After leaving Baltimore, Garrison clung pathetically to the belief that, if he told what he had seen of the barbarism of slavery to the North, he would be certain to enlist the sympathy and aid of its leaders, political and ecclesiastical, in the cause of emancipation. The sequel to his efforts in this regard proved that he was never more mistaken in his life. He addressed letters to men like Webster, Jeremiah Mason, Lyman Beecher, and Dr. Channing, "holding up to their view the tremendous iniquity of the land, and begging them, ere it should be too late, to interpose their great power in the Church and State, to save our country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery was bringing upon us." But there is no evidence that this appeal produced the feeblest ripple in the lives of the two first; and upon the two last it was equally barren of result. Dr. Channing, indeed, did not take the trouble to hear any one of the three lectures of the young philanthropist. Dr. Beecher, however, was at the pains to be present at the first lecture given at Julien Hall. But he betrayed no real interest in the subject. He had no time to devote to anti-slavery, had, in fine, too many irons in the fire already. To this impotent apology of the great preacher of immediatism in his dealing with all kinds of sin, except the sin of slave-holding, for not espousing the cause of the slave, Mr. Garrison made his famous retort:
"Then you had better let all your irons burn than neglect your duty to the slave."
What more did this poor and friendless man, with his one idea and his harsh language, know of duties and dangers than Daniel Webster, who was busy saving the Union; than Lyman Beecher, who was not less busy saving souls; or than Dr. Channing, who was quite as busy saving liberalism in matters of religion? What folly and presumption it must have seemed to these mighty men this attempt of Garrison to impress upon them a proper sense of their obligations to their country.
"Your zeal," said Dr. Beecher to him, with unlimited condescension of tone—"your zeal is commendable, but you are misguided. If you will give up your fanatical notions and be guided by us (the clergy) we will make you the Wilberforce of America."
And so what was the young man, burning up with his one idea, to do in presence of such a failure to win these men to the leadership of the anti-slavery movement? He could not hold his peace; his message he was compelled to deliver in the ears of the nation whether its leaders would hear or forbear. Perhaps the common people would hearken to what the wise and powerful had rejected. At any rate they should hear what was resting upon his soul with the weight of a great woe, the force of a supreme command. But how was he, penniless and friendless, to roll from his bosom the burden which was crushing it; to pause long enough in the battle for bread to fight the battle of the slave? Ah, if he had money! but no money did he have, not a dollar in his pocket! Oh, if he had rich friends who would dedicate their riches to the preaching of the gospel of freedom! but alas! rich friends there were none. Oh, if he could cry to the Church for help in this hour of his need! but it was slowly dawning on him that not from the Church would help come to his cause; for a grievous thing had happened to the Church. The slave gorgon sat staring from the pews, and turning the pulpits to stone, turning also to stone the hearts of the people.
Undismayed by the difficulties which were closing in around him, Garrison resolutely set himself to accomplish his purpose touching the establishment of a weekly paper devoted to the abolition of slavery. He had promised in his Prospectus to issue the first number of the Public Liberator "as soon as subscriptions thereto may authorize the attempt." But had he waited for the fulfillment of this condition, the experiment could never have been tried. When subscribers did not come in, the paper, he determined should go forth all the same. But there are some things in the publication of a paper which no man can dispense with, which indispensable somethings are: types, a press, an office, and an assistant. All these requisites were wanting to the man whose sole possession seemed an indomitable will, a faith in himself, and in the righteousness of his cause, which nothing could shake, nor disappointment nor difficulty, however great, was able to daunt or deter. To such an unconquerable will, to such an invincible faith obstacles vanish; the impossible becomes the attainable. As Garrison burned to be about his work, help came to him from a man quite as penniless and friendless as himself. The man was Isaac Knapp, an old companion of his in Newburyport, who had also worked with him in the office of the Genius, in Baltimore. He was a practical printer, and was precisely the sort of assistant that the young reformer needed at this juncture in the execution of his purpose; a man like himself acquainted with poverty, and of unlimited capacity for the endurance of unlimited hardships. Together they worked out the financial problems which blocked the way to the publication of the paper. The partners took an office in Merchants' Hall building, then standing on the corner of Congress and Water streets, Boston, which gave their joint enterprise a local habitation. It had already a name. They obtained the use of types in the printing office of the Christian Examiner, situated in the same building. The foreman, Stephen Foster, through his ardent interest in Abolition, made the three first numbers of the paper possible. The publishers paid for the use of the types by working during the day at the case in the Examiner's office. They got the use of a press from another foreman with Abolition sympathies, viz., James B. Yerrington, then the printer of the Boston Daily Advocate. Thus were obtained the four indispensables to the publication of the Liberator—types, a press, an office, and an assistant.
When at length the offspring of such labor and sacrifices made its appearance in the world, which was on January 1, 1831, it was, in point of size, insignificant enough. It did not look as if its voice would ever reach beyond the small dark chamber where it saw the light. Picture, oh! reader, a wee sheet with four columns to the page, measuring fourteen inches one way and nine and a quarter the other, and you will get an idea of the diminutiveness of the Liberator on the day of its birth. The very paper on which it was printed was procured on credit. To the ordinary observer it must have seemed such a weakling as was certain to perish from inanition in the first few months of its struggle for existence in the world of journalism. It was domiciled during successive periods in four different rooms of the Merchant's Hall building, until it reached No. 11, "under the eaves," whence it issued weekly for many years to call the nation to repentance. A photographic impression of this cradle-room of the anti-slavery movement has been left by Oliver Johnson, an eye-witness. Says Mr. Johnson: "The dingy walls; the small windows, bespattered with printer's ink; the press standing in one corner; the composing-stands opposite; the long editorial and mailing table, covered with newspapers; the bed of the editor and publisher on the floor—all these make a picture never to be forgotten." For the first eighteen months the partners toiled fourteen hours a day, and subsisted "chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes, and a little fruit, obtained from a baker's shop opposite, and a petty cake and fruit shop in the basement," and, alas, "were on short commons even at that." Amid such hard and grinding poverty was the Liberator born. But the great end of the reformer glorified the mean surroundings:
About the brow of this "infant crying in the night," shone aureole-like the sunlit legend: Our country is the world—our countrymen are mankind. The difference between this motto of the Liberator and that of the Free Press: Our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country—measures the greatness of the revolution which had taken place in the young editor. The grand lesson he had learned, than which there is none greater, that beneath diversities of race, color, creed, language, there is the one human principle, which makes all men kin. He had learned at the age of twenty-five to know the mark of brotherhood made by the Deity Himself: "Behold! my brother is man, not because he is American or Anglo-Saxon, or white or black, but because he is a fellow-man," is the simple, sublime acknowledgment, which thenceforth he was to make in his word and life.
