Presently the young man arose, modestly, but with an air2 of calm determination, and delivered such a lecture as he only, I believe, at that time, could have written; for he only had had his eyes so anointed that he could see that outrages perpetrated upon Africans were wrongs done to our common humanity; he only, I believe, had had his cars so completely unstopped of “prejudice against color” that the cries of enslaved black men and black women sounded to him as if they came from brothers and sisters. He began with expressing deep regret and shame for the zeal he had lately manifested in the Colonization cause. It was, he confessed, a zeal without knowledge. He had been deceived by the misrepresentations so diligently given throughout the free States, by Southern agents, of the design and tendency of the Colonization scheme. During his few months' residence in Maryland he had been completely undeceived. He had there found out that the design of those who originated, and the especial intentions of those in the Southern States that engaged in the plan, were to remove from the country, as a
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settled as a Unitarian minister at Brooklyn, Connecticut, and the only one of the denomination in that State; his cousin, Samuel E. Sewall, a young Boston lawyer; and his brother-in-law, A. Bronson Alcott.1Mr. May has thus described the occasion:
1 It was natural that Mr. Sewall should find himself in sympathy with Mr. Garrison. His distinguished ancestor, Judge Samuel Sewall, was one of the earliest opponents of slavery in America, and published an antislavery pamphlet, “The selling of Joseph; a memorial,” in 1700 (reprinted in Williams's “History of the negro race in America,” 1: 210). (For his descent from Judge Sewall, see Titcomb's “Early New England people,” pp. 217-223.) Mr. May (who was born in 1797, and hence was eight years Mr. Garrison's senior) was a son of Col. Joseph May, of Boston, a highly respected merchant, and both he and his cousin Mr. Sewall graduated from Harvard College in 1817, in the same class with David Lee Child, George Bancroft, George B. Emerson, Caleb Cushing, Samuel A. Eliot, Stephen Salisbury, Stephen H. Tyng, and Robert F. Wallcut. It is worthy of note that Mr. May preached his first sermon in December, 1820, on the Sunday following the delivery of Daniel Webster's Plymouth Rock oration, and was so impressed by the latter's fervid appeal to the ministry to denounce the slave-trade that he read the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah in his morning service. Five years later he was interested in the Rev. John Rankin's “Letters on slavery,” and when Lundy made his second visit to New England, in June, 1828, he was welcomed to Brooklyn, Conn., by Mr. May, and held a large meeting in the latter's church. (See “Memoir of Samuel Joseph May,” pp. 139, 140.)
2 May's Recollections of our A. S. Conflict, pp. 18-20.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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