Chapter 3: the man begins his ministry.
Some time in August, 1829, Garrison landed in Baltimore, and began with Lundy the editorship of The Genius of Universal Emancipation. Radical as the Park Street Church address was, it had, nevertheless, ceased to represent in one essential matter his anti slavery convictions and principles. The moral impetus and ground-swell of the address had carried him beyond the position where its first flood of feeling had for the moment left him. During the composition of the address he was transported with grief and indignation at the monstrous wrong which slavery did the slaves and the nation. He had not thought out for himself any means to rid both of the curse. The white heat of the address destroyed for the instant all capacity for such thinking. “Who can be amazed, temperate, and furious — in a moment? No man. The expedition of his violent love outran the pauser reason” He had accepted the colonization scheme as an instrument for removing the evil, and called on all good citizens “to assist in establishing auxiliary colonization societies in every State, county, and town” ; and implored “their direct and liberal patronage to the parent society.” He had not apparently, so much as dreamed of any other than gradual emancipation. “The emancipation of all [70] the slaves of this generation is most assuredly out of the question,” he said; “the fabric which now towers above the Alps, must be taken away brick by brick, and foot by foot, till it is reduced so low that it may be overturned without burying the nation in its ruins. Years may elapse before the completion of of the achievement; generations of blacks may go down to the grave, manacled and lacerated, without a hope for their children.” He was on the Fourth of July a firm and earnest believer in the equity and efficacy of gradualism. But after that day, and some time before nis departure for Baltimore, he began to think on this subject. The more he thought the less did gradualism seem defensible on moral grounds. John Wesley had said that slavery was the “sum of all villainies” ; it was indeed the sin of sins, and as such ought to be abandoned not gradually but immediately. Slave-holding was sin and slaveholders were sinners. The sin and sinner should both be denounced as such and the latter called to instant repentance, and the duty of making immediate restitution of the stolen liberties of their slaves. This was the tone ministers of religion held everywhere toward sin and sinners, and this should be the tone held by the preachers of Abolition toward slavery, and slaveholders. To admit the principle of gradualism was for Abolition to emasculate itself of its most virile quality. Garrison, consequently rejected gradualism as a weapon, and took up instead the great and quickening doctrine of immediatism. Lundy did not know of this change in the convictions of his coadjutor until his arrival in Baltimore. Then Garrison frankly unburdened himself and declared his decision to conduct [71] his campaign against the national iniquity along the lines of immediate and unconditional emancipation. The two on this new radicalism did not see eye to eye. But Lundy with sententious shrewdness and liberality suggested to the young radical: “Thee may put thy initials to thy articles and I will put my initials to mine, and each will bear his own burden.” And the arrangement pleased the young radical, for it enabled him to free his soul of the necessity which was then sitting heavily upon it. The precise state of his mind in respect of the question at this juncture in its history and in his own is made plain enough in his salutatory address in The Genius of Universal Emancipation. The vow made in Bennington ten months before to devote his life to philanthrophy, and the dedication of himself made six months afterward to the extirpation of American slavery, he solemnly renews and reseals in Baltimore. He does not hate intemperance and warless, but slavery more, and those, therefore, he formally relegates thenceforth to a place of secondary importance in the endeavors of the future. It is obvious that the colonization scheme has no strong hold upon his intelligence. He does not conceal his respect for it as an instrument of freedom, but he puts no high value on its utility. “It may pluck a few leaves,” he remarks, “from the Bohon Upas, but can neither extract its roots nor destroy its withering properties. Viewed as an auxiliary, it deserves encouragement; but as a remedy it is altogether inadequate.” But this was not all. As a remedy, colonization was not only altogether inadequate, its influence was indirectly pernicious, in that it lulled the popular mind into “a belief that [72] the monster has received his mortal wound.” He perceived that this resultant indifference and apathy operated to the advantage of slavery, and to the injury of freedom. Small, therefore, as was the good which the Colonization Society was able to achieve, it was mixed with no little ill. Although Garrison has not yet begun to think on the.subject, to examine into the motives and purposes of the society, it does not take a prophet to foresee that some day he will. He had already arrived at conclusions in respect of the rights of the colored people “to choose their own dwelling place,” and against the iniquity of their expatriation, which cut directly at the roots of the colonization scheme. Later the pro-slavery character of the society will be wholly revealed to him. But truth in the breast of a reformer