It was Mr. Garrison's original design, as we have seen, to publish the Liberator from Washington. Lundy had, since the issue of the Prospectus for the new paper, removed the Genius to the capital of the nation. This move of Lundy rendered the establishment of a second paper devoted to the abolition of slavery in the same place, of doubtful utility, but, weighty as was this consideration from a mere business point of view, in determining Garrison to locate the Liberator in another quarter, it was not decisive. Just what was the decisive consideration, he reveals in his salutatory address in the Liberator. Here it is:
"During my recent tour for the purpose of exciting the minds of the people by a series of discourses on the subject of slavery," he confides to the reader, "every place that I visited gave fresh evidence of the fact, that a greater revolution in public sentiment was to be effected in the free States—and particularly in New England—than at the South. I found contempt more bitter, opposition more active, detraction more relentless; prejudice more stubborn, and apathy more frozen than among slaveowners themselves. Of course there were individual exceptions to the contrary. This state of things afflicted, but did not dishearten me. I determined, at every hazard, to lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker Hill, and in the birthplace of liberty." This final choice of Boston as a base from which to operate against slavery was sagacious, and of the greatest moment to the success of the experiment and to its effective service to the cause.
If the reformer changed his original intention respecting the place of publication for his paper, he made no alteration of his position on the subject of slavery. "I shall strenuously contend," he declares in the salutatory, "for the immediate enfranchisement of our slave population." "In Park Street Church," he goes on to add, "on the Fourth of July, 1829, in an address on slavery, I unreflectingly assented to the popular but pernicious doctrine of gradual abolition. I seize this opportunity to make a full and unequivocal recantation, and thus publicly to ask pardon of my God, of my country, and of my brethren, the poor slaves, for having uttered a sentiment so full of timidity, injustice, and absurdity."
To those who find fault with his harsh language he makes reply: "I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD." Martin Luther's "Here I take my stand," was not braver or grander than the "I will be heard," of the American reformer. It did not seem possible that a young man, without influence, without money, standing almost alone, could ever make good those courageous words. The country, in Church and State, had decreed silence on the subject of slavery; the patriotism of the North, its commerce, its piety, its labor and capital had all joined hands to smother agitation, and stifle the discussion of a question that imperilled the peace and durability of Webster's glorious Union. But one man, tearing the gag from his lips, defying all these, cried, "Silence, there shall not be!" and forthwith the whole land began to talk on the forbidden theme:
Archimedes with his lever desired a place to stand that he might move the world of matter. Garrison with his paper, having found a place for his feet, demonstrated speedily his ability to push from its solid base the world of mind. His plan was very simple, viz., to reveal slavery as it then existed in its naked enormity, to the conscience of the North, to be "as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice." And so, week after week, he packed in the columns of the Liberator facts, the most damning facts, against slaveholders, their cruelty and tyranny. He painted the woes of the slaves as if he, too, had been a slave. For the first time the masters found a man who rebuked them as not before had they been rebuked. Others may have equivocated, but this man called things by their proper names, a spade, a spade, and sin, sin. Others may have contented themselves with denunciations of the sins and with excuses for the sinner, as a creature of circumstances, the victim of ancestral transgressions, but this man offered no excuses for the slave-holding sinner. Him and his sin he denounced in language, which the Eternal puts only into the mouths of His prophets. It was, as he had said, "On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation." The strength and resources of his mother-tongue seemed to him wholly inadequate for his needs, to express the transcendent wickedness of slave-holding. All the harsh, the stern, the terrible and tremendous energies of the English speech he drew upon, and launched at slaveholders. Amid all of this excess of the enthusiast there was the method of a calculating mind. He aimed to kindle a conflagration because he had icebergs to melt. "The public shall not be imposed upon," he replied to one of his critics, "and men and things shall be called by their right names. I retract nothing, I blot out nothing. My language is exactly such as suits me; it will displease many, I know; to displease them is my intention." He was philosopher enough to see that he could reach the national conscience only by exciting the national anger. It was not popular rage, which he feared but popular apathy. If he could goad the people to anger on the subject of slavery he would soon be rid of their apathy. And so week after week he piled every sort of combustible material, which he was able to collect on board the Liberator and lighting it all, sent the fiery messenger blazing among the icebergs of the Union. Slaveholders were robbers, murderers, oppressors; they were guilty of all the sins of the decalogue, were in a word the chief of sinners. At the same moment that the reformer denied their right of property in the slave, he attacked their character also, held them up in their relation of masters to the reprobation of the nation and of mankind as monsters of injustice and inhumanity. The tone which he held toward them, steadily, without shadow of change, was the tone of a righteous man toward the workers of iniquity. The indifference, the apathy, the pro-slavery sympathy and prejudice of the free States rendered the people of the North hardly less culpable. They were working iniquity with the people of the South. This was the long, sharp goad, which the young editor thrust in between the bars of the Union and stirred the guilty sections to quick and savage outbursts of temper against him and the bitter truths which he preached. Almost directly the proofs came to him that he was HEARD at the South and at the North alike. Angry growls reached his ears in the first month of the publication of the Liberator from some heartless New England editors in denunciation of his "violent and intemperate attacks on slaveholders." The Journal, published at Louisville, Kentucky, and edited by George D. Prentice, declared that, "some of his opinions with regard to slavery in the United States are no better than lunacy." The American Spectator published at the seat of the National Government, had hoped that the good sense of the "late talented and persecuted junior editor" of the Genius, "would erelong withdraw him even from the side of the Abolitionists." And from farther South the growl which the reformer heard was unmistakably ferocious. It was from the State of South Carolina and the Camden Journal, which pronounced the Liberator "a scandalous and incendiary budget of sedition." These were the beginning of the chorus of curses, which soon were to sing their serpent songs about his head. Profane and abusive letters from irate slaveholders and their Northern sympathisers began to pour into the sanctum of the editor. Within a few months after the first issue of the Liberator the whole aspect of the world without had changed toward him. "Foes are on my right hand, and on my left," he reported to some friends. "The tongue of detraction is busy against me. I have no communion with the world—the world none with me. The timid, the lukewarm, the base, affect to believe that my brains are disordered, and my words the ravings of a maniac. Even many of my friends—they who have grown up with me from my childhood—are transformed into scoffers and enemies." The apathy of the press, and the apathy of the people were putting forth signs that the long winter of the land was passing away.
To a colored man belongs the high honor of having been the courier avant of the slavery agitation. This man was David Walker, who lived in Boston, and who published in 1829 a religio-political discussion of the status of the negroes of the United States in four articles. The wretchedness of the blacks in consequence of slavery he depicted in dark and bitter language. Theodore Parker, many years afterward, said that the negro was deficient in vengeance, the lowest form of justice. "Walker's Appeal" evinced no deficiency in this respect in its author. The pamphlet found its way South, and was the cause of no little commotion among the master-class. It was looked upon as an instigation to servile insurrection. The "Appeal" was proscribed, and a price put upon the head of the author. Garrison deprecated the sanguinary character of the book. For he himself was the very reverse of Walker. Garrison was a full believer in the literal doctrine of non-resistance as enunciated by Jesus. He abhorred all war, and physical collisions of every description, as wicked and inhuman. He sang to the slave:
He considered "Walker's Appeal" "a most injudicious publication, yet warranted by the creed of an independent people." He saw in our Fourth-of-July demonstrations, in our glorification of force as an instrument for achieving liberty, a constant incentive to the slaves to go and do likewise. If it was right for the men of 1776 to rise in rebellion against their mother-country, it surely could not be wrong were the slaves to revolt against their oppressors, and strike for their freedom. It certainly did not lie in the mouth of a people, who apotheosized force, to condemn them. What was sauce for the white man's goose was sauce for the black man's gander.
