and he must have forgotten that Christianity began in a stable,—“that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble were called. But that God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty.” Our poet, Lowell, estimated, more justly “the would-be Liberator,” his office and his humble assistant.
“In a small chamber, friendless and unseen,
Toiled o’er his types one poor, unlearned young man;
The place was dark, unfurnitured, and mean;
Yet there the freedom of a race began.
“Help came but slowly; sure no man yet
Put lever to the heavy world with less.
What need of help? He knew how types to set;
He had a dauntless spirit and a press.
“Such dauntless natures are the fiery pith,
The compact nucleus round which systems grow;
Mass after mass becomes inspired therewith,
And whirls impregnate with the central glow.”
It cannot be denied that the spirit of Mr. Garrison’s mind has made the minds of multitudes—yes, of the majority of the people of our country—take a new direction in favor of impartial liberty. Of course, I do not claim that this new love of liberty originated with him. He was no more the creator of this moral power, which has taken our nation in its grasp, and is remoulding all our civil and religious institutions, than the fountain in the garden at Baden is the originator of the mighty Danube. Mr. Garrison, no less than that spring, is but a medium, through which the Father of all mercies pours from the hollow of his hand the waters that refresh the earth, and, from the fulness of his heart, the streams that purify the souls, making glad the children of God on earth and in heaven. But although to God we must ultimately ascribe all our blessings, yet do we naturally, and with great reason, revere and love as our benefactors those persons who have been the means and instruments by which personal, political, or religious blessings have been conferred upon us. Especially do we acknowledge our indebtedness to them, if they have suffered reproach, persecution, loss, death, for the sake of the good which we enjoy. The time, therefore, is coming, if it be not now, when the people of our reunited Republic will gratefully own William Lloyd Garrison among the greatest benefactors of our nation and our race.
However much our gratitude to the fathers of our Revolution may dispose us to hide their shortcomings of the goal of impartial liberty, however much we may find or devise to excuse or extenuate their infidelity to the cause of down-trodden humanity, there the shameful facts stand, and never can be effaced from the record;—the fact that (notwithstanding their glorious Declaration) the American revolutionists did not intend the deliverance of all men from oppression; no, not of all the men who heroically fought for it side by side with themselves; no, not of the men who, of all others, needed that deliverance the most;—the fact that the Constitution of this Republic (notwithstanding its avowed purpose) did not mean to secure liberty to all the dwellers in the land over which it was to preside; nor did it provide that those might depart from under it who were not to have any share in its blessings, nor allow the spirit of liberty in them to assert its claims;—the shameful fact that the aim, the tendency, and the result of that great struggle for freedom were partial, restricted, selfish;—the terrible fact that the American revolutionists of 1776 left more firmly established in our country a system of bondage, a slavery, “one hour of which” was known and acknowledged by them to be “more intolerable than whole ages of that from which they had revolted.”
To complete, by moral and religious means and instruments, the great work which the American revolutionists commenced; to do what they left undone; to exterminate from our land the worst form of oppression, the tremendous sin of slavery, was the sole purpose of the enterprise of the Abolitionists, commenced in January, 1831. In this great work Mr. Garrison has been the leader from the beginning. Of him, therefore, I shall have the most to say. But of many other noble men and women I shall have occasion to make most grateful mention.
Although I claim that Mr. Garrison has done more than any one else for the liberation of the immense slave population of America, I am not ignorant or forgetful of those who, before his day, made some attempts for their deliverance. Not to mention the many eminent divines and statesmen of England and the Colonies, before the Revolution, who utterly condemned slavery,—the prominent leaders in that momentous conflict with Great Britain, and in the institution of our Republic, felt and acknowledged its glaring inconsistency with a democratic government. Some of that day predicted, with almost prophetic foresight, the evils, the ruin, which it would bring upon our nation, if slavery should be permitted to abide in our midst. Many protested against the Constitution, because of those articles in it which favored the continuance and indefinite extension of “the great iniquity.” But their objections were too generally overruled by plausible expositions of the potency of other parts of our Magna Charta; and they acquiesced, in the vain hope that the spirit of the Constitution would prove to be better than the letter.
For twenty years after the re-formation of our General Government in 1787, true-hearted men and women spoke and wrote in terms of strong condemnation of slavery, as well as the slave-trade. They spoke and wrote and published what the spirit of liberty dictated, in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, not less than in Pennsylvania, New York, and the New England States. Nay, more, they instituted “societies for the amelioration of the condition of the enslaved, and their gradual emancipation.” Headed by no less a man than Dr. Franklin, they besieged Congress with petitions for the suppression of the African slave-trade, and the gradual abolition of slavery. But after, in 1808, they had obtained the prohibition of the trade, they subsided, as did the abolitionists of Great Britain, into the belief that the subversion of the whole evil of slavery would soon follow as a consequence; not foreseeing that, so long as the market for slaves should be kept open, the commodity demanded there would be forthcoming, let the hazard of procuring it be ever so great. It is now notorious that the traffic in human beings has never been carried on so briskly as since its nominal abolition, while the sufferings of the victims, and the destruction of their lives, have been threefold greater than before.
Owing to this mistaken expectation of the effect of the Act of 1808 abolishing the slave-trade, the attention of philanthropists was in a great measure withdrawn from the subject of slavery for ten years or more. Meanwhile, the friends of “the peculiar institution” were busily engaged in extending its borders and strengthening its defences. The purchase of the Louisiana and Florida territories threw open countless acres of virgin soil, on which the labor of slaves was more profitable than elsewhere. The invention of the “cotton-gin” rendered the preparation of that staple so easy, that our Southern planters could compete with any producers of it the world over. Cotton plantations, therefore, multiplied apace. The value of slaves was more than doubled. The spirit of private manumission, which in Virginia alone, between 1798 and 1808, had set free more than a thousand bondmen annually, was checked by avarice, and then forbidden by law. And the “Ancient Dominion,” proud Virginia, rapidly became the home of slave-breeders; and from that American Guinea was carried on a traffic in human beings as brisk and horrible as ever desolated the coast of Africa.