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Ebook has 637 lines and 126603 words, and 13 pages

Preface V

The Father of the Man 11

The Man Hears a Voice: Samuel, Samuel! 38

The Man Begins his Ministry 69

The Hour and the Man 92

The Day of Small Things 110

The Heavy World is Moved 118

Master Strokes 133

Colorphobia 157

Agitation and Repression 170

Between the Acts 192

Mischief Let Loose 208

Flotsam and Jetsam 233

The Barometer Continues to Fall 242

Brotherly Love Fails, and Ideas Abound 263

Random Shots 292

The Pioneer Makes a New and Startling Departure 306

As in a Looking Glass 319

The Turning of a Long Lane 335

Face to Face 356

The Death-Grapple 370

The Last 385

Index 397

WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON.

THE FATHER OF THE MAN.

William Lloyd Garrison was born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, December 10, 1805. Forty years before, Daniel Palmer, his great-grandfather, emigrated from Massachusetts and settled with three sons and a daughter on the St. John River, in Nova Scotia. The daughter's name was Mary, and it was she who was to be the future grandmother of our hero. One of the neighbors of Daniel Palmer was Joseph Garrison, who was probably an Englishman. He was certainly a bachelor. The Acadian solitude of five hundred acres and Mary Palmer's charms proved too much for the susceptible heart of Joseph Garrison. He wooed and won her, and on his thirtieth birthday she became his wife. The bride herself was but twenty-three, a woman of resources and of presence of mind, as she needed to be in that primitive settlement. Children and cares came apace to the young wife, and we may be sure confined her more and more closely to her house. But in the midst of a fast-increasing family and of multiplying cares a day's outing did occasionally come to the busy housewife, when she would go down the river to spend it at her father's farm. Once, ten years after her marriage, she had a narrow escape on one of those rare days. She had started in a boat with her youngest child, Abijah, and a lad who worked in her household. It was spring and the St. John was not yet clear of ice. Higher up the river the ice broke that morning and came floating down with the current. The boat in which Mary Garrison and her baby rode was overtaken by the fragments and wrecked. The mother with her child sought refuge on a piece of ice and was driven shoreward. Wrapping Abijah in all the clothes she could spare she threw him ashore. She and the lad followed by the aid of an overhanging willow bough. The baby was unharmed, for she had thrown him into a snow-bank. But the perils of the river gave place to the perils of the woods. In them Mary Garrison wandered with her infant, who was no less a personage than the father of William Lloyd Garrison, until at length she found the hut of a friendly Indian, who took her in and "entertained her with his best words and deeds, and the next morning conducted her safely to her father's."

Such was the woman who subsequently became the wife of Abijah Garrison, and the mother of one of the greatest moral heroes of the century. Abijah followed the sea, and she for several years with an increasing family followed Abijah. First from one place and then another she glided after him in her early married life. He loved her and his little ones but the love of travel and change was strong within him. He was ever restless and changeful. During one of his roving fits he emigrated with his family from Nova Scotia to the United States. It was in the spring of 1805 that he and they landed in Newburyport. The following December his wife presented him with a boy, whom they called William Lloyd Garrison. Three years afterward Abijah deserted his wife and children. Of the causes which led to this act nothing is now known. Soon after his arrival in Newburyport he had found employment. He made several voyages as sailing-master in 1805-8 from that port. He was apparently during these years successful after the manner of his craft. But he was not a man to remain long in one place. What was the immediate occasion of his strange behavior we can only conjecture. Possibly an increasing love for liquor had led to domestic differences, which his pleasure-loving nature would not brook. Certain it was that he was not like his wife. He was not a man in whom the moral sense was uppermost. He was governed by impulse and she by fixed moral and religious principles. He drank and she abhorred the habit. She tried first moral suasion to induce him to abandon the habit, and once, in a moment of wifely and motherly indignation, she broke up one of his drinking parties in her house by trying the efficacy of a little physical suasion. She turned the company out of doors and smashed the bottles of liquor. This was not the kind of woman whom Abijah cared to live with as a wife. He was not the sort of man whom the most romantic love could attach to the apron-strings of any woman. And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what he would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace. The condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife and family and the legal and moral responsibilities of husband and father.

"She was the masterpiece of womankind-- In shape and height majestically fine; Her cheeks the lily and the rose combined; Her lips--more opulently red than wine; Her raven locks hung tastefully entwined; Her aspect fair as Nature could design; And then her eyes! so eloquently bright! An eagle would recoil before her light."

Garrison had not only found a true poet, but a true friend as well, in the Quaker lad, John Greenleaf Whittier. The friendship which sprang up between the two was to last during the lifetime of the former. Neither of them in those days of small things could have possibly by any flight of the imagination foreseen how their two lives, moving in parallel lines, would run deep their shining furrows through one of the greatest chapters of human history. But I am anticipating, and that is a vice of which no good storyteller ought to be guilty. So, then, let me incontinently return from this excursion and pursue the even tenor of my tale.

THE MAN HEARS A VOICE: SAMUEL, SAMUEL!

