Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

[107] It was a virtual defence of slavery against foreign criticism by the old tu quoque retort—Our laboring class is better off than yours; and distinctly took ground against immediate emancipation.¹ Mr. Garrison dismissed it curtly, having yielded the floor to a correspondent on the spot; but, in spite of his physical indisposition to write at length on any subject, he was led some months afterward into an elaborate critique of the same divine, with consequences too important to permit of its being passed over. ‘As you have publicly reported me on the sick list,’ he writes to Knapp from Brooklyn, July 19, 1836, ‘you may now say that I am somewhat better. I send² you some strictures upon a speech recently made by Dr. Beecher, at Pittsburgh, respecting the Sabbath. If they are not so vigorous as they might be, ascribe the deficiency to my bodily debility.’ Four columns of fine print followed this announcement, with no trace of bodily debility to be found in them.

The public meeting addressed by Dr. Beecher had been called ‘to take into consideration the increasing desecration of the Sabbath day.’ The subject was one to which Mr. Garrison was fully alive. A few days before composing his editorial article, he had written as follows to his wife from Providence, while en route to Fall River:³

As a specimen of the growing wickedness of the times, take⁴ the fact that a military company is to arrive here by appointment to-morrow (the Sabbath), from New York, and that another military company is to turn out here to escort them through the streets! In the afternoon they are to march to the Rev. Dr. Crocker's meeting-house, where I suppose they have been specially invited. Guns, bayonets, swords, plumes, banners, epaulets in church on the Sabbath! It seems a studied, and is a most aggravated, profanation of the day.