William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist

by Archibald Henry Grimké

At this period he tested the disposition of slaveholders to manumit their slaves. The Colonization Society had given it out that there was no little desire on the part of many masters to set their slaves free. All that was wanted for a practical demonstration in this direction was the assurance of free transportation out of the country for the emancipated slaves. Lundy had made arrangement for the transportation of fifty slaves to Hayti and their settlement in that country. So he and Garrison advertised this fact in the Genius, but they waited in vain for a favorable response from the South—notwithstanding the following humane inducement which this advertisement offered: "THE PRICE OF PASSAGE WILL BE ADVANCED, and everything furnished of which they may stand in need, until they shall have time to prepare their houses and set in to work." No master was moved to take advantage of the opportunity. This was discouraging to the believers in the efficacy of colonization as a potent anti-slavery instrument. But Garrison was no such believer. With unerring moral instinct he had from the start placed his reliance "on nothing but the eternal principles of justice for the speedy overthrow of slavery."

He obtained at this period an intimate personal knowledge of the free colored people. He saw that they were not essentially unlike other races—that there was nothing morally or intellectually peculiar about them, and that the evil or the good which they manifested was the common property of mankind in similar circumstances. He forthwith became their brave defender against the common slanders of the times. "There is a prevalent disposition among all classes to traduce the habits and morals of our free blacks," he remarked in the Genius. "The most scandalous exaggerations in regard to their condition are circulated by a thousand mischievous tongues, and no reproach seems to them too deep or unmerited. Vile and malignant indeed is this practice, and culpable are they who follow it. We do not pretend to say that crime, intemperance, and suffering, to a considerable extent, cannot be found among the free blacks; but we do assert that they are as moral, peaceable, and industrious as that class of the whites who are, like them, in indigent circumstances—and far less intemperate than the great body of foreign immigrants who infest and corrupt our shores." This idea of the natural equality of the races he presented in the Genius a few weeks before with Darwinian breadth in the following admirable sentences: "I deny the postulate that God has made, by an irreversible decree, or any inherent qualities, one portion of the human race superior to another. No matter how many breeds are amalgamated—no matter how many shades of color intervene between tribes or nations give them the same chances to improve, and a fair start at the same time, and the result will be equally brilliant, equally productive, equally grand."

At the same time that he was making active, personal acquaintance with the free colored people, he was making actual personal acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery also. "The distinct application of a whip, and the shrieks of anguish" of the slave, his residence in Baltimore had taught him was "nothing uncommon" in that city. Such an instance had come to him while in the street where the office of the Genius was located. It was what was occurring at almost all hours of the day and in almost all parts of the town. He had not been in Baltimore a month when he saw a specimen of the brutality of slavery on the person of a negro, who had been mercilessly flogged. On his back were thirty-seven gashes made with a cowskin, while on his head were many bruises besides. It was a Sunday morning, fresh from his terrible punishment, that the poor fellow had found the editors of the Genius, who, with the compassion of brothers, took him in, dressed his wounds, and cared for him for two days. Such an experience was no new horror to Lundy, but it was doubtless Garrison's first lesson in that line, and it sank many fathoms deep into his heart.

Maryland was one of the slave-breeding States and Baltimore a slave emporium. There was enacted the whole business of slavery as a commercial enterprise. Here the human chattels were brought and here warehoused in jails and other places of storage and detention. Here they were put up at public auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder, and from here they were shipped to New Orleans, the great distributing center for such merchandise. He heard what Lundy had years before heard, the wail of captive mothers and fathers, wives, husbands and children, torn from each other; like Lundy, "he felt their pang of distress; and the iron entered his soul." He could not hold his peace in the midst of such abominations, but boldly exposed and denounced them. His indignation grew hot when he saw that Northern vessels were largely engaged in the coastwise slave-trade; and when, to his amazement, he learned that the ship Francis, owned by Francis Todd, a Newburyport merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves, his indignation burst into blaze. He blazoned the act and the name of Francis Todd in the Genius, and did verily what he had resolved to do, viz., "to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this nefarious business," the captain as well as the owner of the ill-freighted ship. He did literally point at these men the finger of scorn. Every device known to the printer's art for concentrating the reader's attention upon particular words and sentences, Garrison made skillful use of in his articles—from the deep damnation of the heavy black capitals in which he printed the name Francis Todd, to the small caps in which appeared the words, "sentenced to solitary confinement for life," and which he flanked with two terrible indices. But the articles did not need such embellishment. They were red hot branding irons without them. One can almost smell the odor of burning flesh as he reads the words: "It is no worse to fit out piratical cruisers or to engage in the foreign slave-trade, than to pursue a similar trade along our coast; and the men who have the wickedness to participate therein, for the purpose of keeping up wealth should be ==>SENTENCED TO SOLITARY CONFINEMENT FOR LIFE; <==they are the enemies of their own species—highway robbers, and murderers; and their final doom will be, unless they speedily repent, to occupy the lowest depths of perdition. I know that our laws make a distinction in this matter. I know that the man who is allowed to freight his vessel with slaves at home, for a distant market, would be thought worthy of death if he should take a similar freight on the coast of Africa; but I know, too, that this distinction is absurd, and at war with the common sense of mankind, and that God and good men regard it with abhorrence.