There is a moment in the life of every serious soul, when things, which were before unseen and unheard in the world around him become visible and audible. This startling moment comes to some sooner, to others later, but to all, who are not totally given up to the service of self, at sometime surely. From that moment a change passes over such an one, for more and more he hears mysterious voices, and clearer and more clear he sees apparitional forms floating up from the depths above which he kneels. Whence come they, what mean they? He leans over the abyss, and lo! the sounds to which he hearkens are the voices of human weeping and the forms at which he gazes are the apparitions of human woe; they beckon to him, and the voices beseech him in multitudinous accent and heart-break: "Come over, come down, oh! friend and brother, and help us." Then he straightway puts away the things and the thoughts of the past and girding himself with the things, and the thoughts of the divine OUGHT and the almighty MUST, he goes over and down to the rescue.

"The wild and mingling groans of writhing millions, Calling for vengeance on my guilty land."

Lundy, after his visit to Garrison at Bennington, started on a trip to Hayti with twelve emancipated slaves, whom he had undertaken to colonize there. Garrison awaited in Boston the return of his partner to Baltimore. The former, meanwhile, was out of employment, and sorely in need of money. Never had he been favored with a surplusage of the root of all evil. He was deficient in the money-getting and money-saving instinct. Such was plainly not his vocation, and so it happened that wherever he turned, he and poverty walked arm in arm, and the interrogatory, "wherewithal shall I be fed and clothed on the morrow?" was never satisfactorily answered until the morrow arrived. This led him at times into no little embarrassment and difficulty. But since he was always willing to work at the case, and to send his "pride on a pilgrimage to Mecca," the embarrassment was not protracted, nor did the difficulty prove insuperable.

The Congregational societies of Boston invited him in June to deliver before them a Fourth of July address in the interest of the Colonization Society. The exercises took place in Park Street Church. Ten days before this event he was called upon to pay a bill of four dollars for failure to appear at the May muster. Refusing to do so, he was thereupon summoned to come into the Police Court on the glorious Fourth to show cause why he ought not to pay the amercement. He was in a quandary. He did not owe the money, but as he could not be in two places at the same time, and, inasmuch as he wanted very much to deliver his address before the Congregational Societies, and did not at all long to make the acquaintance of his honor, the Police Court Judge, he determined to pay the fine. But, alack and alas! he had "not a farthing" with which to discharge him from his embarrassment. Fortunately, if he wanted money he did not want friends. And one of these, Jacob Horton, of Newburyport, who had married his "old friend and playmate, Harriet Farnham," came to his rescue with the requisite amount.

On the day and place appointed Garrison appeared before the Congregational Societies with an address, to the like of which, it is safe to say, they had never before listened. It was the Fourth of July, but the orator was in no holiday humor. There was not, in a single sentence of the oration the slightest endeavor to be playful with his audience. It was rather an eruption of human suffering, and of the humanity of one man to man. What the Boston clergy saw that afternoon, in the pulpit of Park Street Church, was the vision of a soul on fire. Garrison burned and blazed as the sun that July afternoon burned and blazed in the city's streets. None without escaped the scorching rays of the latter, none within was able to shun the fervid heat of the former. Those of my readers who have watched the effects of the summer's sun on a track of sandy land and have noted how, about midday, the heat seems to rise in sparkling particles and exhalations out of the hot, surcharged surface, can form some notion of the moral fervor and passion of this Fourth of July address, delivered more than sixty years ago, in Boston. Through all the pores of it, over all the length and breadth of it, there went up bright, burning particles from the sunlit sympathy and humanity of the young reformer.

In beginning, he animadverted, among other things, on the spread of intemperance, of political corruption, on the profligacy of the press, and, amid them all, the self-complacency and boastfulness of the national spirit, as if it bore a charmed life.

"But," he continued, "there is another evil which, if we had to contend against nothing else, should make us quake for the issue. It is a gangrene preying upon our vitals--an earthquake rumbling under our feet--a mine accumulating material for a national catastrophe. It should make this a day of fasting and prayer, not of boisterous merriment and idle pageantry--a day of great lamentation, not of congratulatory joy. It should spike every cannon, and haul down every banner. Our garb should be sack-cloth--our heads bowed in the dust--our supplications for the pardon and assistance of Heaven.

"Sirs, I am not come to tell you that slavery is a curse, debasing in its effects, cruel in its operations, fatal in its continuance. The day and the occasion require no such revelation. I do not claim the discovery as my own, that 'all men are born equal,' and that among their inalienable rights are 'life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' Were I addressing any other than a free and Christian assembly, the enforcement of this truth might be pertinent. Neither do I intend to analyze the horrors of slavery for your inspection, nor to freeze your blood with authentic recitals of savage cruelty. Nor will time allow me to explore even a furlong of that immense wilderness of suffering which remains unsubdued in our land. I take it for granted that the existence of these evils is acknowledged, if not rightly understood. My object is to define and enforce our duty, as Christians and philanthropists."

