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

[259] the sabbatarian, and the anti-woman prejudices against Mr. Garrison those aroused by his latest peace doctrines, and the cord would still have been insufficient to bind the monster. The American sense of humor would, sooner or later, have been touched by the spectacle of ministers panic-stricken at a reformer who repudiated all violence, in the spirit and example and on the express authority of their Master. To all appearance this was the weakest strand in the quadruple cord. To show how it unexpectedly became the strongest, will be the burden of the present chapter.

In surveying the anti-slavery field up to this time, two centres of activity are preeminent: Boston, the fountain of the agitation, the home of the Liberator; and New York, the seat of the Parent Society, the home of the Emancipator. Remark, also, Utica, the seat of the New York State Society, and home of Goodell and his Friend of Man; home, likewise, of Alvan Stewart, whose nearly successful effort to commit the American Society to the doctrine of Federal control over slavery in the States¹ was recorded in the last chapter. Not far to the west, at Peterboroa, lives Gerrit Smith, anxious, as we have seen, to convert the moral basis of the anti-slavery² organization into a political one; and still beyond, in Rochester, lives Myron Holley, known as yet chiefly as an anti-Mason and as the man to whom, perhaps, next to De Witt Clinton, New York owed her magnificent Erie Canal.³ In this central belt of the State was now maturing a political anti-slavery party movement which Mr. Garrison—not alone nor most strenuously—resisted on purely anti-slavery grounds; which found it necessary to break his opposition, and which accordingly joined in the clerical hue-and-cry against the non-voting conclusion of his non-resistant premises—a conclusion addressed to non-resistants alone, however applicable to abolitionists Once more the disintegrating sectarian influences