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

‘ [45] of freedom and independence in a correct manner,’ he advised them to ‘take the United States as a fair and beautiful model by which to govern the affairs of their country—a model which no other nation under heaven can boast its equal, for correctness of sound republican principles and wise and judicious administration:—let them take this, we repeat, as an example, and then can we cordially and joyfully hail them as freemen—while Liberty's bright and glorious beams would shine with redoubled splendor over their land, and dispel every cloud of tyranny and civil discord.’

It is evident from this sophomoric burst of patriotic eloquence that the boy knew and had thought no more about slavery than about war, at that time, and little suspected how far his country was from being a model republic. Nor did he gain wisdom or inspiration from those about him. Caleb Cushing had then an editorial connection with the Herald, and to him may safely be ascribed the authorship of two editorials which appeared in the paper within this same month. The first, in ¹ recording the recent suppression of a slave insurrection in Charleston, S. C., and expressing a fear that the United States would yet see another San Domingo, looked to the future with despair and dread, because immediate or gradual colonization seemed to the writer hopeless and impossible, and gradual emancipation improbable and impracticable. Three weeks later, the writer maintained² that the holding of slaves was not subversive of republican habits, as men who see others deprived of the blessings of freedom must learn more highly to apprize its enjoyments themselves! And yet he admitted the demoralizing effects of slavery upon the slaveholders, and that ‘there can never be so much purity, decorum, exactness and moderation in the morals of a people among whom slaves abound.’

This is a fair specimen of the hopeless, aimless, manner in which slavery was discussed or referred to at the North after the Missouri Compromise of 1820 had