"I recollect that it was always a mystery in Newburyport how Mr. Todd contrived to make profitable voyages to New Orleans and other places, when other merchants, with as fair an opportunity to make money, and sending to the same ports at the same time invariably made fewer successful speculations. The mystery seems to be unravelled. Any man can gather up riches if he does not care by what means they are obtained."

A copy of the Genius, containing this article Garrison sent to the owner of the ship Francis. What followed made it immediately manifest that the branding irons of the reformer had burned home with scarifying effect. Mr. Todd's answer to the strictures was a suit at law against the editors of the Genius for five thousand dollars in damages. But this was not all. The Grand Jury for Baltimore indicted them for publishing "a gross and malicious libel against Francis Todd and Nicholas Brown." This was at the February Term, 1830. On the first day of March following, Garrison was tried. He was ably and eloquently defended by Charles Mitchell, a young lawyer of the Baltimore Bar. But the prejudice of judge and jury rendered the verdict of guilty a foregone conclusion. April 17, 1830, the Court imposed a penalty of fifty dollars and costs, which, with the fine amounted in all to nearly one hundred dollars. The fine and costs Garrison could not pay, and he was therefore committed to jail as a common malefactor. His confinement lasted seven weeks. He did not languish during this period. His head and hands were in fact hardly ever more active than during the term of his imprisonment. Shut out by Maryland justice from work without the jail, he found and did that which needed to be done within "high walls and huge." He was an extraordinary prisoner and was treated with extraordinary consideration by the Warden. He proved himself a genuine evangel to the prisoners, visiting them in their cells, cheering them by his bouyant and benevolent words, giving them what he had, a brother's sympathy, which to these ill-fated ones, was more than gold or silver. He indited for such of them as he deemed deserving, letters and petitions to the Governor praying their pardon; and he had the great satisfaction of seeing many of his efforts in this regard crowned with success.

But more than this his imprisonment afforded him an opportunity for a closer acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery than he could possibly have made had he lived otherwise in Baltimore. A Southern jail was not only the place of detention of offenders against social justice, but of slaves waiting for the next market-day, of recaptured fugitives waiting for their owners to reclaim them. Here they were huddled and caged, pitiful and despairing in their misery. Such scenes sickened the young reformer every day. God had opened to him the darkest chapter in the book of the negroes' wrongs. Here is a page from that black volume of oppression and cruelty, the record of which he has preserved in the following graphic narrative: "During my late incarceration in Baltimore prison, four men came to obtain a runaway slave. He was brought out of his cell to confront his master, but pretended not to know him—did not know that he had ever seen him before—could not recollect his name. Of course the master was exceedingly irritated. 'Don't you remember,' said he, 'when I gave you not long since thirty-nine lashes under the apple-tree? Another time when I gave you a sound flogging in the barn? Another time when you was scourged for giving me the lie, by saying that the horse was in a good condition?' 'Yes,' replied the slave, whose memory was thus quickened, 'I do recollect. You have beaten me cruelly without cause; you have not given me enough to eat and drink; and I don't want to go back again. I wish you to sell me to another master. I had rather even go to Georgia than to return home!'

"'I'll let you know, you villain,' said the master, 'that my wishes and not yours, are to be consulted. I'll learn you how to run away again.'"

The other men advised him to take the black home, and cut him up in inch pieces for his impudence, obstinacy, and desertion—swearing tremendously all the while. The slave was ordered back to his cell. Then ensued the following colloquy between Garrison and the master:

G.—"Sir, what right have you to that poor creature?"