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

But this was not the whole of the ‘clerical appeal’ for which the Liberator's hospitality was entreated by Dr. Channing. Having got the floor, on one pretext, he drifted into his now trite general censure of the abolitionists—their harsh language, violation of Christian charity for Christian slaveholders (calling them robbers and excluding them from church privileges), etc.— which, as usual, was almost as pointedly directed against Mr. Garrison as if the latter had been named. As the hurricane is better than stagnation, ‘so,’ rejoined the editor, ‘this letter, though it is defective in principle, false in its charity, and inconsistent in its reasoning, will doubtless prove useful to the cause of dying humanity. . . . Its spirit is complacent and amicable; its purpose unquestionably good.’ Still, it was an anticlimax to his letter to the citizens of Boston. Dr. Channing was not yet qualified to instruct abolitionists in the ‘peace principle.’ In effect he had argued that ‘a cause which is not benevolent will authorize the shedding of blood without guilt; that which is, will not’—a nice distinction, truly. Why were abolitionists ‘obligated to allow themselves to be torn to pieces by human tigers any more than others,’ and why might they not fight for liberty like others? Mr. Garrison concluded his review¹ by some fatal ‘moral cross-readings’ from Dr. Channing's incoherent and contradictory utterances on the subject of slavery.

In the same number of the Liberator, the editor had the gratification of publishing the accession to the cause of a man whose services to it were destined far to outweigh those of any clerical critic, whether Orthodox or Unitarian. It would be hard to say—happily, it is needless to decide—whether Wendell Phillips or Edmund Quincy showed the greater self-abnegation, the greater ‘integrity of mind and moral independence,’ in quitting