as of others must needs follow the great law of moral growth, first the blade, then the ear, and then the full corn in the ear. It is enough that he has made the tremendous step from gradual to immediate and unconditional emancipation on the soil. At this period he tested the disposition of slaveholders to manumit their slaves. The Colonization Society had given it out that there was no little desire on the part of many masters to set their slaves free. All that was wanted for a practical domonstation in this direction was the assurance of free transportation out of the country for the emancipated slaves. Lundy had made arrangement for the transportation of fifty slaves to Hayti and their settlement in that country. So he and Garrison advertised this fact in the Genius, but they waited in vain fora favorable response from the Southstanding [73] the following humane inducement which this advertisement offered: “the price of passage will be advanced, and everything furnished of which they may stand in need, until they shall have time to prepare their houses and set in to work.” No master was moved to take advantage of the opportunity. This was discouraging to the believers in the efficacy of colonization as a potent anti-slavery instrument. But Garrison was no such believer. With unerring moral instinct he had from the start placed his reliance “on nothing but the eternal principles of justice for the speedy overthrow of slavery.” He obtained at this period an intimate personal knowledge of the free colored people. He saw that they were not essentially unlike other races-that there was nothing morally or intellectually peculiar about them, and that the evil or the good which they manifested was the common property of mankind in similar circumstances. He forthwith became their brave defender against the common slanders of the times. “There is a prevalent disposition among all classes to traduce the habits and morals of our free blacks,” he remarked in the Genius. “The most scandalous exaggerations in regard to their condition are circulated by a thousand mischievous tongues, and no reproach seems to them too deep or unmerited. Vile and malignant indeed is this practice, and culpable are they who follow it. We do not pretend to say that crime, intemperance, and suffering, to a considerable extent, cannot be found among the free blacks; but we do assert that they are as moral, peaceable, and industrious as that class of the whites who are, like them, in indigent circumstances-and [74] far less intemperate than the great body of foreign immigrants who infest and corrupt our shores.” This idea of the natural equality of the races he presented in the Genius a few weeks before with Darwinian breadth in the following admirable sentences: “I deny the postulate that God has made, by an irreversible decree, or any inherent qualities, one portion of the human race superior to another. No matter how many breeds are amalgamated-no matter how many shades of color intervene between tribes or nations give them the same chances to improve, and a fair start at the same time, and the result will be equally brilliant, equally productive, equally grand.” At the same time that he was making active, personal acquaintance with the free colored people, he was making actual personal acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery also. “The distinct application of a whip, and the shrieks of anguish” of the slave, his residence in Baltimore had taught him was “nothing uncommon” in that city. Such an instance had come to him while in the street where the office of the Genius was located. It was what was occuring at almost all hours of the day and in almost all parts of the town. He had not been in Baltimore a month when he saw a specimen of the brutality of slavery on the person of a negro, who had been mercilessly flogged. On his back were thirty-seven gashes made with a cowskin, while on his head were many bruises besides. It was a Sunday morning, fresh from his terrible punishment, that the poor fellow had found the editors of the Genius, who, with the compassion of brothers, took him in, dressed his [75] wounds, and cared for him for two days. Such an experience was no new horror to Lundy, but it was doubtless Garrison's first lesson in that line, and it sank many fathoms deep into his heart. Maryland was one of the slave-breeding States and Baltimore a slave emporium. There was enacted the whole business of slavery as a commercial enterprise. Here the human chattels were brought and here warehoused in jails and other places of storage and detention. Here they were put up at public auction, and knocked down to the highest bidder, and from here they were shipped to New Orleans, the great distributing center for such merchandise. He heard what Lundy had years before heard, the wail of captive mothers and fathers, wives, husbands and children, torn from each other; like Lundy, “he felt their pang of distress ; and the iron entered his soul.” He could not hold his peace in the midst of such abominations, but boldly exposed and denounced them. His indignation grew hot when he saw that Northern vessels were largely engaged in the coastwise slave-trade; and when, to his amazement, he learned that the ship Francis, owned by Francis Todd, a Newburyport merchant, had sailed for New Orleans with a gang of seventy-five slaves, his indignation burst into blaze. He blazoned the act and the name of Francis Todd in the Genius, and did verily what he had resolved to do, viz., “to