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

[497] the irrepressible conflict, he argued that there was no need of collision. Instead of justifying his Rochester¹ speech with John Brown, he repudiated him and justified his punishment. Instead of pointing again to the inherent antagonism of slave and free society, he talked softly of ‘capital’ (slave) and ‘labor’ (free) States, and of the wise arrangement which assigned to each the exclusive care of its own institutions. The Constitution was no longer to be viewed as the leash of two irreconcilable social systems, but as a structure consisting of composite marbles, equally serviceable to the edifice, but in hue appealing to different tastes. The Republican Party was not sectional, but was truly a Union party; its motto (Webster's reversed, with a vengeance!) ‘Union and Liberty’—i. e., Union before Liberty. It was not a propagandist of negro equality—witness the free States; it² was, therefore, a white man's party.

Such was Seward's bid for the Presidency, seduced by that which led to Webster's fall. Calculating and heartless, Mr. Garrison found it, proceeding from a statesman³ —whom, in spite of rare intellectual and rhetorical gifts, he had never regarded ‘as other than the incarnation of political circumspection—cold in blood, cautious in action, wholly indisposed to anything like “ultraism” in any direction.’

Speaking defensively for the Republican Party, Mr. Seward⁴ says: “I know of only one policy which it has adopted or avowed—namely, the saving of the Territories of the United States, if possible, by constitutional and lawful means, from being the homes for slavery and polygamy.” When or where that party has made any distinctive issue with polygamy, more⁵ than the Democratic Party, we do not know; the statement is obviously made for popular effect. “Only one policy” —not the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, where it now exists by the consent and approval of Mr. Seward and his party; not the abolition of the revolting domestic slave trade; not the repeal, or even modification, of the Fugitive Slave Law; not the prohibition of slavery in any of the Territories—but only to save them, if possible, from its establishment upon their soil;