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not consent to leave our Kansas brethren to be butchered.
If all love of freedom has not departed from us, we will not leave them to be cursed with slavery.
And, I add, if the North but resolves to conquer, it will conquer. . . .
And why, too, do I conclude that a death-struggle between liberty and slavery in Kansas will be a death-struggle between these powers in all the land?
Because I am certain that the South will never give up Kansas until compelled to give up all slavery.
She will fight for it to the last. . . .
With no delight do I look upon these scenes of blood that seem to me so certain and so near.
All the horrors of war are to my heart emphatically horrors.
Let us all be filled with sincere and pious regret at the wretched circumstances into which our preeminently guilty country is brought.
I say our guilty country—for I mean the North as well as the South.
If the South has sinned fearfully in keeping alive and extending the system of slavery, no less fearfully has the North sinned in refusing to kill the bloody and infernal system at the ballot-box.
For the civil war that has already broken out in this land, I hold the North and the South equally responsible.
Mr. Garrison entertained no illusions about the efficacy of ballot-boxes or bayonets without a public sentiment behind them.
He held to the simple
Christian and humane remedy which consisted solely in breaking up the unholy partnership that ensured the national support of slavery.
Here are his resolutions offered at the
New England Anti-Slavery Convention on May 27, 1856:
10. Resolved, That we deplore the moral blindness and1 inconsistency of those who are seeking to transform the antislavery cause into a mere territorial struggle, in accordance with the Missouri Compromise—making it no longer a question as to the liberation of four millions of imbruted slaves at the South, but only one of latitude and longitude—basing it on a corrupt bargain, and not on the rights of man—sacrificing one race for the benefit of another—and consenting to the constitutional protection of slavery in fifteen States of the Union where it now exists, and to the outlawry of the fugitive slave in every section of the land.
11. Resolved, That slavery in a Territory is no worse a crime than slavery in a State; that Kansas is no more entitled to freedom than Carolina; and while we yield to none in zeal and
