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sense of loss and bereavement.
Mr. Garrison alone preserved his wonted cheerfulness and serenity.
From the death-bed of the
Liberator, he went directly to a Committee meeting of the
New England Freedmen's Aid Society, his face towards the resurrection and the life of Freedom.
The last number of the
Liberator fitly reproduced the Salutatory from the first, followed by the editor's
valedictory.
1
The last number of the
Liberator.
The last!
the last!
the last!
O, by that little word
How many thoughts are stirred
That sister of the past!
The present number of the Liberator is the completion of its thirty-fifth volume, and the termination of its existence.
Commencing my editorial career when only twenty years of age, I have followed it continuously till I have attained my sixtieth year—first, in connection with the Free Press, in Newburyport, in the spring of 1826; next, with the National Philanthropist, in Boston, in 1827; next, with the Journal of the Times, in Bennington, Vt., in 1828-9; next, with the Genius of Universal Emancipation, in Baltimore, in 1829-30; and, finally, with the Liberator, in Boston, from the 1st of January, 1831, to the 1st of January, 1866;—at the start, probably the youngest member of the editorial fraternity in the land, now, perhaps, the oldest, not in years, but in continuous service,—unless Mr. Bryant, of the New York Evening Post, be an exception.
Whether I shall again be connected with the press, in a similar capacity, is quite problematical; but, at my period of life, I feel no prompting to start a new journal at my own risk, and with the certainty of struggling against wind and tide, as I have done in the past.
I began the publication of the Liberator without a subscriber, and I end it—it gives me unalloyed satisfaction to say— without a farthing as the pecuniary result of the patronage extended to it during thirty-five years of unremitted labors.
From the immense change wrought in the national feeling and sentiment on the subject of slavery, the Liberator derived
