Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 1

‘ [93] industry. Yet he makes no public appeals, but goes forward in the quietude and resoluteness of his spirit, husbanding his little resources from town to town, and from State to State. “I would not,” he said to us some months since, “I would not exchange circumstances with any person on earth, if I must thereby relinquish the cause in which I am enlisted.” . . . Within a few months he has travelled about twenty-four hundred miles, of which upwards of sixteen hundred were performed on foot!—during which time he has held nearly fifty public meetings.¹ Rivers and mountains vanish in his path; midnight finds him wending his solitary way over an unfrequented road; the sun is anticipated in his rising. Never was moral sublimity of character better illustrated.’

Lundy lost no time, after his arrival in Boston, in convening as many clergymen of different sects as he could persuade to come and listen to him at Mr. Collier's house, but the names of the eight who are said to have attended² the meeting (March 17, 1828), and given their cordial approval, in writing, of his plans and paper, are not recorded. ‘William L. Garrison, who sat in the room, also expressed his approbation of my doctrines,’ wrote Lundy. The clerical gentlemen, however, were unwilling to initiate any active movement, or to take part in the formation of an anti-slavery committee or society such as Lundy urged them to organize; and all that he could obtain from them was their signatures to a paper recommending the Genius to the patronage of the public. In his obituary tribute to Lundy, eleven years later, Mr. Garrison gave his recollections of this meeting, and of the failure of Lundy's arguments and appeals to move his hearers:

‘He might as well have urged the stones in the streets to³ cry out in behalf of the perishing captives. O the moral cowardice, ’