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Sabbath—to observe every day as holy unto the Lord.
It was no Jacobinism that I wished to advocate.
But the leading, allabsorbing object of the Liberator shall continue to be, as it has been hitherto, the overthrow of American slavery—not to conflict with any religious sect or political party.
Before this seemingly happy settlement of the
Liberator's continuance—this unlucky makeshift, as the event proved—and amid the depression caused in the Benson circle by their two-fold bereavement,
1 Mr. Garrison sat down to compose the fifth annual report of the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society.
Not a trace of despondency was to be found in the opening sentence: ‘The
2 tone which the
Managers . . . would assume . . . is one of joyful hope to the manacled slaves—of sincere congratulation to the friends of human liberty, universally—of ardent gratitude to God.’
Yet these words were read in the loft of a stable, the only place obtainable by the Society for its meeting:
Let the winds carry the tale to the four quarters of the3 earth—in Boston, in the year of our Lord, 1837, in the sixtyfirst year of American independence, not a single meetinghouse, not a hall of any magnitude, can be obtained on any terms,—not even for money at an exorbitant price!—in which abolitionists may plead the cause of the trampled slave!
But, it is believed, there is not a single pulpit in this city4 to which a slaveholding preacher cannot find ready access, even for the avowed purpose of vindicating the soul-destroying system of slavery as a divine institution, from the Holy Scriptures!
Nor is there, we presume, a public hall which cannot be occupied by jugglers, mountebanks, ballad-singers, rope-dancers, religious impostors, etc., etc., as they shall wish to hire.5