The South could not distinguish between this sort of reasoning, and an express and positive appeal to the slaves to cut the throats of their masters. The contents of the Liberator were quite as likely to produce a slave insurrection as was "Walker's Appeal," if the paper was allowed to circulate freely among the slave population. It was, in fact, more dangerous to the lives and interests of slaveholders by virtue of the pictorial representation of the barbarism and abomination of the peculiar institution, introduced as a feature of the Liberator in its seventeenth number, in the shape of a slave auction, where the slaves are chattels, and classed with "horses and other cattle," and where the tortures of the whipping-post are in vigorous operation. Here was a message, which every slave, however ignorant and illiterate could read. His instinct would tell him, wherever he saw the pictured horror, that a friend, not an enemy, had drawn it, but for what purpose? What was the secret meaning, which he was to extract from a portrayal of his woes at once so real and terrible. Was it to be a man, to seize the knife, the torch, to slay and burn his way to the rights and estate of a man? Garrison had put no such bloody import into the cut. It was designed not to appeal to the passions of the slaves, but to the conscience of the North. But the South did not so read it, was incapable, in fact, of so reading it. What it saw was a shockingly realistic representation of the wrongs of the slaves, the immediate and inevitable effect of which upon the slaves would be to incite them to sedition, to acts of revenge. Living as the slaveholders were over mines of powder and dynamite, it is not to be marveled at that the first flash of danger filled them with apprehension and terror. The awful memories of San Domingo flamed red and dreadful against the dark background of every Southern plantation and slave community. In the "belly" of the Liberator's picture were many San Domingos. Extreme fear is the beginning of madness; it is, indeed, a kind of madness. The South was suddenly plunged into a state of extreme fear toward which the Liberator and "Walker's Appeal" were hurrying it, by one of those strange accidents or coincidences of history.
This extraordinary circumstance was the slave insurrection in Southampton, Virginia, in the month of August, 1831. The leader of the uprising was the now famous Nat Turner. Brooding over the wrongs of his race for several years, he conceived that he was the divinely appointed agent to redress them. He was cast in the mould of those rude heroes, who spring out of the sides of oppression as isolated trees will sometimes grow out of clefts in a mountain. With his yearning to deliver his people, there mingled not a little religious frenzy and superstition. Getting his command from Heaven to arise against the masters, he awaited the sign from this same source of the moment for beginning the work of destruction. It came at last and on the night of August 21st; he and his confederates made a beginning by massacring first his own master, Mr. Joseph Travis, and his entire family. Turner's policy was remorseless enough. It was to spare no member of the white race, whether man, woman, or child, the very infant at the mother's breast was doomed to the knife, until he was able to collect such an assured force as would secure the success of the enterprise. This purpose was executed with terrible severity and exactness. All that night the work of extermination went on as the slave leader and his followers passed like fate from house to house, and plantation to plantation, leaving a wide swathe of death in their track. Terror filled the night, terror filled the State, the most abject terror clutched the bravest hearts. The panic was pitiable, horrible. James McDowell, one of the leaders of the Old Dominion, gave voice to the awful memories and sensations of that night, in the great anti-slavery debate, which broke out in the Virginia Legislature, during the winter afterward. One of the legislators, joined to his idol, and who now, that the peril had passed, laughed at the uprising as a "petty affair." McDowell retorted—"Was that a 'petty affair,' which erected a peaceful and confiding portion of the State into a military camp, which outlawed from pity the unfortunate beings whose brothers had offended; which barred every door, penetrated every bosom with fear or suspicion, which so banished every sense of security from every man's dwelling, that let but a hoof or horn break upon the silence of the night, and an aching throb would be driven to the heart? The husband would look to his weapon, and the mother would shudder and weep upon her cradle. Was it the fear of Nat Turner and his deluded, drunken handful of followers which produced such effects? Was it this that induced distant counties, where the very name of Southampton was strange, to arm and equip for a struggle? No, sir, it was the suspicion eternally attached to the slave himself,—a suspicion that a Nat Turner might be in every family, that the same bloody deed might be acted over at any time and in any place, that the materials for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for a like explosion."
Sixty one whites and more than a hundred blacks perished in this catastrophe. The news produced a profound sensation in the Union. Garrison himself, as he records, was horror-struck at the tidings. Eight months before he had in a strain of prophecy penetrated the future and caught a glimpse of just such an appalling tragedy:
After the Southampton insurrection the slavery agitation increased apace, and the Liberator and its editor became instantly objects of dangerous notoriety in it. The eyes of the country were irresistibly drawn to them. They were at the bottom of the uprising, they were instigating the slaves to similar outbreaks. The savage growlings of a storm came thrilling on every breeze from the South, and wrathful mutterings against the agitator and his paper grew thenceforth more distinct and threatening throughout the free States. October 15, 1831, Garrison records in the Liberator that he "is constantly receiving from the slave States letters filled with the most diabolical threats and indecent language." In the same month Georgetown, S.C., in a panic made it unlawful for a free colored person to take the Liberator from the post-office. In the same month the Charleston Mercury announced that "gentlemen of the first respectability" at Columbia had offered a reward of fifteen hundred dollars for the arrest and conviction of any white person circulating the Liberator, Walker's pamphlet, "or any other publication of seditious tendency." In Georgia the same symptoms of fright were exhibited. In the same month the grand jury at Raleigh, N.C., indicted William Lloyd Garrison and Isaac Knapp for circulating the Liberator in that county. It was even confidently expected that a requisition would be made by the Executive of the State upon the Governor of Massachusetts for their arrest, when they would be tried under a law, which made their action felony. "Whipping and imprisonment for the first offence, and death, without benefit of clergy, for the second." Governor Floyd said in his message to the Virginia Legislature in December that there was good cause to suspect that the plans of the Southampton massacre were "designed and matured by unrestrained fanatics in some of the neighboring States." Governor Hamilton sent to the South Carolina Legislature in the same month an excited message on the situation. He was in entire accord with the Virginia Executive as to the primary and potent agencies which led to the slave uprising in Virginia. They were "incendiary newspapers and other publications put forth in the non-slave-holding States, and freely circulated within the limits of Virginia." As specimens of "incendiary newspapers and other publications, put forth in the non-slave-holding States," the South Carolina official sent along with his message, copies of the Liberator and of Mr. Garrison's address to the "Free People of Color," for the enlightenment of the members of the Legislature. But it remained for Georgia to cap the climax of madness when her Legislature resolved:
"That the sum of five thousand dollars be, and the same is hereby appropriated, to be paid to any person or persons who shall arrest, bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under the laws of this State, the editor or publisher of a certain paper called the Liberator, published in the town of Boston and State of Massachusetts; or who shall arrest and bring to trial and prosecute to conviction, under the laws of this State, any other person or persons who shall utter, publish, or circulate within the limits of this State said paper called the Liberator, or any other paper, circular, pamphlet, letter, or address of a seditious character."
