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

The true question is, whether the policy of the American² Anti-Slavery Society shall be guided by its Constitution, in the hands of a committee of its own choice, responsible at its bar, and representing impartially the abolitionists of the whole land —or whether it shall be controlled at pleasure by a local Board, elected by a single auxiliary society, and representing a section of the abolitionists of a single State.

Goodell was no less explicit, in his own paper. ³ Abolition and Non-Resistance, he wrote, can no more walk together than can Abolition and Colonization. He predicted a strong rally at New York ‘of non-resistants and of whole-Whig-ticket abolitionists combined.’ If they should succeed in censuring and displacing the Executive Committee, it would be equivalent to a dissolution of the Society. A new spur would be given to combined political action ‘if the National Society should slip out of the way, or get into the hands of the friends of Harrison and the opponents of civil government.’⁴ Combined ecclesiastical action would also receive a stimulus. ‘Or, perhaps, among the local churches and among abolitionists connected with them, the query might be revived with fresh interest, whether the Lord Jesus Christ did not institute, and does not require them to organize, Christian churches, which shall occupy and cultivate the ground attempted to be cultivated hitherto by the great reformatory and evangelizing voluntary associations of the day.’ ‘We shall be,’ continued Goodell, ‘as charitable as we can to men's motives, but their anti-abolitionism we shall steadfastly oppose, even if it shelters itself under the banners of Wm. Lloyd Garrison.’ And he bitterly threw off the last remnant of his old friendship for the editor of the Liberator in a short article entitled, ‘How to Make a Pope’: