upon thousands of the people whose wrongs he had made his own, whose woes he had carried in his soul for thirty-five years, greeted him, their deliverer, in all stages of joy and thanksgiving. They poured out at his feet their overflowing love and gratitude. They covered him with flowers, bunches of jessamines, and honeysuckles and roses in the streets of Charleston, hard by the grave where Calhoun lay buried. "'Only listen to that in Charleston streets!' exclaimed Garrison, on hearing the band of one of the black regiments playing the air of 'Old John Brown', and we both broke into tears," relates Rev. Theodore L. Cuyler, who stood by the side of the pioneer that April morning under the spire of St. Michael's church.

"The Government has its hold upon the throat of the monster, slavery," Mr. Garrison assured an audience of nearly four thousand freedmen, "and is strangling the life out of it." It was even so. Richmond had fallen, and Lee had surrendered. The early and total collapse of the rebellion was impending. The Government was, indeed, strangling the life out of it and out of slavery, its cause and mainspring. The monster had, however, a crowning horror to add to a long list of horrors before fetching its last gasp. The assassination of President Lincoln was the dying blow of slavery, aimed through him at the Union which he had maintained. Appalling as was the deed, it was vain, for the Union was saved, and liberty forever secured to the new-born nation. As Garrison remarked at the tomb of Calhoun, on the morning that Lincoln died, "Down into a deeper grave than this slavery has gone, and for it there is no resurrection."

CHAPTER XXI
THE LAST.

"Garrison," said George Thompson on the steamer which was conveying the Government party out of Charleston Harbor on their return trip; "Garrison you began your warfare at the North in the face of rotten eggs and brickbats. Behold you end it at Charleston on a bed of roses!" The period of persecution had indeed ended, the reign of missiles had ceased, but with the roses there came to the pioneer not a few thorns. Bitter was the sorrow which visited him in the winter of 1863. Without warning his wife was on the night of December 29th, stricken with paralysis, which crippled her for the rest of her life. No words can adequately express all that she had been to the reformer in his struggle with slavery. She was a providential woman raised up to be the wife and helpmate of her husband, the strenuous man of God. "As a wife for a period of more than twenty-six years," he wrote her on the completion of her fiftieth year, "you have left nothing undone to smooth the rugged pathway of my public career—to render home the all-powerful magnet of attraction, and the focal point of domestic enjoyment—to make my welfare and happiness at all times a matter of tender solicitude—and to demonstrate the depth and fixedness of that love which you so long ago plighted to me.... Whatever of human infirmity we may have seen in each other, I believe few have enjoyed more unalloyed bliss in wedded life than ourselves." For twelve years after that sad December night the lovely invalid was the object of her husband's most tender and assiduous care. And when at last she left him in January, 1876, the loneliness which fell upon his heart seemed more than he could bear.

Differences with old associates was a grievous thorn which came to the pioneer during the progress of the war. The first marked disagreement between him and them occurred at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society not a month after his wife's prostration. The clash came between the leader and his great coadjutor Wendell Phillips over a resolution introduced by the latter, condemning the Government and declaring its readiness "to sacrifice the interest and honor of the North to secure a sham peace." Garrison objected to the severity of this charge. He believed that there was but one party at the North of which it was true, and that was the party of Copperheads. He endeavored, therefore, to modify the harshness of the resolution by giving it a more moderate tone. But the anti-Lincoln feeling of the Convention proved too strong for his resistance, and Mr. Phillips's resolution was finally adopted as the sentiment of the society.

The discordant note thus struck grew sharper and louder during the year. The divergence of views in the ranks of the Abolitionists touching the Southern policy of the Administration grew wider, until the subject of Mr. Lincoln's renomination sundered the little band into two wings—one for renomination, headed by Garrison, the other against renomination, and led by Phillips. These differences presently developed into, if not positive antagonism, then something closely akin to it between the two wings and the two leaders. No little heat was generated from the strong, sharp things said on both sides. Garrison was wiser than Phillips in his unwillingness to have the country, in the homely speech of the President, "swap horses while crossing a stream."

Serious differences of opinion sprang up also between the two leaders and the two wings in relation to the proper time for dissolving the anti-slavery organizations. Garrison held on one side that this time had come with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment abolishing slavery, while Phillips held on the other that the societies should continue their operations until the negro was invested with the right to vote. And here it seems that Phillips was wiser than Garrison in his purpose not to abandon in 1865 the old machinery for influencing public sentiment in the negro's interest.

At the anniversary of the American Anti-Slavery Society, in May, 1865, Garrison contended for its dissolution, declaring that "Nothing is more clear in my own mind, nothing has ever been more clear, than that this is the fitting time to dissolve our organization, and to mingle with the millions of our fellow-countrymen in one common effort to establish justice and liberty throughout the land." For two days the debate upon this question raged in the convention, but when the vote was taken it was found that a large majority of the delegates agreed with Mr. Phillips. Mr. Garrison was, nevertheless, reëlected President, but declined and withdrew from the society. The controversy was renewed at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in January, 1866. But here again a large majority voted against dissolution. Warm words fell from both Garrison and Phillips and their respective supporters, which tried sorely the friendship of the two leaders.