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[108] faithful friend Garrison had assumed in favoring Mr. Lincoln's reelection. ‘There are no hundred men in the country,’ he continued, ‘whose united voices would be of equal importance in determining the future of the Government and country. A million dollars would have been a cheap purchase for the Administration of the Liberator's article on the Presidency.’ And at the final session he1 closed his despondent speech with a renewed avowal of his hostility to Lincoln, the day of whose reelection, he said, “I shall consider the end of the Union in my day, or its reconstruction on terms worse than Disunion.” Lib. 34.86.

Mr. Garrison's rejoinders to these speeches were in harmony with his previous charitable consideration for Mr. Lincoln, in view of the perils which had surrounded him,—“perils and trials unknown to any man, in any age of the world, in official station” Lib. 34.82; and he quoted Mr.2 Phillips's own words the year before, which contemplated Mr. Lincoln's being President four or eight years longer, in these terms:

I told him myself, and I believed it then, and I believe it now,—I meant it then, and I mean it now,—that the man who would honestly put his right hand to the plow of that proclamation, and execute it, this people would not allow to quit while the experiment was trying. Whoever starts the great experiment of emancipation, and honestly devotes his energies to making it a fact, deserves to hold the helm of the Government until that experiment is finished. Lib. 33.110.

Mr. Garrison's hopeful view was shared by Miller McKim and George Thompson, in their speeches, and3 at all the public sessions the sympathy of the audiences was clearly with them and in favor of Lincoln. At the business meetings of the Society, Mr. Phillips was4 supported by Stephen S. Foster and Parker Pillsbury, and the resolution offered by him at the outset was adopted by the close vote of 21 to 18. The regular series of resolutions introduced by Mr. Garrison, and unanimously adopted, made no allusion whatever to the Presidential question, but urged the enactment of the Thirteenth

1 May 11.

2 Lib. 34.86.

3 J. M. McKim.

4 Lib. 34.83.

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