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

‘ [143] and would go with you most heartily if your lecturers and writers did not attack the Sabbath, and the Christian ministry and the churches, and all civil and family government . . . . We are not willing, for the sake of killing the rats, to burn down the house with all it contains.’ Mr. Woodbury would not therefore desert the cause of abolition: ‘No, never. But desert Mr. Garrison I would, if I ever followed him. But I never did. I once tried to like his paper—took it one year and paid for it, and stopped it because that, though it did well on abolition on one page, it would say something on the other to injure it, which something, too, did not concern the point of abolishing slavery.’ Alluding to a talk on family government between H. C. Wright and the Grimkes that had appeared in the Lib-¹ erator, Mr. Woodbury declared: ‘I had as soon my son should be taught that the Bible is not true, as that I have not the right, under God, to chastise him; for he now understands that if done it is done by the direct sanction of the Almighty.’ Finally, in a postscript, the appellants were admonished—‘No doubt, if you break with Garrison, some will say, “You are no abolitionists,” —for, with some, Garrison is the god of their idolatry. He embodies abolition. He is abolition personified and incarnate.’

At this point our narrative must, for the proper understanding of what succeeds, be interrupted for a retrospect. We have already seen that in the ² Thanksgiving season immediately following the Boston mob, Mr. Garrison's thoughts, so far from being driven in and concentrated upon the one abolition reform, were taking a wider range, among subjects ‘upon which much light remains to be thrown, and which are of the utmost importance to the temporal and eternal welfare of man.’ In this he was but sharing the spirit of the age—a spirit of almost universal ferment, which perhaps exhibited its greatest activity and its greatest moderation in Massachusetts. As Mr. Frothingham well says, in his