This was, by way of exordium, the powerful skirmish line of the address. Assuming the existence of the evil, he advanced boldly to his theme, viz., the duty of abolishing it. To this end he laid down four propositions, as a skillful general plants his cannon on the heights overlooking and commanding his enemies' works. The first, broadly stated, asserted the kinship of the slave to the free population of the republic. They were men; they were natives of the country; they were in dire need. They were ignorant, degraded, morally and socially. They were the heathen at home, whose claims far outranked those in foreign lands; they were higher than those of the "Turks or Chinese, for they have the privileges of instruction; higher than the Pagans, for they are not dwellers in a Gospel land; higher than our red men of the forest, for we do not bind them with gyves, nor treat them as chattels."

Then he turned hotly upon the Church, exclaiming: "What has Christianity done by direct effort for our slave population? Comparatively nothing. She has explored the isles of the ocean for objects of commiseration; but, amazing stupidity! she can gaze without emotion on a multitude of miserable beings at home, large enough to constitute a nation of freemen, whom tyranny has heathenized by law. In her public services they are seldom remembered, and in her private donations they are forgotten. From one end of the country to the other her charitable societies form golden links of benevolence, and scatter their contributions like rain drops over a parched heath; but they bring no sustenance to the perishing slave. The blood of souls is upon her garments, yet she heeds not the stain. The clanking of the prisoner's chains strike upon her ear, but they cannot penetrate her heart."

Then, with holy wrath upon the nation, thus:

"Every Fourth of July our Declaration of Independence is produced, with a sublime indignation, to set forth the tyranny of the mother country, and to challenge the admiration of the world. But what a pitiful detail of grievances does this document present, in comparison with the wrongs which our slaves endure? In the one case it is hardly the plucking of a hair from the head; in the other, it is the crushing of a live body on the wheel--the stings of the wasp contrasted with the tortures of the Inquisition. Before God I must say that such a glaring contradiction as exists between our creed and practice the annals of six thousand years cannot parallel. In view of it I am ashamed of my country. I am sick of our unmeaning declamation in praise of liberty and equality; of our hypocritical cant about the inalienable rights of man. I would not for my right hand stand up before a European assembly, and exult that I am an American citizen, and denounce the usurpations of a kingly government as wicked and unjust; or, should I make the attempt, the recollection of my country's barbarity and despotism would blister my lips, and cover my cheeks with burning blushes of shame."

He looked without shrinking upon the possibility of disunion even then.

Considering that he was in his twenty-fourth year, and that the Abolition movement had then no actual existence, the orator evinced surprising prescience in his forecast of the future, and of the strife and hostility which the agitation was destined to engender.

"But the plea is prevalent," he said, "that any interference by the free States, however benevolent or cautious it might be, would only irritate and inflame the jealousies of the South, and retard the cause of emancipation. If any man believes that slavery can be abolished without a struggle with the worst passions of human nature, quietly, harmoniously, he cherishes a delusion. It can never be done, unless the age of miracles returns. No; we must expect a collision, full of sharp asperities and bitterness. We shall have to contend with the insolence, and pride, and selfishness of many a heartless being.

"Sirs, the prejudices of the North are stronger than those of the South; they bristle like so many bayonets around the slaves; they forge and rivet the chains of the nation. Conquer them and the victory is won. The enemies of emancipation take courage from our criminal timidity.... We are ... afraid of our own shadows, who have been driven back to the wall again and again; who stand trembling under their whips; who turn pale, retreat, and surrender at a talismanic threat to dissolve the Union...." But the difficulties did not daunt him, nor the dangers cow him. He did not doubt, but was assured, that truth was mighty and would prevail. "Moral influence when in vigorous exercise," he said, "is irresistible. It has an immortal essence. It can no more be trod out of existence by the iron foot of time, or by the ponderous march of iniquity, than matter can be annihilated. It may disappear for a time; but it lives in some shape or other, in some place or other, and will rise with renovated strength. Let us then be up and doing. In the simple and stirring language of the stout-hearted Lundy, all the friends of the cause must go to work, keep to work, hold on, and never give up." The closing paragraph is this powerful peroration: "I will say, finally, that I despair of the republic while slavery exists therein. If I look up to God for success, no smile of mercy or forgiveness dispels the gloom of futurity; if to our own resources, they are daily diminishing; if to all history our destruction is not only possible but almost certain. Why should we slumber at this momentous crisis? If our hearts were dead to every thought of humanity; if it were lawful to oppress, where power is ample; still, if we had any regard for our safety and happiness, we should strive to crush the vampire which is feeding upon our life-blood. All the selfishness of our nature cries aloud for a better security. Our own vices are too strong for us, and keep us in perpetual alarm; how, in addition to these, shall we be able to contend successfully with millions of armed and desperate men, as we must, eventually, if slavery do not cease?" Exit the apprentice, enter the master. The period of preparation is ended, the time of action begun. The address was the fiery cry of the young prophet ere he plunged into the unsubdued wilderness of American slavery.

THE MAN BEGINS HIS MINISTRY.

"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."

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!'

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?"

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