Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

[309] not worth a price like this, and that it is in the highest degree criminal for you to continue the present compact. Let the pillars thereof fall—let the superstructure crumble into dust— if it must be upheld by robbery and oppression.

‘The domestic slavery of the Southern States,’ Mr. Webster had said in the speech already cited, ‘I leave where I find it,—in the hands of their own governments. It is their affair, not mine.’ Quite otherwise Mr. Garrison, in the first number of the volume, reaffirming the guilt of slaveholders over and above their inheritance, and the guilt of New Englanders with reference (1) to the maintenance of slavery in the District of Columbia, and (2) to their obligation to suppress slave insurrections, declared:

So long as we continue one body—a union—a nation—¹ the compact involves us in the guilt and danger of slavery. . . . What protects the South from instant destruction? Our physical force. Break the chain which binds her to the Union, and the scenes of St. Domingo would be witnessed throughout her borders. She may affect to laugh at this prophecy; but she knows that her security lies in Northern bayonets.² Nay, she has repeatedly taunted the free States with being pledged to protect her. . . . How, then, do we make the inquiry, with affected astonishment, “What have we to do with the guilt of slavery?”

This inquiry rested much less heavily with Mr. Garrison's townsmen, especially the respectable and then ruling portion, than this other: ‘How shall we justify ourselves to our Southern brethren for tolerating the Liberator?’ Accordingly, at the opening of the March term of the Municipal Court in Boston, Judge Thacher charged the Grand Jury that it ‘is an offence against³ the peace of the Commonwealth, and that it may be prosecuted as a misdemeanor at common law, . . . to publish books, pamphlets, or newspapers, designed to be ’