John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison

The Anti-slavery epoch presents a perfect example of the rise, progress, and victory of a moral cause. This cause was so obvious, so inevitable, its roots were so deep in human nature and in history, that its victory was assured from the beginning. In studying it, all our wonder and all our attention may be reserved for the manner of its rise, the form of its advance, and the mode of its victory.

Historians are apt to apportion praise and blame to the Abolitionists, to the Southern leaders, to the Republican Party, to the generals during the war, to the troops upon one side or the other in the terrible conflict. But such appraisements are either the aftermath of partisan feeling, or they are the judgments of men who have not realized the profundity and the complexity of the whole movement — the inevitability not only of the outcome, but of the process. That Garrison should have disapproved of the entry of Abolition into party politics, and that he should have raved like a hen upon the river