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

The Apostle had not performed his last act of servility in this direction when he arrived in Washington in December and (even on the very day he was dining at the² White House) a motion to invite him to a seat on the floor of the Senate was offered by a Northern member. The Lumpkin exposure and the luckless Address were alleged against the proposed courtesy by an Alabamian³ ‘fire-eater’; but Clay nimbly came to the rescue, repaying the compliments received in New York, and offsetting the Address with Father Mathew's holding aloof from the abolitionists. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi was implacable, saying he would exclude all abolitionists, foreign and domestic, from the chamber. John P. Hale proposed to vote for the resolution, but should be opposed to it as a sanction of the Apostle's course on the subject of slavery. Pearce, of Maryland, thought the precedent a⁴ bad one: to-day it was Clay's ‘Irish patriot,’ to-morrow it might be the Hungarian Kossuth. So the debate was prolonged, with much heat evolved; but the Southern Senators and their doughface allies were divided by⁵ considerations of political expediency, and Father Mathew was admitted by slaveholders to the dishonor of fellowship in their seat of power.

‘The Apostle’ was but an incident in Mr. Garrison's activity for the year 1849. He addressed, with Wendell Phillips, the Judiciary Committee of the Massachusetts⁶ House in favor of disunion; he presided, at Worcester,⁷ over the celebration of West India emancipation, and at the fine anniversary of the American Society in New⁸ York;⁹ he attended the fall meeting of the Pennsylvania¹⁰ Anti-Slavery Society. He wrote freely in the Liberator,