III
GARRISON AND PHILLIPS: ANTI-SLAVERY AGITATION
In retrospect, historians make a large place for the eloquence of the anti-slavery epoch, as a force explaining the abolition movement. Every great movement must have its advocate and voice. Garrison was the pen for abolition, Emerson its philosopher, Greeley its editor, and in Wendell Phillips abolition had its advocate. Political kings are oftentimes artificial kings. The orator is God's natural king, divinely enthroned. Back of all eloquence is a great soul, a great cause and a great peril. Our history holds three supreme moments in the story of eloquence—the hour of Patrick Henry's speech at Williamsburg, Wendell Phillips' at Faneuil Hall and Lincoln's at Gettysburg. The great hour and the great crisis, the great cause and the great man, all met and melted together at a psychologic moment. In retrospect Phillips seems like a special gift of God to the anti-slavery period. Webster had more weight and majesty, Everett a higher polish, Douglas more pathos, Beecher was more of an embodied thunder-storm, but John Bright was probably right when he pronounced Wendell Phillips one of the first orators of his century, or of any century.
The man back of Wendell Phillips and the abolition movement was William Lloyd Garrison. This reformer began his career in 1825, as a practical printer and occasional writer of articles for the daily press. Among Garrison's friends were two Quakers, one a young farmer, John Greenleaf Whittier; the other was Benjamin Lundy, who for several years had spent his time and fortune protesting against the slave traffic. Lundy had visited Hayti, to examine the conditions of negro life there,—had returned to Baltimore, where he had been brutally beaten by a slave dealer, and had finally come to Boston to test out the anti-slavery sentiment in New England. He held a meeting in a Baptist church, only to have it broken up by the pastor, who refused to allow Lundy to continue his remarks, on the ground that his position could only be offensive to the South, and therefore dangerous. But Lundy succeeded in having a committee appointed to consider the problem, and young Garrison was one of its members. A few months later, Garrison was made the editor of a journal in Bedford, where he began to advance more and more radical theories, until a rival editor was irritated to the point of charging him with "the pert loquacity of a blue jay." But Garrison's fidelity to his own convictions, and his courage in airing them in public, had won the respect of the Quaker enthusiast, Lundy, and the old man walked all the way from Baltimore to Bedford to ask Garrison to join him in his work of agitation. A year later the two men, one old and discouraged, the other young and hopeful, both being practically penniless,—started work in Baltimore. Troubles came thick and fast. The slave dealer who had beaten Lundy now attacked young Garrison. Carelessly worded criticisms of a Northern slave dealer from Garrison's own town of Newburyport led to a suit for libel, and a fine of fifty dollars; neither man could raise the money to pay the fine, and Garrison went to jail for forty-nine days. But the youth was full of courage and faith, and in 1831 we find him once more in Boston, starting a new paper, that was, if possible, more radical than ever.
In this second venture he was alone, his office was a garret, his only helper a negro boy whom he had freed. His paper was called the Liberator, and the first edition appeared in January, 1831. Garrison registered his sublime vow in his opening editorial: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.... I am in earnest,—I will not equivocate,—I will not excuse,—I will not retract a single inch,—and I will be heard." His battle cry was "Immediate, unconditional emancipation on the soil."
No movement that wrought so great a national convulsion ever had a more feeble origin. The Revolutionary fathers had three million colonists as supporters. The leaders of the Home Rule movement had four millions of Irishmen to back them. Cobden and Bright were supported and cheered on by the manufacturers of Central England. But young Garrison stood alone, with empty hands, a slave boy to support, a hand-press printing a sheet twelve inches square, never knowing where the money for the next edition was to come from. His motto was "Our country is the world, and our countrymen all men, black or white." The genius of his message was unmistakable: "Is slavery wrong anywhere? Then it is wrong everywhere. Was it wrong once in Palestine? Then it is wrong in all lands. Is a wrongdoer bound to do right at any time? Then he is bound to do right instantly." He distributed his sheets among the merchants of Boston. Beacon Street shook with laughter, for a new Don Quixote had arisen. But from the first the South was alarmed, for that little sheet from the printing-press fell upon the South like the stroke and tread of armed men.
The Liberator soon brought friends to this unknown youth. But in August of this same year, 1831, an event occurred which lifted Garrison,—almost without his being aware of it,—into truly national prominence. This was the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia,—a negro uprising under the leadership of a genuine African slave who knew the Bible by heart, who claimed to have communication with the Holy Spirit, and who finally employed an eclipse of the sun as a sign to his followers that they were to arise and slay their masters. The massacre which resulted lasted forty-eight hours, and sixty-one white people on the neighbouring plantations lost their lives. Retribution followed swiftly, and where the slightest suspicion of guilt was to be found, negroes were shot at sight or burned against the nearest tree. Southampton County saw a veritable reign of terror. A storm of indignation swept over the South; thousands of slave owners living on their great estates, miles from the nearest military station, feared themselves victims of a servile insurrection. The cause of the uprising was at once sought for, and a hundred writers laid the blame at the door of the Boston Liberator. Garrison was indicted for felony in North Carolina. The legislature of Georgia offered a reward for $5,000 to any one who would kidnap him and deliver his body within the limits of the state. With one voice the entire South cried out that the Liberator must be suppressed.
Later it became clear that Garrison's part in the Nat Turner rebellion was nil. The Liberator had not a single subscriber in the South; Nat Turner had never seen a copy of the paper,—and Garrison had been specific in his statements that he did not believe in active resistance to authority, or in the use of force of any kind. But the storm had broken, and Garrison had to fight his way through it.
Even in Boston Garrison had to face the mob, and meet the scorn of the ruling classes of the city. His movement had no popular support, in the true sense of the word, as it had twenty years later, when Wendell Phillips led the forces of abolition. Cotton was king, and the fear of losing the Southern trade sent the mercantile classes into a panic of fear. Garrison's enemies were by no means confined to the South. He was like David with his sling; and slavery, with all its vassals, North as well as South, was Goliath armed with steel. But for Garrison there were only two words, Right and Wrong, and he would not compromise concerning either.