The following Sabbath clergymen all over the country preached about this wonderful life: its struggles succeeded by world-wide honor. Mr. Greeley's one great wish was gratified, "I cherish the hope that the journal I projected and established will live and flourish long after I shall have mouldered into forgotten dust; and that the stone which covers my ashes may bear to future eyes the still intelligible inscription, 'Founder of the New York Tribune.'"
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
For a great work God raises up a great man. Usually he is trained in the hard school of poverty, to give him courage and perseverance. Usually he stands alone among a great multitude, that he may have firmness and endurance.
William Lloyd Garrison was born to be preëminently the deliverer of the slave. For two hundred years the curse of African slavery had rested upon one of the fairest portions of our land. Everybody thought it an evil to keep four million human beings from even the knowledge of how to read and write, and a cruelty to sell children away from parents, to toil forever without home or kindred. Everybody knew that slavery was as ruinous almost to master as to slave; that labor was thereby despised, and that luxury was sapping the vigor of a race. But every slave meant money, and money is very dear to mankind.
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.
Before the Declaration of Independence, three hundred thousand slaves had been brought to this country. Some of the colonists remonstrated, but the traffic was not stopped till 1808. The Quakers were opposed to human bondage from the first, and decided, in 1780, to free all their slaves. Vermont had freed hers three years previously, and other Northern States soon followed. Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and others were outspoken against the sin; but it continued to increase till, in 1810, we had over a million slaves.
Five years before this time, in a plain, wooden house in Newburyport, Mass., a boy was born who was to electrify America, and the world even, on this great subject. William Lloyd Garrison's father was a sea-captain, a man who loved books and had some literary ambition; the mother was a noble woman, deeply religious, willing to bear all and brave all for conscience' sake, and fearless in the path of duty. She early taught her boy to hate oppression of every kind, and to stand everywhere for the right. Very poor, there was no chance for William, either in school or college. When he was seven, his mother, having found work for herself as a nurse for the sick, placed the child with a deacon of the town, where he learned to split wood and other useful things. At nine, the careful mother put him to the shoemaking trade, though he was scarcely large enough to hold the lap-stone. He was not happy here, longing for something that made him think.