This text is part of:
[177]
a silver tea-service, elaborately chased and properly inscribed, together with a silk purse containing ten sovereigns, by the anti-slavery ladies of Edinburgh, in the Brighton-Street Church. ‘Such tokens,’ wrote the recipient to Richard Webb, ‘while they are cheering to1 me at the present crisis, when such malignant efforts are making to cover me with popular odium,2 make me feel as though I had yet to perform much, fully to deserve them.’3
On November 4, Mr. Garrison sailed from Liverpool on the Acadia. A large party of friends—representatives4 of the three kingdoms—who had gathered the night before expressly to bid him farewell at the house of Richard Rathbone, waved him their long adieus.
The voices of Thompson and Webb and H. C. Wright swelled the cheering led by Frederick Douglass.
More than twenty years would elapse before the voyager's eye should again behold the pleasant English shores now vanishing behind him. From Halifax on the eleventh5 day he pencilled a line to Elizabeth Pease, informing her of the smooth and safe passage, attended, nevertheless, with more than the ordinary discomforts for his overtaxed system.6 On November 17, he landed in
1 Ms. Oct. 24, 1846.
2 Speaking in the City Hall at Glasgow with reference to the underhand calumniation of himself and his associates, Mr. Garrison ‘solemnly declared, after an eighteen years anti-slavery experience in the United States of America, that he had seen nothing more wicked or malicious, more wanton and cruel, than he had beheld within the last three or four weeks emanating from the apologists of the Free Church and the Evangelical Alliance’ (Glasgow Argus, Oct. 29, 1846; and see, in the Argus for Oct. 15, Mr. Garrison's dissection of a hostile article in the Scottish Guardian. Further, for charges of infidelity by Dr. Campbell in his Christian Witness, see Lib. 17: 5, 21, 121; and by Dr. Cunningham, Lib. 17: 9). His clerical traducers never faced him in public.
3 A breakfast by invitation with George Combe, perhaps on Oct. 22, in company with Thompson, Douglass, and Buffum, was another pleasurable incident of this visit to Edinburgh ( “Life of Douglass,” ed. 1882, p. 245).
5 Ms. Nov. 15, 1846.
6 On December 11, 1846, Mr. Garrison wrote to Geo. W. Benson (Ms.): ‘The Garrisonian ranks are filling up. This morning, dear Helen presented me with a new-comer into this breathing world,—a daughter,—and the finest babe ever yet born in Boston!’ On Dec. 19 he informed S. J. May (Ms.) that the little girl had been named Elizabeth Pease. Wendell Phillips wrote to her namesake on Jan. 31, 1847 (Ms.): ‘Garrison's child is a nice, healthy, dark-eyed little thing, much like his other little one, Helen. I am glad he has called it E. P., for you will feel more fully than ever convinced that the best ones on your side the water do not love and value you more than the best one here does.’
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.