cover with thick infamy all who were concerned in this nefarious business,” the captain as well as the owner of the ill-freighted ship. He did literally point at these men the finger of scorn. Every device known to the printer's art for concentrating the reader's attention [76] upon particular words and sentences, Garrison made skillful use of in his articles — from the deep damnation of the heavy black capitals in which he printed the name Francis Todd, to the small caps in which appeared the words, “sentenced to solitary confinement for life,” and which he flanked with two terrible indices. But the articles did not need such embellishment. They were red hot branding irons without them. One can almost smell the odor of burning flesh as he reads the words:It is no worse to fit out piratical cruisers or to engage in the foreign slave-trade, than to pursue a similar trade along our coast; and the men who have the wickedness to participate therein, for the purpose of keeping up wealth should be sentenced to solitary confinement for life; they are the enemies of their own species — highway robbers, and murderers; and their final doom will be, unless they speedily repent, to occupy the lowest depths of perdition. I know that our laws make a distinction in this matter. I know that the man who is allowed to freight his vessel with slaves at home, for a distant market, would be thought worthy of death if he should take a similar freight on the coast of Africa; but I know, too, that this distinction is absurd, and at war with the common sense of mankind, and that God and good men regard it with abhorrence. I recollect that it was always a mystery in Newburyport how Mr. Todd contrived to make profitable voyages to New Orleans and other places, when other merchants, with as fair an opportunity to make money, and sending to the same ports at the same time invariably made fewer successful speculations. [77] The mystery seems to be unravelled. Any man can gather up riches if he does not care by what means they are obtained.A copy of the Genius, containing this article Garrison sent to the owner of the ship Francis. What followed made it immediately manifest that the branding irons of the reformer had burned home with scarifying effect. Mr. Todd's answer to the strictures was a suit at law against the editors of the Genius for five thousand dollars in damages. But this was not all. The Grand Jury for Baltimore indicted them for publishing “a gross and malicious libel against Francis Todd and Nicholas Brown.” This was at the February Term, 1830. On the first day of March following, Garrison was tried. He was ably and eloquently defended by Charles Mitchell, a young lawyer of the Baltimore Bar. But the prejudice of judge and jury rendered the verdict of guilty a foregone conclusion. April 17, 1830, the Court imposed a penalty of fifty dollars and costs, which, with the fine amounted in all to nearly one hundred dollars. The fine and costs Garrison could not pay, and he was therefore committed to jail as a common malefactor. His confinement lasted seven weeks. He did not languish during this period. His head and hands were in fact hardly ever more active than during the term of his imprisonment. Shut out by Maryland justice from work without the jail, he found and did that which needed to be done within “high walls and huge.” He was an extraordinary prisoner and was treated with extraordinary consideration by the Warden. He proved himself a genuine evangel to the prisoners, visiting them in their cells, cheering them [78] by his bouyant and benevolent words, giving them what he had, a brother's sympathy, which to these illfated ones, was more than gold or silver. He indited for such of them as he deemed deserving, letters and petitions to the Governor praying their pardon; and he had the great satisfaction of seeing many of his efforts in this regard crowned with success. But more than this his imprisonment afforded him an opportunity for a closer acquaintance with the barbarism of slavery than he could possibly have made had he lived otherwise in Baltimore. A Southern jail was not only the place of detention of offenders against social justice, but of slaves waiting for the next market-day, of recaptured fugitives waiting for their owners to reclaim them. Here they were huddled and caged, pitiful and despairing in their misery. Such scenes sickened the young reformer every day. God had opened to him the darkest chapter in the book of the negroes' wrongs. Here is a page from that black volume of oppression and cruelty, the record of which he has preserved in the following graphic narrative:
During my late incarceration in Baltimore prison, four men came to obtain a runaway slave. He was brought out of his cell to confront his master, but pretended not to know himdid not know that he had ever seen him before-could not recollect his name. Of course the master was exceedingly irritated. “ Don't you remember,” said he, “ when I gave you not long since thirty-nine lashes under the apple-tree? Another time when I gave you a sound flogging in the barn? Another time when you was scourged for giving me the lie, by saying that the horse was in a good condition?” “ Yes,” [79] replied the slave, whose memory was thus quickened, “I do recollect. You have beaten me cruelly without cause; you have not given me enough to eat and drink; and I don't want to go back again. I wish you to sell me to another master. I had rather even go to Georgia than to return home!” “I'll let you know, you villain,” said the master, “that my wishes and not yours, are to be consulted. I'll learn you how to run away again.”The other men advised him to take the black home, and cut him up in inch pieces for his impudence, obstinacy, and desertion-swearing tremendously all the while. The slave was ordered back to his cell. Then ensued the following colloquy between Garrison and the master: G.