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

The Committee, in their distress, appealed through Birney and Stanton to the Massachusetts Board for succor, or for the requisite permission to send agents into their territory. This appeal was met by a review¹ of the past unhandsome behavior of the Committee towards the Massachusetts Society, and their complicity with a hostile organization; and the final answer, subscribed with the names of Francis Jackson, President, and W. L. Garrison, Corresponding Secretary, was, that the Massachusetts treasury had been exhausted in self-protection, and to give now to the Parent Society would be to risk paying for fresh attacks on itself. ‘Justice to the Society which we represent, and to the cause we espouse, forbids our compliance with their request that the financial agents of the Parent Society may come into this State at the present time.’ In other words, the Board could no longer negotiate with, or cheerfully raise funds for, an Executive Committee of whom it had to be said that there was ‘growing distrust in their clear-sightedness, sound judgment, rigid impartiality, and anti-sectarian spirit.’ The Committee, in despair, called² a special meeting of the American Society to meet in New York on January 15, 1840.³

In the midst of dissensions in which he had himself taken part against his disciple, Benjamin Lundy passed⁴ away in Lowell, La Salle County, Illinois, on August 22, 1839. News travelled slowly from that distant State,⁵ and so it happened that in the issue of the Liberator on the very day following his death, Mr. Garrison had to⁶ notice that ‘our veteran coadjutor in the cause of emancipation (of whom we have always spoken in affectionate and grateful terms, but whose disposition, we have long since had reason to know, is very much altered towards us) is out upon us, in the Genius of Emancipation, in ’