This extraordinary resolve was signed Dec. 26, 1831, by "Wilson Lumpkin, Governor." The whole South was in a state of terror. In its insane fright it would have made short shrift of the editor of the Liberator, had he by accident, force, or fraud have fallen into the clutches of its laws. The Georgia reward of five thousand dollars was as Mr. Garrison put it, "a bribe to kidnappers." The Southern method of dealing with the agitation within the slave States was violent and effective. There could be no agitation after the agitators were abolished. And the Southern method was to abolish the agitators.
The suppression of Abolitionism within the slave States was no difficult matter, but its suppression at the North was a problem of a wholly different nature, as the South was not long in finding out. It would not understand why its violent treatment of the disease within its jurisdiction could not be prescribed as a remedy by the non-slave-holding half of the Union within its borders. And so the South began to call loudly and fiercely for the suppression of a movement calculated to incite the slaves to insubordination and rebellion. This demand of the South had its influence at the North. Such newspapers as the National Intelligencer, and the Boston Courier suggested amendments to the laws whereby the publication of incendiary writings in the free States might be prohibited. The latter journal allowed that under the criminal code of Massachusetts "every man has a right to advocate Abolition, or conspiracy, or murder; for he may do all these without breaking our laws, although in any Southern State public justice and public safety would require his punishment." "But," the editor goes on to remark, "if we have no laws upon the subject, it is because the exigency was not anticipated.... Penal statutes against treasonable and seditious publications are necessary in all communities. We have them for our own protection; if they should include provisions for the protection of our neighbors it would be no additional encroachment upon the liberty of the press." The Governors of Virginia and Georgia remonstrated with Harrison Gray Otis, who was Mayor of Boston in the memorable year of 1831, "against an incendiary newspaper published in Boston, and, as they alleged, thrown broadcast among their plantations, inciting to insurrection and its horrid results." As a lawyer Mayor Otis, however, "perceived the intrinsic, if not insuperable obstacles to legislative enactments made to prevent crimes from being consummated beyond the local jurisdiction." But the South was not seeking a legal opinion as to what it could or could not do. It demanded, legal or illegal, that Garrison and the Liberator be suppressed. To the Boston mayor the excitement over the editor and his paper seemed like much ado about nothing. The cause appeared to his supercilious mind altogether inadequate to the effect. And so he set to work to reduce the panic by exposing the vulgarity and insignificance of the object, which produced it. That he might give the Southern bugaboo its quietus, he directed one of his deputies to inquire into a publication, of which "no member of the city government, nor any person," of his honor's acquaintance, "had ever heard." The result of this inquiry Mayor Otis reported to the Southern functionaries.
"Some time afterward," he wrote, "it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors."
With this bare bodkin Harrison Gray Otis thought to puncture the Southern panic. But the slaveholders had correcter notions of the nature and tendency of the Abolition enterprise than had the Boston mayor. They had a strange, an obstinate presentiment of disaster from the first instant that the Liberator loomed upon their horizon. It was a battery whose guns, unless silenced, would play havoc with Southern interests and the slave system; ergo, the paper must be suppressed; ergo, its editor must be silenced or destroyed. And so when Otis, from his serene height, assured them of his "belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people," they continued to listen to their fears, and to cry the louder for the suppression of the "incendiary newspaper published in Boston."
The editor of that paper never flinched before the storm of malignity which was gathering about his head. He pursued the even tenor of his way, laboring at the case more than fourteen hours every day, except Sundays, upon the paper, renewing, week after week, his assaults upon the citadel of the great iniquity, giving no quarter to slave-holding sinners, but carrying aloft the banner of IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL EMANCIPATION. Otis had looked to numbers and respectability as his political barometer and cue; but when, after diligent search with official microscopes, he failed to observe the presence of either in connection with this "new fanaticism," wise man that he was, he turned over and renewed his slumbers on the edge of a volcano whose ominous rumbling the Southern heart had heard and interpreted aright. He was too near to catch the true import of the detonations of those subterranean forces which were sounding, week after week, in the columns of the Liberator. They seemed trivial, harmless, contemptible, like the toy artillery of children bombarding Fort Independence. Garrison's moral earnestness and enthusiasm seemed to the Boston mayor like the impotent rage of a man nursing memories of personal injuries suffered at the South.
If there was panic in the South, there was none in the office of the Liberator. Unterrified by the commotion which his composing-stick was producing near and far, he laughed to scorn the abuse and threats of his enemies. When the news of the reward of the State of Georgia "for the abduction of his person" reached him, he did not quail, great as was his peril, but boldly replied:
"Of one thing we are sure: all Southern threats and rewards will be insufficient to deter us from pursuing the work of emancipation. As citizens of the United States we know our rights and dare maintain them. We have committed no crime, but are expending our health, comfort, and means for the salvation of our country, and for the interests and security of infatuated slaveholders, as well as for the relief of the poor slaves."
Archimedes with his lever had moved the world. Archimedes "in a small chamber, unfurnitured and mean," had set a world of pro-slavery passions and prejudices spinning away into space:
"Help came but slowly" to the reformer. With a single instrument he had stirred the nation, as no other man had done, on the slavery question. He had thrown the South into widespread excitement, and thawed the apathy of the North into widespread attention. He had won an almost instant hearing for his cause. But he knew that this was not enough. Effective as he had shown the weapon of the press to be, it alone was unequal to the conduct of prolonged agitation. And prolonged agitation Garrison clearly apprehended was to be the price of abolition. Back of him and the Liberator he needed an organized force, coadjutors like Aaron and Hur to hold up his arms during the mighty conflict on which he had now entered with the slave interests of the country. Those interests were organized, and because they were organized they were powerful. The sentiment of freedom he determined to organize and to render it thereby invincible. To organized wrong he designed to oppose organized right, confident that organized right would prevail in the end. He had knowledge of the utility of temperance societies in advancing the cause of sobriety among the people. He had learned from Lundy how much he had relied upon the union of men as anti-slavery helps. Garrison determined to summon to his side the powerful agency of an anti-slavery society devoted to immediate and unconditional emancipation. He had already made converts; he had already a small following. At Julien Hall, on the occasion of his first lecture on the subject of slavery, he had secured three remarkable men to the movement, viz., Rev. Samuel J. May, then a young Unitarian minister, Samuel E. Sewall, a young member of the Bar, and A. Bronson Alcott, a sage even in his early manhood. They had all promised him aid and comfort in the great task which he had undertaken. A little later two others, quite as remarkable as those first three were drawn to the reformer's side, and abetted him in the treason to iniquity, which he was prosecuting through the columns of the Liberator with unrivaled zeal and devotion. These disciples were Ellis Grey Loring and David Lee Child. They were a goodly company, were these five conspirators, men of intellect and conscience, of high family and social connections, of brilliant attainments and splendid promises for the future. To this number must be added a sixth, Oliver Johnson, who was at the time editing The Christian Soldier, disciple of Garrison then, and ever after his devoted friend. The early promises of this noble half dozen friends of the slave were more than fulfilled in after years. Often to the dingy room "under the eaves" in Merchants' Hall they climbed to carry aid and comfort to "one poor, unlearned young man," and to sit at his feet in this cradle-room of the new movement. It was there in communion with the young master that suggestions looking to the formation of an anti-slavery society, were doubtless first thrown out.
