previous next
“ [309] we at agreement,” seemed to the American Isaiah to describe exactly the character of the National Constitution. “Slavery is a combination of death and hell,” he declares, with righteous wrath, “and with it the North have made a covenant, and are at agreement. As an element of the Government it is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. As a component part of the Union, it is necessarily a national interest. Divorced from Northern protection, it dies; with that protection it enlarges its boundaries, multiplies its victims, and extends its ravages.”

The announcement of this new radicalism caused a sensation. Many genuine Garrisonian Abolitionists recoiled from a policy of disunion. Lydia Maria Child and James S. Gibbon of the Executive Committee of the National Society hastened to disavow for the society all responsibility for the disunion sentiment of the editor of the Liberator. His new departure seemed to them “foreign to the purpose for which it was organized.” Like all new ideas, it was a swordbearer, and proved a decided disturber of the peace. The Union-loving portion of the free States had never taken to the Abolition movement, for the reason that it tended to disturb the stability of their idol. But now the popular hatred of Abolitionism was intensified by the avowal of a distinct purpose on the part of its leader to labor for the separation of the sections. The press of the North made the most of this design to render altogether odious the small band of moral reformers, to reduce to a nullity their influence upon public opinion.

Notwithstanding its rejection by James Gibbons and Lydia Maria Child the new idea of the dissolution

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Lydia Maria Child (2)
James Gibbons (1)
James S. Gibbon (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: