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may prove the destruction of their country.’
Mr. Garrison confessed to have attained a clearer light in the meantime.
Lewis Tappan explained his own and his 1 colleague's refusal to entertain Mr. Phillips's proposition by reference to the insufficiency of the guarantee—a Wall-Street view of debt collecting, replied Mr. Garrison.2 Orange Scott complained that Birney's political argument3 had been misreported, availing himself of the opportunity to insinuate that Mr. Garrison, as a Perfectionist, believed in spiritual wives.4 Birney, speaking for himself, affirmed that any one owning Mr. Garrison's scruples5 ought not to join the Society.
He would, indeed, cast out no one, but thought it unworthy in a new sect springing up in the Society, to bend the Constitution to suit their peculiar tenets.
The cause, concluded the president of the newly formed Evangelical Anti-Slavery6 Society of the City of New York (to which only orthodox church-members were eligible), must be relieved of all the extraneous questions which had been connected with it during the past year or two.
What are they?
asked Mr. Garrison, and proceeded to7
4 This clerical slander was most industriously propagated in public and in private during the next few years (e. g., in New Hampshire, in the winter of 1841, as related in Parker Pillsbury's “Acts of the Anti-slavery apostles,” p. 243). Abner Sanger writes on Mar. 4, 1840, from Danvers, Mass., to Mr. Garrison, of the Rev. Daniel Wise's recent meeting in that place: ‘After the thirteen females had retired, Mr. Wise stated the evil tendencies of the non-resistance doctrines. He said that a man in Putney, Vt. [J. H. Noyes], had written something which you had commented upon with approbation, some time since. Lately, the same person, (he had forgotten his name), had written something in a newspaper carrying out the non-resistance doctrines to the alarming consequences intimated by him. The idea was a promiscuous cohabitation of the sexes, which he stated, as near as he could recollect, thus: that one man had no more exclusive right to one woman than, when a number sat together at their dinner, consisting of different dishes, one man had an exclusive right to the whole of one dish. He had had the article, but lent it to a person to copy, and it was not now in his possession. So, because you had commented favorably [on] one article, it followed that you endorsed what he published afterwards’ (Ms.) Still, though this sort of logic was obviously at fault, Mr. Garrison's less intimate friends naturally felt disquieted, and desired a personal explanation from his own lips. See his indignant assertion of his regard for the institution of marriage in Lib. 11.43, 191.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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