It was not all clear sailing for the editor of the Liberator even with such choice spirits. They did not always carry aid and comfort to him, but differences of opinions sometimes as well. He did not sugar-coat enough the bitter truth which he was telling to the nation. Some of them would have preferred The Safety Lamp to the Liberator as a title less likely to offend the prejudices of many good people. Some again objected to the pictorial heading of the paper as an altogether unwise proceeding, and positively mischievous. He had the same experience when the formation of an Abolition society was under consideration. He was confronted with this benevolent aversion to giving offence by calling things by their right names. But much as he desired to have his friends and followers organized for associated action, where a principle was at stake he was with them as with slavery itself absolutely inflexible and uncompromising. He was for organizing on the principle of immediate emancipation. A few deemed that ground too radical and revolutionary, and were for ranging themselves under the banner of Gradualism, thinking to draw to their ranks a class of people, who would be repelled by Immediatism. But Garrison was unyielding, refused to budge an inch to conciliate friend or foe—not even such stanch supporters as were Sewall and Loring, who supplied him again and again with money needed to continue the publication of the Liberator. No, he was right and they were wrong, and they, not he, ought accordingly to yield. The contention between the leader and his disciples was not what was expedient, but what was right. It was on the part of the leader the assertion of a vital principle, and on this ground he was pledged against retreat. The mountain could not go to Mahomet, therefore Mahomet must needs go to the mountain. Garrison could not abandon his position, wherefore in due time Loring, Child, and Sewall surrendered theirs. Finely has Lowell expressed this righteous stubbornness, and steadfastness to principle in three stanzas of his poem entitled, "The Day of Small Things," and which have such an obvious lesson for our own times that I shall venture to quote them in this place:
The history of the making of this first society is an interesting story. There were four meetings in all before it was found possible to complete the work of its organization. These meetings extended over a space of nearly three months, so obstinate were a minority against committing the proposed society to the principle of immediate emancipation. The very name which was to be given to the association provoked debate and disagreement. Some were for christening it "Philo-African," while Garrison would no such milk-and-water title, but one which expressed distinctly and graphically the real character of the organization, viz., "New England Anti-Slavery Society." He would sail under no false or neutral colors, but beneath the red flag of open and determined hostility to slavery. It should be a sign which no one could possibly mistake. The first meeting was held at the office of Samuel E. Sewall, November 13, 1831. At the third meeting, convened New Year's evening of 1832, which was the first anniversary of the publication of the Liberator, the work of organization was finished, with a single important exception, viz., the adoption of the preamble to the constitution. The character of the preamble would fix the character of the society. Therefore that which was properly first was made to come last. The fourth meeting took place on the night of January 6th in the African Baptist Church on what was then Belknap but now known as Joy street. The young leader and fourteen of his followers met that evening in the school-room for colored children, situated under the auditorium of the church. They could hardly have fallen upon a more obscure or despised place for the consummation of their enterprise in the city of Boston than was this selfsame negro church and school-room. The weather added an ever memorable night to the opprobrium of the spot. A fierce northeaster accompanied with "snow, rain, and hail in equal proportions" was roaring and careering through the city's streets. To an eye-witness, Oliver Johnson, "it almost seemed as if Nature was frowning upon the new effort to abolish slavery; but," he added, "the spirits of the little company rose superior to all external circumstances."
If there was strife of the elements without, neither was there sweet accord within among brethren. "The spirits of the little company" may have risen superior to the weather, but they did not rise superior to the preamble, with the principle of immediatism incorporated in it. Eleven stood by the leader and made it the chief of the corner of the new society, while three, Messrs. Loring, Sewall, and Child, refused to sign the Constitution and parted sorrowfully from the small band of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. But the separation was only temporary, for each returned to the side of the reformer, and proved his loyalty and valor in the trying years which followed.
The preamble which was the bone of so much contention declared that: "We, the undersigned, hold that every person, of full age and sane mind, has a right to immediate freedom from personal bondage of whatsoever kind, unless imposed by the sentence of the law for the commission of some crime. We hold that man cannot, consistently with reason, religion, and the eternal and immutable principles of justice, be the property of man. We hold that whoever retains his fellow-man in bondage is guilty of a grievous wrong. We hold that a mere difference of complexion is no reason why any man should be deprived of any of his natural rights, or subjected to any political disability. While we advance these opinions as the principles on which we intend to act, we declare that we will not operate on the existing relations of society by other than peaceful and lawful means, and that we will give no countenance to violence or insurrection."
Twelve, the apostolic number, affixed to the preamble and constitution their names, and thus formed the first Garrisonian Society for the abolition of slavery in the United States. The names of these apostolic men it is well to keep in mind. They are William Lloyd Garrison, Oliver Johnson, Robert B. Hall, Arnold Buffum, William J. Snelling, John E. Fuller, Moses Thatcher, Joshua Coffin, Stillman B. Newcomb, Benjamin C. Bacon, Isaac Knapp, and Henry K. Stockton. The band of reformers, their work done, had risen to pass out of the low, rude room into the dark night. The storm was still raging. They themselves had perchance been sobered by the experiences of the evening. They had gone in fifteen, they were returning twelve. And, after all, what had they accomplished? What could they a mere handful do to abolish slavery entrenched as it was in Church and State? It is possible that some such dim discouragement, some such vague misgiving of the futility of the evening's labor, was in the hearts of those wearied men, and that their leader divined as much, for the spirit of prophecy fell upon Garrison just as they "were stepping out into the storm and darkness." "We have met to-night," he said, "in this obscure school-house; our numbers are few and our influence limited; but, mark my prediction, Faneuil Hall shall erelong echo with the principles we have set forth. We shall shake the nation by their mighty power." Then the little band dispersed "into the storm and darkness," carrying with them these words charged with hope and courage.
