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

[168] his English mission. The public sentiment aroused by the Exeter Hall meeting, and by similar demonstrations all over the United Kingdom up to his sailing for home on November 4, admittedly constrained the British branch, when organizing at Manchester on that very date, to¹ exclude slaveholders from membership—albeit leaving their personal Christianity an open question.² Meantime, more than fifty withdrawals had been reported to the Provisional Committee. In short, the effort to rehabilitate in Great Britain the spurious Christianity of the American Churches, by a guilty confederacy in silence or apology on the subject of slavery, was signally and finally defeated. Moreover, so little did the Free Church leaders prevail in their own section that, early in the summer, the Synod of the United Secession Church (one of the largest religious bodies in Scotland) committed to James N. Buffum, on his return to America, a “Memorial and Remonstrance respecting Slavery, to the Churches of the United States of America,” Lib. 16.167, 199, 201. and renounced fellowship with any church that sanctioned slavery.

In the interval between the two meetings of the League, Mr. Garrison had begun the whirl of journeying, lecturing, and visiting, which was not to cease while he remained in the United Kingdom. On August 20, in company with Thompson and Douglass, he was most affectionately³ received by the aged Clarkson at Ipswich, whom he found weak in body but active in mind, and who gave him, on parting, a paper, ‘Hints for the American People in the Event of a Dissolution of the Union’—a consummation which he welcomed as a means to the abrogation of the legal sanction of slavery. ‘I consider, then,’ he wrote, ‘the dissolution of the Union, by affording the ’