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

The answer to this question would presently come from Kansas itself (from John Brown, namely) with the aid of Gerrit Smith, who had got bravely back up the ‘dam of non-resistance’ which he was once carried over. He was¹ now even more prominent than Beecher and Parker in bestowing and soliciting arms for Kansas; and, from a Revolutionary standpoint, nothing could be better than his remarks, full of insight, at a Kansas convention in Buffalo, July 10, 1856:

Most of you are relying largely on political action, and² especially on the next election, to save Kansas. Unhappy reliance! I speak deliberately when I say, that nothing so much as this reliance is now in the way of the deliverance of Kansas. You are looking to ballots when you should be looking to bayonets; counting up voters when you should be mustering armed, and none but armed, emigrants; electioneering for candidates for civil rulers when you should be enquiring for military rulers. All the time that you are making this mistake, slavery is fortifying itself in Kansas, and weakening and expelling liberty. . . . There was a time when slavery could have been ended by political action. But that time has gone by—and, as I apprehend, forever. There was not virtue enough in the American people to bring slavery to a bloodless termination; and all that now remains for them is to bring it to a bloody one. No man has called longer than I have on the American people to vote slavery to death. For many years, however, I have well-nigh despaired of their doing so, and for the last month or two I have entirely despaired of it. . . .

No, the American people have never proposed to vote³ slavery to death, and they do not now propose to do so. The only question that remains is, whether they are prepared to put it to death by violence. They think that they are not. But I think that they are. I admit that they are not in purpose. Nevertheless, I think that they are in effect, for I trust that they are ready to put it to a violent death in Kansas— and in that death will be involved the whole of American slavery. . . .

But why do I conclude that the North will put slavery in Kansas to a violent death? Because I am certain that the South will persevere in fighting for Kansas, and that the North will do so too. If all manhood has not departed from us, we will