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

Those whom the coat fitted were, as we have seen in Phelps's case, quick to put it on. Mr. Garrison had purposely mentioned no names in denouncing the intriguers; but as quickly as the exigencies of the Liberator permitted, they unmasked themselves in reclamations which confirmed the truth of his allegations, while showing the extent of their bitterness towards him, and their confidence in soon having him under their feet. They smarted under the term ‘plot’ as they did under the epithet ‘clerical,’ which had been rightly conjoined with it. Torrey was the first to appear, in ‘the full tide of his priestly bile,’ and set the tone of this personal warfare¹ by menacing Mr. Garrison's ‘brassy brow’ with exposure, charging him with ‘dastardly insinuation’ about his (Torrey's) failing zeal in the cause, and with being ‘one of the most bigoted and unfair sectarians in our land.’ St. Clair confessed that the Fitchburg resolutions were concocted by himself with Torrey's approval; accused the Liberator of preaching a no-government doctrine which incapacitated it from heartily urging abolitionists to do their political duty; pronounced the references to himself ‘an unprovoked and vile attack on one you professed to regard as a friend,’ and said, ‘I shall take the liberty to appeal from your imperial decision.’ Phelps, who had been the least distinctly implicated, embodied in his rejoinder a recent letter from Torrey,² affirming that ‘the goodness of our project’ was evidenced by the first movement of the opposition ‘to lie it down’; then denied having seen the Fitchburg resolutions until after they were passed, but promised to support them at the annual meeting. He claimed a right to work for the cause ‘without doing it through your paper, and without coming and kneeling devoutly to ask your Holiness whether I may do so or not.’ Mr. Garrison's charges were natural to ‘one whose overgrown self-conceit had wrought him into the belief that his mighty self was abolition incarnate.’ So, in a subsequent communication: ‘You seem still to be possessed with the old idea that you³ ’