[55] against one—ought to atone for the essay of ‘Hancock.’ I am disgusted with this squeamish regard for Mr. Lyman, and think it very unwise, as well as positively criminal, for any to attempt to exonerate him from blame.
Ellis Gray Loring1 to W. L. Garrison, at Brooklyn.Boston, Dec. 5, 1835.I write you in behalf of Miss Susan Cabot, a sister of our friend Mrs. Follen, and a firm supporter of the abolition faith.2 She is about to pass some weeks in Philadelphia, and has a strong desire to become acquainted with Miss Grimke, who3 wrote the admired letter in the Liberator addressed to you. . . . 4 I have just read with intense interest Dr. Channing's tract on Slavery. It is the most elaborate work on the philosophy of Anti-Slavery I have ever seen, and appears most seasonably when iniquity is claiming to pass for an angel of light. I am grieved at some few censures of the abolitionists in it, put forth, I think, on insufficient grounds, but nineteen-twentieths of the book are sound in principle, and I will not grudgingly bestow my gratitude and praise for this splendid testimony to the truth. You see, I presume, the storm of abuse which Miss Martineau has called on herself from the newspapers, for her independent conduct at the ladies' meeting. In addition to
This text is part of:
Ellis Gray Loring1 to W. L. Garrison, at Brooklyn.
1 Mr. Loring was born in Boston, in 1803, the only son of a mother widowed shortly after his birth. At the Latin School, where he was distinguished for scholarship, he had a friend and companion in R. W. Emerson. A gentle and delicate boy, he greatly endeared himself to his classmates and his teachers. He was admitted to the bar in 1827, and attained immediate success. His espousal of the anti-slavery cause at once cost him the larger number of his clients; and the sudden coldness of the Ticknors, Prescotts, and other leading Boston families put an end to his hitherto intimate social relations with them. He never regretted what he thus forfeited, and never wavered in his adhesion to the cause, in the management of which his counsel was invaluable. His decisive support of the Liberator in its deadly pecuniary crises has been already shown. No one of the Boston circle of abolitionists was more beloved for his amiable spirit, or more trusted for judgment and integrity. (See the tributes in Lib. June 4, 18, 1858.) At least half of Dr. Channing's anti-slavery reputation belongs to Ellis Gray Loring. ‘It was from his hand, marked with his now so familiar writing,’ said Wendell Phillips, ‘that I received the first anti-slavery pamphlet, in the record of his appearance before the [Mass.] Senate to protest against the attempt to punish meetings like these with the State Prison’ (Lib. 28.91).
4 Ante, 1.518.
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