Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

“ [359] comes; and it is for you, women, who hear me, to think what you will do, and what you are willing-I will not say, to consent that those you love should do, but what you are willing to urge them to do, and to send them from your homes, knowing that they will do it, whether they live or die.” The murderous assault upon Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber at Washington by Preston S. Brooks, served to intensify the increasing belligerancy of the Northern temper, to deepen the spreading conviction that the irrepressible conflict would be settled not with the pen through any more fruitless compromises, but in Anglo-Saxon fashion by blood and iron.

Amid this general access of the fighting propensity, Garrison preserved the integrity of his nonresistant principles, his aversion to the use of physical force as an anti-slavery weapon. Men like Charles Stearns talked of shouldering their Sharp's rifles against the Border ruffians as they would against wild beasts. For himself, he could not class any of his fellow-creatures, however vicious and wicked, on the same level with wild beasts. Those wretches were, he granted, as bad and brutal as they were represented by the free State men of Kansas, but to him they were less blameworthy than were their employers and indorsers, the pro-slavery President and his Cabinet, pro-slavery Congressmen, and judges, and doctors of divinity, and editors. Incomparably guilty as these “colossal conspirators against the liberty, peace, happiness, and safety of the republic” were; and, though his moral indignation “against their treasonable course” burned like fire, he, nevertheless, wished them no harm. He shrank from the idea of