Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

[61] 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