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

[191] of the place,—he was amply justified by the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence, by the example of our Revolutionary fathers, and by the applause which mankind have always bestowed upon those who have perished under similar circumstances; consequently, that for those who subscribe to that Declaration, and eulogize those patriotic sacrifices, to affect to be shocked at the brave and spirited defence made by Mr. Lovejoy, and on that account to consider his death as not deserving of peculiar sympathy or respect, is nothing better than base hypocrisy, cold-blooded insensibility, and atrocious malignity.

6. That while it is not the province of this Board to determine for the friends of universal emancipation how far, or under what circumstances, it is right to use arms in self-defence; and while it is certain that no body of men have ever had a better right to do so than had Mr. Lovejoy and his associates, in view of the dreadful provocations and perils with which they were assailed; yet, as abolitionists, we are constrained to believe, that if the doctrine of non-resistance had been practically carried out by our brethren in Alton, as it has been by the friends of the colored race in Boston, New York, and many other places, a similar deliverance and victory would, in the providence of God, have been the result; or, if not, that the spilling of the blood of defenceless men would have produced a more thrilling and abiding effect.

More tersely, but with less satisfaction to many abolitionists, the New York Executive Committee's resolutions¹ simply declared Lovejoy to have been slain ‘whilst engaged in defending his property and his rights in a manner justified by the laws of this and of all other civilized countries.’ It remained for Dr. Channing once more to confound moral distinctions and bestow indiscriminate censure, in a ‘Letter to Abolitionists’ which, after having submitted it to his intimate friend and² admirer—nay, his prompter at every stage of his antislavery progress, and never more so than in putting him forward to inaugurate the Faneuil Hall protest—Ellis Gray Loring, he offered to the Liberator for ³ publication. On reading his confession that Lovejoy's ‘course was justified by the laws of his country, and by the ’