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Chapter 2: Germs of contention among brethren.—1836.
Ill health cripples
Garrison's activity during this year, which he spends mostly at
Brooklyn, Conn. He joins the
Massachusetts remonstrants against legislative suppression of the abolitionists, at the
State House, and attends the conference of the seventy Agents in New York City, where he meets the Grimke sisters, of
South Carolina.
In criticizing
Lyman Beecher's discourse on the Sabbath, he reveals his own views regarding the sanctity of that day, and alarms many of his orthodox associates.
It is fortunate for the country that the good sense, the1 generous feeling, and the deep-rooted attachment of the people of the non-slaveholding States to the Union, and to their fellow-citizens of the same blood in the South, have given so strong and impressive a tone to the sentiments entertained against the proceedings of the misguided persons who have engaged in these unconstitutional and wicked attempts [‘to circulate through the mails inflammatory appeals addressed to the passions of the slaves, in prints’], and especially against the emissaries from foreign parts who have dared to interfere in this matter, as to authorize the hope that those attempts will no longer be persisted in. . . . I would. . . . respectfully suggest the propriety of passing such a law as will prohibit, under severe penalties, the circulation in the Southern States, through the mail, of incendiary publications intended to instigate the slaves to insurrection.
In these terms
President Jackson, in his message to Congress, December 7, 1835, introduced, for the first time in such documents, an allusion to abolitionism.
His allegations were cruelly false; his implicit approval of the mob violence of the past
summer and
autumn, as infamous in a chief magistrate as it was short-sighted in a statesman; and his proposition to close the mails against anti-slavery publications, audaciously unconstitutional and despotic.
2 Nevertheless, they gave the keynote to the policy of repression which, during the next year, was sought to be enforced by continued popular outrages, by State legislative and Federal Congressional
