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

Edmund Quincy to Henry G. Chapman.

¹ My dear Sir: I received your kind letter on Saturday with² the accompanying Certificate, and should have answered it immediately, had not your most unexpected request for the publication of my letter to you demanded time for mature consideration. My first impulse was, after thanking you for the favorable opinion which it implied, absolutely to decline it, as most repugnant to all my tastes and habits. And I confess that, after well weighing the matter, I can hardly conceive that ‘the early and toil-worn friends of the cause,’ as you well describe them, can derive any support or encouragement from the approbation of their course expressed by one of whose existence, from the retired habits of his life, they have probably never heard. Upon this point, however, you are much more competent to judge than I am; and if the publication of my letter, or anything else that I can say or do, can give the least pleasure to those admirable men, or the smallest assistance to the cause, I should hold myself inexcusable should I withhold it. And perhaps, too, upon my entrance on this new scene of duty, the sacrifice of a possibly false delicacy is not too great a one to make as an initiatory offering. My letter is, therefore, at your disposal, to do with it as you see fit.

From the first agitation of the slavery question, I have admired, and on all suitable occasions vindicated, the spirit and constancy with which the abolitionists defended their own rights, and maintained those of their oppressed countrymen; for a long time past, I have fully assented to the doctrines of the Anti-Slavery Society—the sinfulness of the slave system, and the consequent duty and expediency of its immediate abolition; but I confess that I have arrived very slowly, and I am afraid I might say reluctantly, at the conclusion, that the course pursued by Mr. Garrison and the other true friends of the cause was in accordance with the dictates either of human wisdom or Christian charity. A more accurate knowledge, however, of what their course has really been, and of the difficulties which they have had to encounter; a constantly increasing sense of the enormous wickedness of degrading the children of God and the brethren of Christ into the condition of beasts of burden; and, above all, the contemplation of the example set before us by the Great Captain of our Salvation, in the