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Still to oppose and thwart, with heart and hand,
Thy brutalising sway—till Afric's chains
Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land,—
Trampling Oppression and his iron rod:
Such is the vow I take—so help me god!
1
From this manifesto, in which, as was
Mr. Garrison's wont, every word was weighed with a more than rhetorical exactitude, one misses any allusion to the American Colonization Society, unless the passage on gradual abolition, with its reference to the Park-Street Church discourse, be such; nor does the
Society's name occur in the first number.
In the very next, however, in opposition to
Lundy, the editor reiterates his belief that ‘the
2 American Colonization Society is wrong in principle and impotent in design,’ and promises to ‘thoroughly sift its pretensions in subsequent numbers of the
Liberator.’
No bodily nor mental fatigue prevented this pledge from being amply redeemed.
The resolution to guard his agitation from political and sectarian entanglements was frankly based on practical considerations of expediency.
‘We are out of the
3 arena of politics, and we mean to keep out of it,’ he says subsequently.
And again, announcing his intention to address by request the Society of Free Enquirers, at the
Lower Julien Hall, on the cruelties and impieties of slavery and the anti-republican and anti-Christian tendency of the Colonization Society:
‘It is immaterial to me what party or sect I am invited to4 address on this subject.
Universal emancipation from despotism is, and ought to be, common ground.
He is neither a free man, nor a friend to freedom, who makes this a sectarian or political cause.
If the religious portion of the community are indifferent to the cries of suffering humanity, it is no reason ’
