Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

“ [308] their designs, their feelings, utterly diverse from ours? Why, then, be subject to their dominion? Why not have the Union dissolved in form as it is in fact, especially if the form gives ample protection to the slave system, by securing for it all the physical force of the North? It is not treason against the cause of liberty to cry,” Down with every slave-holding Union! “Therefore, I raise that cry. And O that I had a voice louder than a thousand thunders, that it might shake the land and electrify the dead-the dead in sin, I mean-those slain by the hand of slavery.”

A few weeks later the first peal of this thunder broke upon the startled ears of the country through the columns of the Liberator. The May meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society was drawing near, and the reformer, now entirely ready to enter upon an agitation looking to the dissolution of the Union, suggested “the duty of making the repeal of the Union between the North and the South the grand rallying point until it be accomplished, or slavery cease to pollute our soil. We are for throwing all the means, energies, actions, purposes, and appliances of the genuine friends of liberty and republicanism into this one channel,” he goes on to announce, “and for measuring the humanity, patriotism, and piety of every man by this one standard. This question can no longer be avoided, and a right decision of it will settle the controversy between freedom and slavery.” The stern message of Isaiah to the Jews, beginning, “Hear the word of the Lord, ye scornful men that rule this people. Because ye have said, We have made a covenant with death and with hell are ”