The fruitful seed of organized agitation Garrison had securely planted in soil fertile and ready for its reception. Its growth constitutes one of the marvels of reforms. Within a few brief years it multiplied into hundreds and thousands of societies throughout the free States. But its beginnings were small and humble enough. "The objects of the society" were according to the second article of the constitution, "to endeavor by all means sanctioned by law, humanity, and religion, to effect the abolition of slavery in the United States, to improve the character and condition of the free people of color, to inform and correct public opinion in relation to their situation and rights, and to obtain for them equal civil and political rights and privileges with the whites." The means which were immediately adopted by the society for the accomplishment of these objects were mainly three, than which none others could have been more effective. These were petitioning Congress on the subject of slavery. The publication and circulation of anti-slavery addresses and tracts, and the employment of anti-slavery agents, "in obtaining or communicating intelligence, in the publication and distribution of tracts, books, or papers, or in the execution of any measure which may be adopted to promote the objects of the society." Such was the simple but unequaled machinery which the New England Anti-Slavery Society relied upon for success in the war, which it had declared against American slavery. The executive power of the body, and the operation of its machinery were lodged in a board of managers of which Garrison's was the leading, originating mind. The society started out bravely in the use of its means by memorializing Congress for the abolition of slavery, "in the District of Columbia and in the Territories of the United States under their jurisdiction," and by preparing and distributing an address in maintenance of the doctrine of immediate emancipation. The board of managers set the machinery in motion as far and as fast as the extremely limited pecuniary ability of the society would permit. The membership was not from the rich classes. It was Oliver Johnson who wittily remarked that not more than one or two of the original twelve, "could have put a hundred dollars into the treasury without bankrupting themselves." The remark was true, and was quite as applicable to any dozen of the new-comers as to the original twelve. The society was never deficient in zeal, but it was certainly sadly wanting in money. And money was even to such men and to such a movement an important factor in revolutionizing public opinion.
The Liberator was made the official organ of the society, and in this way was added to its other weapons that of the press. This was a capital arrangement, for by it both the paper and the society were placed under the direction of the same masterly guidance. There was still one arrow left in the moral quiver of the organization to reach the conscience of the people, and that was the appointment of an agent to spread the doctrines of the new propaganda of freedom. In August the board of managers, metaphorically speaking, shot this arrow by making Garrison the agent of the society to lecture on the subject of slavery "for a period not exceeding three months." This was the first drop from a cloud then no bigger than a hand, but which was to grow and spread until, covering the North, was, at the end of a few short years, to flood the land with anti-slavery agents and lecturers.
Our anti-slavery agent visited portions of Massachusetts, Maine, and Rhode Island, preaching the Abolition gospel in divers places, and to many people—notably at such centers of population as Worcester, Providence, Bangor, and Portland, making at the latter city a signal conversion to his cause in the person of General Samuel Fessenden, distinguished then as a lawyer, and later as the father of William Pitt Fessenden. The anti-slavery schoolmaster was abroad, and was beginning to turn New England and the North into one resounding schoolhouse, where he sat behind the desk and the nation occupied the forms.
So effective was the agitation prosecuted by the society during the first year of its existence that it was no empty declaration or boast of the Abolitionist, the new monthly periodical of the society, that "probably, through its instrumentality, more public addresses on the subject of slavery, and appeals in behalf of the contemned free people of color, have been made in New England, during the past year (1832) than were elicited for forty years prior to its organization."
The introduction of the principle of association into the slavery agitation, and the conversion of it into an organized movement was an achievement of the first importance. To Garrison, more than to any man, or to all others put together, belongs the authorship of this immense initiative. He it was, who, having "announced the principle, arranged the method" of the Abolition movement. The marshaling of the anti-slavery sentiment of New England under a common standard, in a common cause, was a master stroke of moral generalship. This master stroke the leader followed up promptly with a second stroke not less masterly. That second stroke was his "Thoughts on African Colonization," published in the summer succeeding the formation of the New England Anti-Slavery Society.
Garrison's championship of the cause of the slave had started with strong faith in the efficacy and disinterestedness of the colonization scheme as an instrument of emancipation. It commanded, therefore, his early support. In his Park Street Church address he evinced himself in earnest sympathy with the friends of colonization. But after his arrival in Baltimore a change began to exhibit itself in this regard. He began to qualify his confidence in its utility; began to discern in it influences calculated to retard general emancipation. As these doubts and misgivings arose within him he expressed them frankly in the Genius. Lundy had been suspicious of the pro-slavery purposes or interests of the enterprise for many years. He could not reconcile himself to the significant or, at least, singular fact of so many slaveholders being in the membership and the offices of the association. Then, in addition to this lack of confidence on the part of Lundy in the scheme, Garrison became acquainted, for the first time, with the objects of the society's philanthropy—the class of free people of color. He found that these people were not at all well affected to the society; that they had no appreciation of its benevolent intentions in respect to themselves. He found, on the contrary, that they were positively embittered toward it and toward its designs for their removal from the country as toward their worst enemy. This circumstance was undoubtedly a poser to their young friend. How could he reconcile this deep-seated and widespread disbelief in the purity of the motives of the Colonization Society, with the simple integrity and humanity of the enterprise itself? Later, his acquaintance with such representatives of the free people of color in Philadelphia as James Forten and his son-in-law, Robert Purvis, served but to confirm those first impressions which he received in Baltimore from the Watkinses and the Greeners. It was the same experience in New York and New Haven, in Boston and Providence. He learned that from the very beginning, in the year 1817, that the free people of color in Richmond and Philadelphia had, by an instinctive knowledge of threatened wrong and danger, met and resolved against the society and its sinister designs upon themselves. These people did not wish to leave the country; they did not wish to be sent to Liberia; but the society, bent on doing them good against their will, did want them to leave the country, did want to send them to Liberia.
And why did the society desire to remove the free people of color out of the country? Was it from motives of real philanthropy? The colored people were the first to detect its spurious humanity, the first to see through the artful disguises employed to impose upon the conscience of the republic. Their removal, they intuitively divined, was proposed not to do their race a benefit, but rather to do a service to the owners of slaves. These objects of the society's pseudo-philanthropy had the sagacity to perceive that, practically, their expatriation tended to strengthen the chains of their brethren then in slavery; for if the South could get rid of its free colored population, its slave property would thereby acquire additional security, and, of consequence, increased market value. Like cause, like effect. If the operation of the colonization scheme was decidedly in the interest of the masters, it was the part of wisdom to conclude as the free colored people did actually conclude that the underlying motive, the hidden purpose of the society was also in the interest of the masters.
