Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

[19] more effectual! And yet he is the man—mirabile dictu!— whose election causes seven of the slaveholding States to revolt, and in hot haste withdraw from the Union! Surely they must be desperately hard to “conciliate” !

No transformation was ever more sudden, overwhelming, and amazing than that effected by the bombardment¹ and capture of Fort Sumter, and President Lincoln's call² for troops to suppress the rebellion. That which the South had expected would complete the demoralization of the North, and be the signal for riots and outbreaks in its great cities, evoked a whirlwind of patriotism that swept all before it, and caused “such an uprising in every city, town, and hamlet of the North, without distinction of sect or party, as to seem,” Lib. 31.66. wrote Mr. Garrison, ‘like a general resurrection from the dead.’ To those who were puzzled to know how he, as a disunionist, could rejoice in the determination of the Government to crush the rebellion which sought to dissolve the Union, he speedily made clear, in two lucid editorials, the difference between³ Northern Disunionists and Southern Secessionists, and the utter absence of any justification for the latter. Neither he nor the American Anti-Slavery Society had ever advocated the right of a State to secede from the Union ad libitum, without reason; and only a revolutionary right, for the causes set forth in the Declaration of Independence, could justify the South in its course.

‘On the issue raised by the secessionists,’ he reiterated, in⁴ rejoinder to a letter from Beriah Green,

they are wholly and fearfully in the wrong, while President Lincoln is indisputably in the right. On his side all the elements of freedom will coalesce, sympathetically and approvingly, as against their thoroughly infernal spirit and purposes, and a thousand times over wish him success in the struggle. At the same time, as pertaining to a continued union with the South, God grant that the North may speedily see the folly, danger, and iniquity of trying it any longer! Let . . . the North take the right, with not a Border Slave State left to mar her free policy, and let the South take the left, and the consequences!