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

[139] Do not ecclesiastical terrors take hold of you, as publisher of the Liberator? Have you done penance and obtained absolution? For my own part I am growing more and more irreverent, and must be given over as incorrigible. Surely you must be a pugnacious man to employ such an Ishmaelitish editor. “Woe is me, my mother! for I was born a man of strife.” What latent feelings, think you, have stirred up Messrs. Fitch and Towne to make such a strange “Appeal” ? Tell me whether there is not some sectarian ill-will, some “ clerical” apprehension, at the bottom of this movement. You are very good, as a Yankee, in guessing—but perhaps the facts in the case are too palpable to need a single surmise. My review of the “Appeal” will probably ensure you the loss of a few subscribers, and perhaps add a few more to your list.

In this review Mr. Garrison took to himself the attack¹ really levelled at the temporary editor of the Liberator, whose conduct of the paper in his absence he now explicitly endorsed. The selection of another medium than the Liberator for the publication of the Appeal, he regarded as ‘an impeachment far more offensive than the Appeal itself.’ As for that document, it would be welcomed by the Tracys, by Leonard Bacon, Asa Cummings, and Wilbur Fisk,² and by the religious (Congregational) press generally, for it was their thunder. It consisted of the commonest and most flippant objections to the cause. So far as related to its defence of the two ‘slandered’ pro-slavery clergymen, neither had complained nor could complain, and the defence of them was laughable. The defamation, such as it was, was valid only among abolitionists. Fitch, during his pastorate in Hartford, had been dumb on the subject of slavery, and only flamed out when called to the Free Church in Boston. In his work already cited, he had³ pronounced slavery worse than infidelity, popery, intemperance, theft, murder, fornication, treason; had