-“Sir, what right have you to that poor creature?” M.-“My father left him to me.” G.-“Suppose your father had broken into a bank and stolen ten thousand dollars, and safely bequeathed that as a legacy; could you conscientiously keep the money? For myself, I had rather rob any bank to an indefinite amount than kidnap a fellow-being, or hold him in bondage; the sin would be less injurious to society, and less sinful in the sight of God.” M.-“Perhaps you would like to buy the slave and give him his liberty?” G.-“Sir, I am a poor man; and were I ever so opulent, it would be necessary, on your part, to make out a clear title to the services of the slave before I could conscientiously make a bargaina” [80] M.-“Well, sir, I can prove from the Bible that slavery is right.” G.-“Ah! that is a precious book — the rule of conduct. I have always supposed that its spirit was directly opposed to everything in the shape of fraud and oppression. However, sir, I should be glad to hear your text.” M. (hesitatingly)--“Ham — Noah's curse, you know.” G. (hastily)-“Oh, sir, you build on a very slender foundation. Granting even-what remains to be proved — that the Africans are the descendants of Ham, Noah's curse was a prediction of future servitude, and not an injunction to oppress. Pray, sir, is it a careful desire to fulfill the Scriptures, or to make money, that induces you to hold your fellow-men in bondage?” M. (excitedly)-“Why, sir, do you really think that the slaves are beings like ourselves?-that is, I mean do you believe that they possess the same faculties and capacities as the whites?” G. (energetically)-“Certainly, sir, I do not know that there is any moral or intellectual quality in the curl of the hair, or the color of the skin. I cannot conceive why a black man may not as reasonably object to my color, as I to his. Sir, it is not a black face that I detest, but a black heart-and I find it very often under a white skin.” M. (derisively)-“Well, sir, how should you like to see a black man President of the United States?” G. (severely)-“As to that, sir, I am a true Republican, and bow to the will of the majority. If the people prefer a black President, I should cheerfully [81] submit; and if he be qualified for the station, may peradventure give him my vote.” M. (triumphantly)-“How should you like to have a black man marry your daughter?” G. (making a home thrust and an end of the dia logue)--“I am not married — I have no daughter. Sir, I am not familiar with your practices; but allow me to say, that slaveholders generally should be the last persons to affect fastidiousness on that point; for they seem to be enamored with amalgamation,” Garrison's pen was particularly busy during the term of his imprisonment. He paid his respects to the State's Attorney who prosecuted him, to the judge who condemned him, and to Francis Todd, the owner of the ship Francis. He prepared and scattered broadcast a true account of his trial, showing how the liberty of the press had been violated in the case. He did not doubt that it would astonish Europe if it were known there “that an American citizen lies incarcerated in prison, for having denounced slavery and its abettors in his own country.” The fact created no little astonishment in America. Slavery became distinctly connected for the first time with abridgments of the freedom of the press, and the right of free speech. And the cause of the slave became involved with the Constitutional liberties of the republic. In punishing Garrison, the Abolitionist, the rights of Garrison the white freeman were trampled on. And white freemen in the North, who cared nothing for Abolitionism, but a great deal for their right to speak and write freely, resented the outrage. This fact was the most important consequence, which flowed from the trial and imprisonment of the young editor of [82] The Genius of Universal Emancipation. “As the news of my imprisonment became extensively known,” he wrote, “and the merits of the case understood, not a mail rolled into the city but it brought me consolatary letters from individuals hitherto unknown to me, and periodicals of all kinds from every section of the Union (not even excepting the South), all uniting to give me a triumphant acquittal-all severely reprehending the conduct of Mr. Toddand all regarding my trial as a mockery of justice.” This unexpected result was one of those accidents of history, which “have laws as fixed as planets have.” The prosecution and imprisonment of Garrison was without doubt designed to terrorize him into silence on the subject of slavery. But his persecutors had reckoned without a knowledge of their victim. Garrison had the martyr's temperament and invincibility of purpose. His earnestness burned the more intensely with the growth of opposition and peril. Within “gloomy walls close pent,” he warbled gay as a bird of a freedom which tyrants could not touch, nor bolts confine:
No chains can bind it, and no cell enclose,or with deep, stern gladness sang he to “The guiltless prisoner” how:
Swifter than light, it flies from pole to pole,
And in a flash from earth to heaven it goes!
