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

[303] mouthpiece of the Anti-Slavery Society, in any sense—who have repelled the slightest intimation from the enemies of abolition that the Society is responsible for the sayings and doings of the Liberator—I say, it is quite remarkable that all at once, in the eyes of those persons, I have become an official organ, an unerring oracle, the Magnus Apollo of the whole land, whose speech and example are to be followed implicitly —because they have ascertained that, since the year 1833, I have actually voted once at the polls! They shall not make me vain. I perceive the design of this incense-offering—to cast me off from the anti-slavery cause, (paradoxical as the statement may seem), in order to secure “the co-operation of the great Mass of the intelligent mind [i. e. the aristocracy, the rabbis and scribes] of the nation.” I am not willing to be made a tool for their convenience—to be crowned this hour that I may be deposed the next; for it is not true that the Liberator has ever been the official journal of any society or body of men, or that any other person, besides its editor, is responsible either for the religious or political sentiments contained in its columns.

It was false witness to charge him with lugging his views on government into anti-slavery meetings: his accusers—Birney, Elizur Wright, Phelps, and Scott—had done this. ‘As men, as citizens, as Christians, we confess that we have advocated the heaven-originated cause of Non-Resistance, and shall continue to do so, until we are convicted of error,—but not as abolitionists. “The head and front of our offending hath this extent— no more.” ’ And yet the non-resistance theory is embodied in the Anti-Slavery Constitution and Declaration of Sentiments—the two instruments being admitted by Birney to be of equal weight. When he says of this theory—‘Our wives, our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, we are to see set upon by the most brutal without any effort, on our part, except argument, to defend them; and even they themselves are forbidden to use, in defence of their purity, such powers as God has endowed them with for its protection, if resistance should be attended with injury or destruction to the assailant’ —he simply echoes what the Declaration enjoins upon