We found on board a very large company, including several1 of our anti-slavery friends, among whom was our bro. Elizur Wright, jr., who was on his way to take charge of the Abolitionist—a paper which is to please everybody who is displeased with us, and enable our clerical brother in Salem (C. T. T.),2 Corresponding Secretary of the Essex County A. S. Society, to inform all the members of that association of the time of its regular meetings! The time has been when our bro. W. would sooner have consented to pluck out a right eye, or cut off a right hand, than to edit a journal got up in rank hostility to the Liberator. How long, or to what extent, he will suffer himself to be made the tool of a factious, sectarian body of men, time must determine. That, in the end, they will find that, in securing his services, they have “caught a Tartar,” we have very little doubt. He is an able, ready and caustic writer, and will not spare any political doughface or clerical dumb dog in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, or elsewhere. However widely we may differ in time to come, nothing can ever occur to lessen our admiration of the zeal, the talent, the self-sacrificing spirit, the generous daring, he has exhibited in the anti-slavery cause from a very early period.It was not till after the New England Convention—the scene of the next engagement in this battle year—that Mr. Garrison found time to prepare an answer to Birney's abortive dictation to quit the ranks. On May 20 he wrote to Henry C. Wright at Newburyport:3 ‘Lewis Tappan has written a very bad letter in reply to a letter of our committee inviting him to attend the New England Convention. He is in a sad state of mind. Your letter respecting Birney is received. I mean to reply to him next week.’ The Liberator of June 28 4 contained the attack and the repulse, both reproduced from the Emancipator. Mr. Garrison began by rebuking the editor for having admitted Birney's essay without comment,
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towards Mr. Garrison and his associates, while more in sympathy with their opponents.
Mr. Wright himself, by a strange coincidence, took passage for Boston on the same steamboat with Mr. Garrison, who thus goodnaturedly reported the adventure in the Liberator:
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