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Chapter 1: ‘no union with non-slaveholders!’—1861.

The final resolve of the South to have no Union with nonslaveholding States creates a Union-saving panic in the North, and secures Republican assent in Congress to the most abject conditions of a restoration of the Status quo by Constitutional amendment, with explicit guarantees for the perpetuity of slavery. Concurrently, mob violence against the abolitionists breaks out afresh, with Wendell Phillips for its chief object in Boston. Garrison employs his pen actively against the compromising cowardice of Seward and other Republican leaders. He sides with the Federal Government as against the Constitutional pretences of the secessionists, but would seize the opportunity for a peaceable separation. He reviews President Lincoln's inaugural address with Anti-slavery fidelity. The attack on Sumter breaks the spell that has bound the North, and Garrison lends his full weight to the wave of public feeling which resists the overthrow of the Union. He counsels a temporary self-effacement of the abolitionists, and omits the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-slavery Society. He defends his consistency as a non-resistant and (for the benefit of his English friends) as an abolitionist in his support of the Government at this crisis. Nevertheless, he censures the President's revocation of a military edict of emancipation, and his wishy-washy message to Congress in December. He draws up a memorial to that body, praying for an abolition enactment with compensation to loyal slave-holders. He enforces John Quincy Adams's doctrine of the war powers of the Government over slavery, and, among his Liberator mottoes, substitutes for “ the United States Constitution is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell” the more timely “proclaim Liberty throughout all the land, to all the inhabitants thereof! ”


‘To me,’ wrote George Thompson to Mr. Garrison, on1 hearing of Lincoln's election,

it seems that the triumph just achieved has placed the cause in a new, a critical, and a trying position; demanding (if it be possible) additional vigilance, inflexible steadfastness to fundamental moral principles, and unrelaxed energy in the employment of anti-slavery means. You have now to grapple with the new doctrine of Republican conservatism, and will be called to contend with those in power who, having gained their object by the assistance derived from the abolition ranks, will use their power to repress, if not to punish, the spread of the true gospel of freedom. You have now to make genuine converts of those who have as yet only been baptized into the faith of non-extension, and whose zeal in that direction is mere white-man-ism. Forgetting the things that are behind, you have to reach forth to the things that are before, pressing towards the object you had in view when starting— the utter extermination of slavery wheresoever it may exist.

The fears of this sagacious observer were quickly justified. While the abolitionists, without pause, renewed in2 the fall their campaign of petitions for the perfecting (in a disunion sense) of the Massachusetts Personal Liberty

1 Nov. 23, 1860; Lib. 30.198.

2 Lib. 30.186.

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