Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

[59] could not go abroad without the almost certain prospect of death. But still, had there been reason to believe that by staying and falling on your soil, I should thereby have done the will of God, and the best thing to advance the cause, I trust I should not have hesitated to remain and be offered up. The finger of Providence seemed to point to Great Britain as a scene of labor not to be neglected for the problematical good which a longer continuance in the U. S. might effect. There was a field wide, open, secure, rich, waving already, white unto the harvest —the public in the fittest possible state to receive the information I had collected, and the appeals I was qualified to found upon that evidence. After viewing the matter deliberately, and I trust prayerfully, I came to the decision that the path of duty lay across the waters; and then, through the length and breadth of the kingdom, publishing everywhere the wrongs of the American slave, and calling upon man, woman and child to join in one united and overwhelming remonstrance against the unmatched wickedness of American slavery.

On this side, meantime, Mr. Thompson was leaving behind him an imposing number of anti-slavery societies almost called into being by his eloquence,¹ an increased zeal among those already existing, and the reputation (teste Peleg Sprague) of having given ‘their greatest² prevalence and intensity’ to the anti-slavery doctrines he had been invited to propagate.³ Nowhere was the impression made by his year's labors more profound than at the South. From them Jefferson Davis dates the⁴ ‘public agitation’ for abolition, and the deliberate attempt to dissolve the Union; and the author of a notable secession work⁵ likewise declares Thompson to have been ‘the controlling spirit of this effort to array North and South on geographical lines,’ and renews the charge that he went about ‘repeating in conversation that “every slaveholder should have his throat cut.” ’