Chapter 5: the Civil war
Garrison's doctrine of non-resistance was put to the test throughout this period and to the end of the Civil War itself, but he never wavered. In 1856, during the early struggle for freedom in Kansas, Theodore Parker and Henry Ward Beecher had not hesitated to hold meetings in their churches with the object of raising money to buy rifles for the anti-slavery volunteers. Mr. Beecher said: “You might just as well read the Bible to buffaloes as to those fellows who follow Atchison and Stringfellow.” Garrison expressed his emphatic dissent from this assertion. To class human beings as wild beasts was, he said, merely to adopt the theory which the slaveholders applied to their slaves. The “border ruffians” of Kansas were less blameworthy than their respectable backers. “Convince us that it is right to shoot anybody, and our perplexity would be ”War is a condition of hate subsisting between persons, and
peace is a condition of good — will subsisting between persons.Erasmus.
