Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[356] amidst the execrations of the universe, she will traverse the world on its track, dealing her bolts upon its head, and dashing against it her condemning brand. We repeat it, every man knows that slavery is a curse. Whoever denies this, his lips libel his heart. Try him! Clank the chains in his ears, and tell him they are for him; give him an hour to prepare his wife and children for a life of slavery; bid him make haste, and get ready their necks for the yoke, and their wrists for the cofflechains; then look at his pale lips and trembling knees, and you have nature's testimony against slavery. . . .

As to the tact displayed by you in the management of your cause, it certainly indicates great worldly shrewdness. In England, you could eulogize the Government, advocate free trade, and warmly commend the abolition of West India slavery as ‘bound up with much of the glory’ of that country; for this was sailing with both wind and tide. In the United States, your admiration is boundless for the Union, the Constitution, the Government, even the Mexican War, unparalleled for its turpitude, because waged expressly for the extension and perpetuity of slavery. All this is congenial with the popular taste. But as for free trade, the anti-slavery enterprise, etc., these are questions of ‘domestic policy’ with which you cannot properly meddle, because they have not yet become victorious! You will find, sir, in the end, that ‘honesty is the best policy,’ and that no amount of skilful diplomacy can be advantageously substituted for manly rectitude. Strive as you may to propitiate the slave power, by which this Government is moulded and directed, it will be only to your own degradation, and without attaining the end you desire. Letter to Kossuth, p. 58.

The Hungarian refugee had hardly turned his back upon the national capital when the House, by a narrow vote, just failed of resolving that South Carolina (like¹ the seaboard slave States generally) was justified in imprisoning the black sailors of a British ship driven into² port by stress of weather—treatment worse than that which the Japanese expedition was ostensibly ordered to³ redress. He passed into Maryland and Pennsylvania, and was received by the Legislatures and Governors⁴ while a bill was pending in each State to prevent the⁵ entrance of free negroes. Traversing Ohio, which disfranchised its black citizens, he essayed his pro-slavery