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

‘“ [89] subject you to the painful necessity of seeing your paper die for the want of patronage.” After the wide difference which has existed between us, and the many severe things I have written in reference to his colonization conduct, is not the donation generous, and the panegyric still more liberal? Noble man! not ashamed to praise that which he once repudiated. What would Joseph Tracy and Leonard Bacon say, were I to publish his letter? Perhaps I shall yet do so, as no prohibition is contained in it—though it is not probable that he intended it for publication. He evidently is willing I should do with it as I think proper.’¹

The extracts already given have foreshadowed Mr. Garrison's judgment of Channing's essay on slavery as ultimately recorded in a formal review. Before coming to this, he answered some taunts of Tracy's Recorder about Channing's censure of the abolitionists and of Thompson by saying: ‘But we [‘the Garrison party’]² do claim all that is sound or valuable in the book as our³ own; its sole excellencies are its moral plagiarisms from the writings of abolitionists, which the Dr. has taken, without having the magnanimity to intimate that they are the very principles which we have cherished as the apple of our eye, whatever may have been the ‘indiscreetness’ of our measures, or the ‘rashness’ of our zeal: nay, he puts them forth to the world as if they were some new moral discoveries.’ George Thompson wrote from Liverpool, January 14, 1836: ‘To me it⁴ appears that Dr. C. has done little more than republish the Primer of the abolitionists, appending thereto certain remarks which show his lamentable ignorance of the state of public opinion around him, and, as a natural consequence, of the means necessary to carry on and complete the reformation which is to purify and bless your country.’

William Goodell thought himself personally aggrieved,⁵ and that Dr. Channing had helped himself freely to the