‘I am sorry that I can give you in return only a few lines2 which are destitute of thought and distinguished for bad penmanship, (for I write in haste,)—but so it is. A week's hard labor has just closed, and my mind is too much exhausted for mental effort, and my body too jaded to be serviceable. My correspondence is necessarily extensive and onerous; pen, ink and paper throw me into a kind of intellectual hydrophobia, and so I avoid them as much as possible.’But we have not done with the mechanical obstacles to the birth of the new journal. The ream or two of3 paper needed to produce a specimen number was sought to be obtained on credit of Deacon Moses Grant, of the firm of Grant & Daniell, an acquaintance in the temperance cause, who had entire respect for the partners and had previously been consulted by them about starting the Liberator. His refusal to let them have the modest amount asked for was, therefore, not from distrust of ultimate repayment, but from scruples about countenancing a paper having the anti-slavery character proposed. At last, a house to which the young men were both strangers was found to take the business risk, and the first number was launched. Simultaneously was received from James Forten, ‘the greatly esteemed and4 venerated sailmaker of Philadelphia,’ the sum of fiftyfour dollars in advance for twenty-seven subscribers— aid so timely as (like that shortly before received from5 Ebenezer Dole) perhaps to be called Providential, seeing that Mr. Garrison's orthodoxy was at that date irreproachable. Still, neither a slender credit nor fifty-four dollars in hand could go a great way towards supporting a paper which began without a subscriber. But for the ‘cheering countenance and pecuniary assistance early extended to the Liberator’ by Mr. Sewall6 and Mr. Ellis
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2 Ms.
3 Ms. Mar. 1, 1874, W. L. G. to O. Johnson; May's Recollections, p. 30; Lib. 21.18, 19.
4 Ms. Dec. 31, 1830, to W. L. G.
5 Ante, p. 193.
6 ‘Had it not been for Samuel E. Sewall, I never should have been able to continue the paper. He was the man who gave money again and again, never expecting and never asking for the return of it’ (Stenographic report of Mr. Garrison's speech at the 20th anniversary of the Liberator, omitted in print; see Lib. 21.18.
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