Garrison did not reach his conclusions as to the pro-slavery character and tendency of the society abruptly. The scales fell away gradually from his eyes. He was not completely undeceived until he had examined the reports of the society and found in them the most redundant evidence of its insincerity and guilt. It was out of its own mouth that he condemned it. When he saw the society in its true character, he saw what he must do. It was a wolf in sheep's skin running at large among the good shepherd's flock, and inflicting infinite hurt upon his poor sheep. He no longer wondered at the horror which the colonization scheme inspired among the free people of color. They were right. The society was their dangerous and determined enemy; it was the bulwark of the slave-holding classes. With the instinct of a great purpose he resolved to carry this powerful bulwark of slavery by assault. To the attack he returned week after week in the Liberator, during a year and a half. Then he hurled himself upon it with all his guns, facts, arguments, denunciations, blowing away and burning up every shred of false covering from the doctrines, principles, and purposes of the society, revealing it to mankind in its base and monstrous character.
The society's one motive "to get rid of the free people of color," was outrageous enough, but this was not its only sin. There was another phase to the mischief it was working, which lifted it to the rank of a great sinner. It was not only harmful in its principles and purposes. "It imperatively and effectually seals up the lips," so Garrison accused it, "of a vast number of influential and pious men, who, for fear of giving offence to those slaveholders with whom they associate, and thereby leading to a dissolution of the compact, dare not expose the flagrant enormities of the system of slavery, nor denounce the crime of holding human beings in bondage. They dare not lead to the onset against the forces of tyranny; and if they shrink from the conflict, how shall the victory be won? I do not mean to aver that in their sermons, or addresses, or private conversations, they never allude to the subject of slavery; for they do so frequently, or at least every Fourth of July. But my complaint is that they content themselves with representing slavery as an evil—a misfortune—a calamity which has been entailed upon us by former generations,—and not as an individual CRIME, embracing in its folds, robbery, cruelty, oppression, and piracy. They do not identify the criminal; they make no direct, pungent, earnest appeal to the consciences of men-stealers." This was a damning bill, but it was true in every particular; and the evidence which Garrison adduced to establish his charges was overwhelming and irrefragable.
Nearly fifty years afterward, Elizur Wright described the baleful influence of the society upon the humanity and philanthropy of the nation. "The humanity and philanthropy," he said, "which could not otherwise be disposed of, was ingeniously seduced into an African Colonization Society, whereby all slaves who had grown seditious and troublesome to their masters could be transplanted on the pestiferous African coast. That this wretched and seemingly transparent humbug could have deluded anybody, must now seem past belief; but I must with shame confess the fact that I for one was deluded by it. And that fact would put me in doubt of my own sanity at the time if I did not know that high statesmen, presidents of colleges, able editors, and that most undoubted of firm philanthropists, Gerritt Smith, shared the same delusion. Bible and missionary societies fellowshipped that mean and scurvy device of the kidnapper, in their holy work. It was spoken of as the most glorious of Christian enterprises, had a monthly magazine devoted to itself, and taxed about every pulpit in the land for an annual sermon in its favor."
Such was the Colonization Society, and its entrenched strength in the piety and philanthropy of the country at the moment when Garrison published his "Thoughts." It did not seem possible that a single arm however powerful, was able to start its roots; but, directly upon the launching of this bolt, the roots of the Bohun Upas, as Garrison graphically designated the society, were seen to have started, and the enterprise appeared blasted as by fire. The deluded intellect and conscience of the free States saw in the fierce light, which the pamphlet of the reformer threw upon the colonization scheme how shamefully imposed upon they had been. They had believed the society "the most glorious of Christian enterprises," and, lo! it stood revealed to them a "scurvy device of the kidnapper." The effect was extraordinary. The book was seized and its contents devoured by some of the finest minds of the North. Here is an example of the interest which it excited and the converts which it made: "Last Monday evening was our Law Club meeting, and I had the great satisfaction of hearing Judge Mellen, our Chief-Justice, say he had read your 'Thoughts,' was a thorough convert to your views, and was ready to do all in his power to promote them. Mr. Longfellow [father of Henry W. Longfellow] was present also, and with equal warmth and clearness expressed himself also in favor of your views. This is getting the two first men in the State for talents and influence in benevolent effort. I have no doubt they will head the list of those who will subscribe to form here an anti-slavery society. Mr. Greenleaf [Simon] also, will cordially come in, and I need not say he is one of the first [men] in the State, for his character is known." This quotation is made from a letter of General Samuel Fessenden, of Portland, Me., to Mr. Garrison, dated December 14, 1832. Among the remarkable minds which the "Thoughts" disillusioned in respect of the character and tendency of the Colonization Society were Theodore D. Weld, Elizur Wright, and Beriah Green, N.P. Rogers, William Goodell, Joshua Leavitt, Amos A. Phelps, Lewis Tappan, and James Miller McKim.
Garrison's assertion that "the overthrow of the Colonization Society was the overthrow of slavery itself," was, from the standpoint of a student of history, an exaggerated one. We know now that the claim was not founded on fact, that while they did stand together they did not fall together. But the position was, nevertheless, the strongest possible one for the anti-slavery movement to occupy at the time. In the disposition of the pro-slavery forces on the field of the opening conflict in 1832, the colonization scheme commanded the important approaches to the citadel of the peculiar institution. It cut off the passes to public opinion, and to the religious and benevolent influences of the land. To reach these it was necessary in the first place to dislodge the society from its coign of vantage, its strategical point in the agitation. And this is precisely what "The Thoughts on African Colonization" did. It dislodged the society from its powerful place in the moral sentiment of the North. The capture of this position was like the capture of a drawbridge, and the precipitation of the assaulting column directly upon the walls of a besieged castle. Within the pamphlet was contained the whole tremendous enginery of demolition. The anti-slavery agent and lecturer thenceforth set it up wherever he spoke.
To him it was not only the catapult; it furnished the missile-like facts and arguments for breaching the walls of this pro-slavery stronghold as well.
The effect of the publication of "The Thoughts" in this country was extraordinary, but the result of their circulation in England was hardly less so. It produced there as here a revolution in public sentiment upon the subject. The philanthropy and piety of Great Britain had generally prior to the unmasking of the society, looked upon it as an instrument of Emancipation, and had accordingly given it their powerful countenance, and not a little material support. But from the moment that the pamphlet reached England a decided change in this regard became manifest. The society made fruitless attempts to break the force of the blow dealt it by Garrison in the United States. But wherever its emissaries traveled "The Thoughts" confronted and confounded them. So that Mr. Garrison was warranted in saying that "all that sophistry or misrepresentation could effect to overthrow its integrity has been attempted in vain. The work, as a whole, stands irrefutable." The attempts made to maintain its hold upon the British public were characterized by duplicity and misrepresentation beyond anything practiced in America. The work of deceiving the philanthropy of Great Britain was conducted by the emissary of the society, Elliott Cresson, a man perfectly fitted to perform his part with remarkable thoroughness and industry. Three thousand miles away from America, and practically secure from contradiction, he went about making outrageous statements as to the anti-slavery character and purpose of the colonization enterprise. As there was no one in England sufficiently acquainted with the operations and designs of the society, he was enabled to falsify facts, to conceal the real principles of the scheme with astonishing audacity and activity. He approached Wilberforce, and duped Clarkson into a belief in the anti-slavery aim of the society.
