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[276]

The Board deny that it is competent for any anti-slavery society, by its votes or through its organ, to arraign either the political or religious views of its members. It may with no more propriety decide that one man is morally bound to cast a vote at the polls, than that another man is morally bound to unite himself to the church. On this subject there are many conflicting but honest opinions entertained by abolitionists. All that a society or its organ may rightfully do, is to entreat its members to abide by their principles, whether in the church or out of it, at the polls or elsewhere; to vote for no man who is not in favor of immediate emancipation; to listen to no preacher who apologizes for slavery.

The discomfiture of the clerical schismatics by such reasoning was not less complete than that which they received from the voting at the annual meeting. They proceeded to give effect to their openly avowed intention to issue a new weekly paper, to be called the Massachusetts Abolitionist, and to be edited either by Elizur1 Wright or by John G. Whittier. In the meantime, Mr. Stanton would have the charge of it.

Both Whittier and Stanton had dispatched reports of the meeting—the one to his paper, the Pennsylvania Freeman; the other, to William Goodell. Whittier made light of the difference in Massachusetts, saying that it2 gave no cause for triumph to the enemies of the cause; and, later, that he—unlike his ‘friend of twelve years3 standing’—was above the fear of treachery and conspiracy. To this Mr. Garrison retorted, that the founding of a new paper showed that the difference was anything but light. Abolitionists ‘do not mean to assert, as a self-evident or universal truth, that no man can be a sound and consistent abolitionist who is not a church member, or who does not exercise his elective franchise. No indeed! This doctrine is of recent origin; and, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, we are certain that the grand design of those who have promulgated it is to supplant the Liberator, and to establish a paper upon its ruins that will be less ’

1 Right and Wrong in Mass., 1839, p. 98.

2 Lib. 9.31.

3 Lib. 9.39.

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