A martyr's crown is richer than a king's!
Think it an honor with thy Lord to bleed,
And glory 'midst intensest sufferings;
Though beat-imprisoned-put to open shame
Time shall embalm and magnify thy name.
“Is it supposed by Judge Brice,” the guiltless prisoner [83] wrote from his cell, “that his frowns can intimidate me, or his sentence stifle my voice on the subject of African oppression? He does not know me. So long as a good Providence gives me strength and intellect, I will not cease to declare that the existence of slavery in this country is a foul reproach to the American name; nor will I hesitate to proclaim the guilt of kidnappers, slave abettors, or slaveowners, wheresoever they may reside, or however high they may be exalted. I am only in the alphabet of my task; time shall perfect a useful work. It is my shame that I have done so little for the people of color; yea, before God, I feel humbled that my feelings are so cold, and my language so weak. A few white victims must be sacrificed to open the eyes of this nation, and to show the tyranny of our laws. I expect and am willing to be persecuted, imprisoned, and bound for advocating African rights; and I should deserve to be a slave myself if I shrunk from that duty or danger.” The story of the trial of William Lloyd Garrison, from which the above brave words are taken, fell into the hands of that noble man and munificent merchant, Arthur Tappan, of New York. From the reading of it he rose “with that deep feeling of abhorrence of slavery and its abettors which every one must feel who is capable of appreciating the blessings of liberty,” and thereupon notified Lundy to draw upon him for one hundred dollars if that amount would give the young editor his liberty. The fine and costs of court were accordingly paid and just forty-nine days after entering Baltimore jail a prisoner, Garrison recovered his freedom. The civil action of Todd [84] against him was still pending. Nothing daunted Garrison went North two days after his discharge to obtain certain evidence deemed important by his counsel to his defence. He took with him an open letter from Lundy looking to the renewal of the the weekly Genius under their joint control. Prior to Garrison's trial the paper had fallen into great stress for want of money. Lundy and he had made a division of their labors, the latter doing the editorial and office work, while the former traveled from place to place soliciting subscriptions and collecting generally the sinews of war. But the experiment was not successful from a business standpoint. For as Garrison playfully observed subsequently: “Where friend Lundy could get one new subscriber, I could knock a dozen off, and I did so. It was the old experiment of the frog in the well, that went two feet up and fell three feet back, at every jump.” Where the income of the paper did not exceed fifty dollars in four months and the weekly expenditure amounted to at least that sum, the financial failure of the enterprise was inevitable. This unhappy event did actually occur six weeks before the junior editor went to jail; and the partnership was formally dissolved in the issue of the Genius of March 5, 1830. But when Arthur Tappan made his generous offer of a hundred dollars to effect Garrison's release, he made at the same time an offer of an equal amount to aid the editors in reestablishing the Genius. This proposition led to hopes on the part of the two friends to a renewal of their partnership in the cause of emancipation. And so Garrison's visit to the North was taken advantage of to test the disposition [85] of Northern philanthropy to support such a paper. But what he found was a sad lack of interest in the slave. Everywhere he went he encountered what appeared to him to be the most monstrous indifference and apathy on the subject. The prejudices of the free States seemed to him stronger than were those of the South. Instead of receiving aid and encouragement to continue the good work of himself and coadiutor, and for the doing of which he had served a term of seven weeks in prison, men, even his best friends sought to influence him to give it up, and to persuade him to forsake the slave, and to turn his time and talents to safer and more profitable enterprises nearer home. He was informed by these worldly wise men and Job's counselors that his “scheme was visionary, fanatical, unattainable.” “Why should he make himself,” they argued, “an exile from home and all that be held dear on earth, and sojourn in a strange land, among enemies whose hearts were dead to every noble sentiment?” Ah! he himself confessed that all were against his return to Baltimore. But his love of the slave was