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

[74] and fifty lashes: he names the ships to which the launches were successively taken, and the fellow-sufferer who died¹ under the terrible infliction. In January, 1824, he had² escaped to New York, and in September shipped for the first time in the United States navyin the North Carolina seventy-four at Norfolk. ‘I considered myself,’ he records, ‘an adept in the usages of a man-of-war; but I was mistaken, and soon found out I was destined to treatment to which I had before been a stranger, and which I considered that no officers belonging to any civilized country could adopt.’ His introduction to American naval cruelty was given him by the future opener of Japan to ‘civilization,’ Matthew C. Perry, then first lieutenant.³

We draw the veil over what followed, under the American flag, until James Garrison, a mere wreck, was rescued from the navy by his brother. But an earlier experience had in it an element which connects while it contrasts the lives of both. Towards the close of 1819, while Lloyd was in his early printer's apprenticeship, James, then in his twentieth year, bound himself to one Benjamin Sisson, a Savannah pilot—a slaveholder, cruel and tyrannical, whose wretched treatment at last drove James to run away. On the road to Charleston he was overtaken; and now, as if the South were taking satisfaction on his poor body for the future anti-slavery warfare of his brother, James Garrison was subjected to punishment such as slaves had meted out to them for similar offences. Stripped naked, and hung to a tree by his thumbs so that his toes would just touch the ground, he was almost flayed alive