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

[167]

W. L. Garrison to G. W. Benson

Boston, Sept. 23, 1837.

¹ With regard to our meeting at Worcester on Wednesday² next, I cannot urge upon you to attend it, if it will interfere materially with your business. But the crisis is a momentous one, and perhaps we have never needed a stronger expression of feeling and sentiment from the thorough-going friends of our cause than at the present time. I hope, therefore, that you will contrive, by hook or by crook, to be at Worcester; for the meeting cannot now avoid a discussion upon the ‘Appeal,’ and its decision will be looked for with great anxiety all over the land. The condemnation ought to be explicit—it ought to be strong—it ought to be decisive; especially in view of the criminal and extraordinary course pursued by the Executive Committee and Emancipator at New York. Be assured, we have too much sectarianism at headquarters. There appears to be ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark.’ I am troubled exceedingly in spirit at what I am constrained to consider the blind, temporizing policy which the Board at New York seem determined to pursue. Only look at it!— Five clergymen, professing to be conspicuous abolitionists, make a public appeal, in which they bring severe and vital charges, not merely against the Liberator, but abolitionists and their course. Another appeal, backing this up, but still more grave and general in its charges, is issued at Andover, signed by thirty-nine professed friends. Then follows a letter from J. T. Woodbury, one of the ‘seventy agents.’ All these are copied exultingly into various religious and political pro-slavery newspapers, and our enemies are rejoicing in the assertion of Fitch and Towne, that nine-tenths of the abolitionists in New England agree with them in opinion. The Friend of Man, the Herald of Freedom, the Vermont Telegraph, and various antislavery societies, have deemed the whole affair as worthy of special notice—yet, in view of all these things, our friends in New York have preserved unbroken silence! Will not our enemies quote the old adage, ‘Silence gives consent,’ and claim the Emancipator as privately favoring the Appeal? Our friends at New York may rely upon it, that the course which they have resolved to pursue, respecting this matter, will very much displease the great body of abolitionists, and alienate them and their money from the Parent Society.