stronger than the strength of the temptation. He put all these selfish objections behind him. As he has recorded the result of this experience : “Opposition served only to increase my ardor, and confirm my purpose.” Strange and incomprehensible to his fellows is the man who prefers “persecution, reproach, and poverty” with duty, to worldly ease and honor and riches without it. When a man appears in society who is not controlled by motives which usually govern the conduct of other men he becomes at first an object of pity, then of contempt, and, lastly, of hate. Garrison we may be sure at the [86] end of this visit had made rapid transit from the first to the second of these stages in the esteem of his generation. His experience was not all of this deplorable kind. He left Baltimore without the money required to pay his way North, depending literally upon the good God to provide for him the necessary means to complete his journey. And such help was more than once providentially afforded the young apostle of liberty. At New York, when he did not know how he was to go farther for want of means, he met a Mr. Samuel Leggett who gave him a pass on the “splendid steamboat President.” It seems that this friend in his need had read with indignation the story of his trial. The bread which he had scattered from his prison on the waters of public sentiment had thus returned to him after many days in the timely assistance of a sympathetic soul. And then, again, when he was in Boston in sore distress for a little money, suddenly, beautifully, the desire of his heart was satisfied. But let him tell the incident in his own touching way. His face was turned toward Baltimore: “But how was I to return?” he asks. “I had not a dollar in my pocket, and my time was expired. No one understood my circumstances. I was too proud to beg, and ashamed to borrow. My friends were prodigal of pity, but of nothing else. In the extremity of my uneasiness, I went to the Boston post-office, and found a letter from my friend Lundy, inclosing a draft for $ioo from a stranger and as a remuneration for my poor inefficient services in behalf of the slaves!” The munificent stranger was Ebenezer Dole, of Hallowell, Maine. Money thus acquired was a sacred trust to [87] this child of Providence. “After deducting the expenses of traveling,” he goes on to say, “the remainder of the above-named sum was applied in discharging a few of the debts incurred by the unproductiveness of the Genius.” Garrison returned to Baltimore, but he did not tarry long in that slave-ruled city. Todd's suit against him was tried after his departure, and the jury soothed the Newburyport merchant's wounded pride with a verdict for a thousand dollars. He never attempted, however, to enforce the payment of the same being content probably with the “vindication,” which his legal victory gave him. Before the reformer left Baltimore he had definitely abandoned the plans looking to a revival of his interest in the Genius. He determined instead to publish a sheet devoted to the abolition of slavery under his sole management and control. This paper he proposed to call the Public Liberator, and to issue from Washington. The prospectus of this journalistic project bearing date, August, 1830, declares in its opening sentence its “primary object” to be “the abolition of slavery, and the moral and intellectual elevation of our colored population.” “I shall spare no efforts,” he pledged himself, “to delineate the withering influence of slavery upon our national prosperity and happiness, its awful impiety, its rapid extension, and its inevitable consequences if it be suffered to exist without hindrance. It will also be my purpose to point out the path of safety, and a remedy for the disease.” This comprehensive and aggressive plan of campaign signalized the rise of an Abolitionism wholly unlike the Abolitionism of any [88] previous time in the history of the country. It did in fact date the opening of a new era in the slavery struggle in America. With Northern indifference and apathy on the subject of emancipation, Garrison's previous visit to the North had acquainted him. Their existence he saw interposed the main obstacle to the success of his new venture in journalism. “The cause of this callous state of feeling,” he believed, “was owing to their exceeding ignorance of the horrors of slavery.” He accordingly made up his mind to throw the light which he possessed into the midst of this darkness. He had written in prison three lectures on “Slavery and Colonization.” What better could he now do than to deliver those lectures at the North? If the good people and their religious leaders knew what he knew, they would