to5 flatter England, or to disparage my native land, but to protest against the foul deed of the Free Church of Scotland, in putting into its treasury the price of blood, and giving for it the right hand of Christian fellowship to the American slaveholder;6 to enlist for the overthrow of slavery, by moral instrumentalities, all that is disinterested, humane, and free; to vindicate the American Anti-Slavery Society and its kindred auxiliaries from the aspersions of their betrayers and defamers, and as worthy of the most entire confidence and the most liberal encouragement; to avow principles which lay the axe at the root of all injustice, oppression, and war; and to labor for the overthrow of whatever stands opposed to the kingdom of peace and holiness.This programme was carried out to the letter; but, as in both his previous visits to England, the main object7 was overruled and became subordinate.
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national guilt towards slavery; the abolition corps was already weakened by the absence of Wright, Douglass, and Buffum.
Could the chief himself be spared?
The New England Convention first, and afterwards the Executive1 Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, unanimously answered yes, and a call for funds was immediately made.
There remained the editorial conduct of the Liberator, of which Quincy, Phillips, Charles K. Whipple,2 and Mrs. Chapman offered to assume the not light burden.
To part with wife and children was hard,—all the more because, as in 1840, there was a prospective increase of3 the family.
Mrs. Garrison, with her customary self-abnegation, interposed no obstacles.
In short, Mr. Garrison yielded, and sailed from Boston in the steamship Britan-4 nia on July 16, 1846:
‘I do not go,’ he said in his valedictory to his readers,
3 Ante, 2.363.
6 ‘Her representatives are blameworthy, not because they got money in the Southern States, but because they got it most foully by keeping silence on the subject of slavery. . . . If they had obtained it after having uttered a faithful testimony in the ears of the South, every slave would say, Keep it’ (W. L. G. to the colored people of Boston, at the farewell tendered him by them at Belknap-Street Church, July 15, 1846, reported by Mrs. Chapman in Lib. 16: 118). Cf. Lib. 17: 70, in which Mr. Garrison justifies the reception of money from the South towards the relief of the famine-stricken population of Ireland.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
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