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

[117] words, all these moralists of the forum and the pulpit whom conscience constrained to draw the line at Texas, thereby gave their complete sanction to the act of their forefathers in striking the inhuman alliance between free and slave institutions, called the Federal Constitution. Mr. Garrison and his disunion associates, on the contrary, put themselves where any of the statesmen of 1787 might have stood, in implacable opposition to the sacrifice (for the sake of Union) of the blacks, and to the guarantee of a slaveholding political supremacy. The deed having been done, a new Revolution was called for;¹ and the only wonder is, not that Mr. Garrison was the first to proclaim it, but that he should have waited so long to perfect his doctrine of immediate emancipation, by coupling it with an equally immediate policy of withdrawal from all part and parcel in the support of a blood-stained Government.

In the domain of individual conscience, the success of both the doctrine and the policy was instantaneous. Nothing more remained to extinguish absolutely the responsibility of the Garrisonian abolitionists for the enslavement of their countrymen. They alone of the entire population of the United States had washed their hands of slavery, historically and in time present; at the South or at the North; in the area cursed by it when the Revolutionary fathers made their compact, or in any subsequent or possible extension of it; intrenched in State and local legislation, or in the Constitution of the United States. All other considerations yielded to this religious purification of themselves before their Creator.

But anti-slavery disunion is seldom weighed in its