presently feel as he did on the question. He was loath to leave Baltimore without giving this testimony against slavery. But unable to procure a room for this purpose was finally compelled to content himself with the witness he had already borne in the Genius and in prison in behalf of the slave. In Philadelphia he well-nigh failed to obtain a hall for his lectures, but did finally succeed in getting the Franklin Institute, where, to small audiences, he lifted up his voice against the iniquity of the times. He repeated his lectures in New York, New Haven, and Hartford. But not many came out to hear him. The nation, its churches, and politicians had thrust their fingers in their ears to every cry coming up from the slave. Why should they go to sup with a madman on horrors, with which as patriotic people they were forbidden to concern themselves. And so [89] for the most part Garrison could do nothing with communities, which had eyes. but obstinately refused to see with them upon any subject relating to the abominations of slavery. In his own town of Newburyport, officers of Christian churches not only refused to hear his message themselves, but debarred others from listening to the woes and wrongs of fellow-creatures in bondage. As Mr. Garrison truly said at the time: “If I had visited Newburyport to plead the cause of twenty white men in chains, every hall and every meeting-house would have been thrown open, and the fervor of my discourses anticipated and exceeded by my fellow-townsmen. The fact that two millions of colored beings are groaning in bondage, in this land of liberty, excites no interest nor pity.” If these damning facts are remembered sixty years after their occurrence to the shame of the trustees of the two churches, viz., the Presbyterian Church on Harris street and the Second Congregational Church, it is also remembered to the honor of the two pastors, Rev. Dr. Daniel Dana, and the Rev. Dr. Luther F. Dimmick, that they had thrown open to the prophet the doors of their meeting-houses, which the trustees afterward slammed in his face. In Boston the same hard luck followed him. In all that city of Christian churches he could not obtain the use of a single meeting-house, “in which to vindicate the rights of two millions of American citizens, who are now groaning in servile chains in this boasted land of liberty; and also to propose just, benevolent, and constitutional measures for their relief.” So ran an advertisement in the Boston Courier of the sorely tried soul. For [90] two weeks he had gone up and down the town in search of a room free of cost, in which to deliver his message. The door of every sanctuary was locked against his cause. It was then, as a final recourse, that he turned to the Courier, and made his last appeal to the Christian charity of the city. The prayer of the prophet was answered from an unexpected quarter. It was that ecclesiastical dragon of the times, Abner Kneeland, and his society of “blasphemers,” who proved afresh the truth of that scripture which says: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” It was they that gave to liberty a hearing, to the prophet of righteousness a chance to deliver his message. It was in their meetinghouse, in Julian Hall, that Garrison gave his lectures, giving the first one on the evening of October 15, 1830. Samuel J. May, who was present, has preserved his impressions of the lecture and lecturer. “Never before,” he records many years afterward, “was I so affected by the speech of man. When he had ceased speaking I said to those around me: ‘That is a providential man; lie is a prophet; he will shake our nation to its center, but he will shake slavery out of it. We ought to know him, we ought to help him. Come, let us go and give him our hands.’ Mr. Sewall and Mr. Alcott went up with me and we introduced each other. I said to him, ‘Mr. Garrison, I am not sure that I can indorse all you have said this evening. Much of it requires careful consideration. But I am prepared to embrace you. I am [91] sure you are called to a great work, and I mean to help you.’ Mr. Sewall cordially assured him of his readiness also to cooperate with him. Mr. Alcott invited him to his home. He went and we sat with him until twelve that night, listening to his discourse, in which he showed plainly that immediate, unconditional emancipation, without expatriation, was the right of every slave, and could not be withheld by his master an hour without sin. That night my soul was baptised in his spirit, and ever since I have been a disciple and fellow-laborer of William Lloyd Garrison.” A new force had arisen in our history, and a new epoch had broken bolts for humanity.
