Chapter 6: end of ‘the Liberator.’—1865.
The division among the abolitionists as to their proper attitude towards the Administration, and as to the continuance of the Anti-slavery organization and propaganda, culminates in an utter disagreement between Garrison and Phillips and their respective supporters. The American Anti-slavery Society follows Phillips, and Garrison withdraws from it. A lecturing tour to the Mississippi enables him to sustain the Liberator till the close of the thirty-fifth volume, when he pens his valedictory, and terminates his career as an in-dependent journalist.The debates at the January meetings of the1 Massachusetts Society in Boston had turned almost wholly upon the question of reconstruction and negro suffrage; Mr. Phillips vigorously opposing the readmission of Louisiana or any other of the seceded States with the word white in their constitutions, and declaring that “no emancipation can be effectual, and no freedom real, unless the negro has the ballot and the States are prohibited from enacting laws making any distinction among their citizens on account of race or color.” Lib. 35.18. Mr. Garrison urged that those Northern States which denied suffrage to the blacks within their own borders could not, with any consistency, make a similar denial on the part of the Southern States a sufficient reason for refusing them readmission to the Union, and he therefore proposed the following resolutions as supplementary to the series introduced by Mr. Phillips:
7. Resolved, That if, as reconstructed, Louisiana ought not2 to be admitted to the Union because she excludes her colored population from the polls, then Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and all the Western States ought not to be in the Union for the same reason; and while they are guilty of this proscription, it is not for them to demand of Louisiana a broader scope of republican liberality than they are willing to take in their own case.3