Unmasked in America, the time had come when the interests of the Abolition movement on this side of the Atlantic required that it should be stripped of its disguises on the other side also. No better instrument could be selected for this purpose than the man who had torn the mask from its features in the United States. And so in March, 1833, the Board of Managers of the New England Anti-Slavery Society notified the public of the appointment of "William Lloyd Garrison as their agent, and that he would proceed to England as soon as the necessary arrangements can be made, for the purpose of procuring funds to aid in the establishment of the proposed MANUAL LABOR SCHOOL FOR COLORED YOUTH, and of disseminating in that country the truth in relation to American slavery, and to its ally, the American Colonization Society." The managers offered in justification of their step the fact that "Elliott Cresson is now in England as an agent for the Colonization Society, and that he has procured funds to a considerable amount by representing that the object of the society is 'to assist in the emancipation of all the slaves now in the United States.' It is important that the philanthropists of that country should be undeceived, and that the real principles and designs of the Colonization Society should be there made known."
In pursuance of this mission Garrison sailed from New York, May 2, 1833. Twenty days later he landed in Liverpool. His arrival was opportune, for all England was watching the closing scene in the drama of West India Emancipation. He was an eye-witness of the crowning triumph of the English Abolitionists, viz., the breaking by Act of Parliament of the fetters of eight hundred thousand slaves. He was in time to greet his great spiritual kinsman, William Wilberforce, and to undeceive him in respect of the Colonization Society, before death claimed his body, and to follow him to his last resting-place by the side of Pitt and Fox, in Westminster Abbey.
A highly interesting incident of this visit is best told in Mr. Garrison's own words. He said:
"On arriving in London I received a polite invitation by letter from Mr. Buxton to take breakfast with him. Presenting myself at the appointed time, when my name was announced, instead of coming forward promptly to take me by the hand, he scrutinized me from head to foot, and then inquired, 'Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Garrison, of Boston, in the United States?' 'Yes, sir,' I replied, 'I am he; and I am here in accordance with your invitation.' Lifting up his hands he exclaimed, 'Why, my dear sir, I thought you were a black man! And I have consequently invited this company of ladies and gentlemen to be present to welcome Mr. Garrison, the black advocate of emancipation, from the United States of America.' I have often said that that is the only compliment I have ever had paid to me that I care to remember or to tell of! For Mr. Buxton had somehow or other supposed that no white American could plead for those in bondage as I had done, and therefore I must be black!"
Garrison promptly threw down his challenge to Elliott Cresson, offering to prove him an impostor and the Colonization Society "corrupt in its principles, proscriptive in its measures, and the worst enemy of the free colored and slave population of the United States." From the first it was apparent that Cresson did not mean to encounter the author of the "Thoughts" in public debate. Even a mouse when cornered will show fight, but there was no manly fight in Cresson. Garrison sent him a letter containing seven grave charges against his society, and dared him to a refutation of them in a joint discussion. This challenge was presented four times before the agent of colonization could be persuaded to accept it. Garrison was bent on a joint public discussion between himself and Mr. Cresson. But Mr. Cresson was bent on avoiding his opponent. He skulked under one pretext or another from vindicating the colonization scheme from the seven-headed indictment preferred against it by the agent of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. As Cresson could not be driven into a joint discussion with him there was nothing left to Garrison but to go on without him. His arraignment and exposure of the society in public and private was thorough and overwhelming. He was indefatigable in the prosecution of this part of his mission. And his labor was not in vain. For in less than three months after his reaching England he had rendered the Colonization Society as odious there as his "Thoughts" had made it in America. The great body of the anti-slavery sentiment in Great Britain promptly condemned the spirit and object of the American Colonization Society. Such leaders as Buxton and Cropper "termed its objects diabolical;" while Zachary Macaulay, father of the historian, did not doubt that "the unchristian prejudice of color (which alone has given birth to the Colonization Society, though varnished over with other more plausible pretences, and veiled under a profession of a Christian regard for the temporal and spiritual interests of the negro which is belied by the whole course of its reasonings and the spirit of its measures) is so detestable in itself that I think it ought not to be tolerated, but, on the contrary, ought to be denounced and opposed by all humane, and especially by all pious persons in this country."
The protest against the Colonization Society "signed by Wilberforce and eleven of the most distinguished Abolitionists in Great Britain," including Buxton, Macaulay, Cropper, and Daniel O'Connell, showed how thoroughly Garrison had accomplished his mission. The protest declares, thanks to the teachings of the agent of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, that the colonization scheme "takes its roots from a cruel prejudice and alienation in the whites of America against the colored people, slave or free. This being its source the effects are what might be expected; that it fosters and increases the spirit of caste, already so unhappily predominant; that it widens the breach between the two races—exposes the colored people to great practical persecution, in order to force them to emigrate; and, finally, is calculated to swallow up and divert that feeling which America, as a Christian and free country, cannot but entertain, that slavery is alike incompatible with the law of God and with the well-being of man, whether the enslaver or the enslaved." The solemn conclusion of the illustrious signers of this mighty protest was that: "That society is, in our estimation, not deserving of the countenance of the British public." This powerful instrument fell, as Garrison wrote at the time, "like a thunderbolt upon the society." The damage inflicted upon it was immense, irreparable. The name of Thomas Clarkson was conspicuous by its absence from the protest. He could not be induced to take positive ground against the society. Garrison had visited him for this purpose. But the venerable philanthropist, who was then blind, had taken position on neutral ground, and could not, after an interview of four hours, be induced to abandon it. But, fortunately, potent as the name of Clarkson would have been in opposition to the society, it was not indispensable to its overthrow in Great Britain. Garrison had won to his side "all the staunch anti-slavery spirits," while Cresson was able to retain only "a few titled, wealthy, high-pretending individuals."
The success of the mission was signal, its service to the movement against slavery in America manifold. Garrison writing from London to the board of managers, summarized the results produced by it as follows: "1st, awakening a general interest among the friends of emancipation in this country, and securing their efficient coöperation with us in the abolition of slavery in the United States; 2d, dispelling the mists with which the agent of the American Colonization Society has blinded the eyes of benevolent men in relation to the design and tendency of the society; 3d, enlisting able and eloquent advocates to plead our cause; 4th, inducing editors of periodicals and able writers to give us the weight of their influence; 5th, exciting a spirit of emulation in the redemption of our slave population among the numerous female anti-slavery societies; 6th, procuring a large collection of anti-slavery documents, tracts, pamphlets, and volumes, which will furnish us with an inexhaustible supply of ammunition." These were indeed some of the grand results of laborious weeks. His mission was ended. He was profoundly grateful to the good God for its success. The great movement which he had started against oppression in his own country was awaiting his aggressive leadership. He did not tarry abroad, therefore, but set sail from London August 18, 1833, for New York, where he landed six weeks later.