Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

‘ [62] We seek, therefore, to put an end to constitutional slavery, that is, to slavery in the District of Columbia, in Florida, and in American vessels upon the seas, and to restore the Government to its true constitutional sphere. If we can accomplish this, slavery must die; and we may accomplish this without insisting on more than the fulfillment of the guarantees of the Constitution.’

In other words, Mr. Chase went for the Constitution as it was, and the Union as it was. One of his associates, writing at the same time to the Xenia (Ohio) Free Press, even more frankly defined the difference between the political and the moral agitation:

Abolitionists seek to exterminate slavery everywhere, by¹ all rightful means, religious, moral, and political. Liberty men strive to get rid of slavery, not everywhere, but wherever it exists within the proper range of political action; to deliver the Government from the usurped control of the Slave Power . . . by imparting energy and activity to the action of all the departments, through the introduction into important offices of a far larger proportion of intelligent, non-slaveholding freemen.

‘It is obvious that a man who is not an abolitionist at all May be A Liberty man; for he may anxiously desire and zealously labor for these objects, though he may not be prepared to devote himself to the more general objects of universal emancipation.’

Mr. Chase's letter was appropriately addressed to the managers of a New York Liberty Party Convention in Syracuse in October, where for the first time the lines² were drawn so as to exclude all but party members from sharing in the proceedings. These managers, annoyed by the activity of the agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society in their preserves, complained that it and its organ encouraged abolition connection with the Whig or Democratic Party. A most voluminous onslaught was therefore made on the Society and the Standard by³ William Goodell, in an address to the political abolitionists of the State, read at the above convention. Mr. Garrison gave up a whole page of the Liberator to it; so did Torrey⁴