Garrison was never able to see the Liberty party, and for that matter Wendell Phillips, Edmund Quincy, and others of the old organization leaders could not either, except through the darkened gla.s.s of personal antagonisms growing out of the schism of 1840. It was always, under all circ.u.mstances, to borrow a phrase of Phillips, "Our old enemy, Liberty party." And, as Quincy navely confesses in an article in the Liberator pointing out the reasons why Abolitionists should give to the Free-soil party incidental aid and comfort, which were forbidden to their "old enemy, Liberty party," the significant and amusing fact that the latter was "officered by deserters." Ay, there was indeed the rub! The military principle of the great leader forbade him to recognize deserters as allies. Discipline must be maintained, and so he proceeded to maintain the anti-slavery discipline of his army by keeping up a constant fusillade into the ranks of the deserter band, who, in turn, were every whit as blinded by the old quarrel and separation, and who slyly cherished the modest conviction that, when they seceded, the salt of old organization lost its savor, and was thenceforth fit only to be trampled under the Liberty party"s feet. Without doubt, those old Abolitionists and Liberty party people belonged to the category of "humans."
The scales of the old grudge dropped from Garrison"s eyes directly the Free-Soil party loomed upon the political horizon. He recognized at once that, if it was not against the slave, it was for the slave; apprehended clearly that, in so far as the new party, which, by the way, was only the second stage in the development of the central idea of his old enemy, Liberty party, as the then future Republican party was to be its third and final expression, apprehended clearly I say that, in so far as the new party resisted the aggressions and pretensions of the slave-power, it was fighting for Abolition-was an ally of Abolitionism.
In the summer of 1848, from Northampton, whither he had gone to take the water cure, Garrison counseled Quincy, who was filling the editorial chair, in the interim, at the Liberator office, in this sage fashion: "As for the Free-Soil movement, I feel that great care is demanded of us disunionists, both in the Standard and the Liberator, in giving credit to whom credit is due, and yet in no case even seeming to be satisfied with it." In the winter of 1848 in a letter to Samuel May, Jr., he is more explicit on this head. "As for the Free-Soil movement," he observes, "I am for hailing it as a cheering sign of the times, and an unmistakable proof of the progress we have made, under G.o.d, in changing public sentiment. Those who have left the Whig and Democratic parties for conscience"s sake, and joined the movement, deserve our commendation and sympathy; at the same time, it is our duty to show them, and all others, that there is a higher position to be attained by them or they will have the blood of the slave staining their garments. This can be done charitably yet faithfully. On the two old parties, especially the Whig-Taylor party, I would expend-pro tempore, at least-our heaviest ammunition." This is as it should be, the tone of wise and vigilant leadership, the application of the true test to the circ.u.mstances, viz., for freedom if against slavery; not to be satisfied, to be sure, with any thing less than the whole but disposed to give credit to whom it was due, whether much or little. Pity that the pioneer could not have placed himself in this just and discriminating point of view in respect of his old enemy, Liberty party, praising in it what he found praiseworthy, while blaming it for what he felt was blameworthy. But perfection weak human nature doth not attain to in this terrestrial garden of the pa.s.sions, and so very likely the magnanimity which we have desired of Garrison is not for that garden to grow but another and a heavenly.
Garrison ill brooked opposition, came it from friends or foes. He was so confident in his own positions that he could not but distrust their opposites. Of course, if his were right, and of that doubt in his mind there was apparently none, then the positions of all others had to be wrong. This masterful quality of the man was constantly betrayed in the acts of his life and felt by his closest friends and a.s.sociates in the anti-slavery movement. Quincy, writing to Richard Webb, narrates how, at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1843, Garrison was for removing it to Boston, but that he and Wendell Phillips were for keeping it where it then was in New York, giving at the same time sundry good and sufficient reasons for the faith that was in them, and how, thereupon, "Garrison dilated his nostrils like a war-horse, and snuffed indignation at us." "If the Boston friends were unwilling to take the trouble and responsibility," were the petulant, accusative words put by Quincy into his chief"s mouth on the occasion, "then there was nothing more to be said; we must try to get along as well as we could in the old way." And how they disclaimed "any unwillingness to take trouble and responsibility," while affirming "the necessity of their acting on their own idea."
Another characteristic of the pioneer is touched upon by the same writer in a relation which he was making to Webb of Garrison"s election to the presidency of the parent society. Says Quincy: "Garrison makes an excellent president at a public meeting where the order of speakers is in some measure arranged, as he has great felicity in introducing and interlocuting remarks; but at a meeting for debate he does not answer so well, as he is rather too apt, with all the innocence and simplicity in the world, to do all the talking himself."
The same friendly critic has left his judgment of other traits of the leader, traits not so much of the man as of the editor. It is delivered in a private letter of Quincy to Garrison on resigning the temporary editorship of the Liberator to "its legitimate possessor." who had been for several months health-hunting at Northampton in the beautiful Connecticut Valley. Quincy made bold to beard the Abolition lion in his lair, and twist his tail in an extremely lively manner. "Now, my dear friend," wrote the disciple to the master, "you must know that to the microscopic eyes of its friends, as well as to the telescopic eyes of its enemies, theLiberatorhas faults, these they keep to themselves as much as they honestly may, but they are not the less sensible of them, and are all the more desirous to see them immediately abolished. Luckily, they are not faults of principle-neither moral nor intellectual deficiencies-but faults the cure of which rests solely with yourself.
"I hardly know how to tell you what the faults are that we find with it, lest you should think them none at all, or else unavoidable. But no matter, of that you must be the judge; we only ask you to listen to our opinion. We think the paper often bears the mark of haste and carelessness in its getting up; that the matter seems to be hastily selected and put in higgledy-piggledy, without any very apparent reason why it should be in at all, or why it should be in the place where it is. I suppose this is often caused by your selecting articles with a view to connect remarks of your own with them, which afterward in your haste you omit. Then we complain that each paper is not so nearly a complete work in itself as it might be made, but that things are often left at loose ends, and important matters broken off in the middle. I a.s.sure you, that Brother Harriman is not the only one of the friends of the Liberator who grieves over your "more anon" and "more next week"-which "anon" and "next week" never arrive.
"Then we complain that your editorials are too often wanting, or else such, from apparent haste, as those who love your fame cannot wish to see; that important topics, which you feel to be such, are too often either entirely pa.s.sed over or very cursorily treated, and important moments like the present neglected....
"We have our suspicions, too, that good friends have been disaffected by the neglect of their communications; but of this we can only speak by conjecture. In short, it appears to those who are your warmest friends and the stanchest supporters of the paper, that you might make the Liberator a more powerful and useful instrumentality than it is, powerful and useful as it is, by additional exertions on your part. It is very unpleasant to hear invidious comparisons drawn between the Liberator and Emanc.i.p.ator with regard to the manner of getting it up, and to have not to deny but to excuse them-and we knowing all the time that you have all the tact and technical talent for getting up a good newspaper that Leavitt has, with as much more, intellectual ability as you have more moral honesty, and only wanting some of his (pardon me) industry, application, and method."
Garrison, to his honor, did not allow the exceeding candor of his mentor to disturb their friendship. The pioneer was not wholly without defence to the impeachment. He might have pleaded ill health, of which he had had quantum suf. since 1836 for himself and family. He might have pleaded also the dissipation of too much of his energies in consequence of more or less pecuniary embarra.s.sments from which he was never wholly freed; but, above all, he might have pleaded his increasing activity as an anti-slavery lecturer. His contributions to the movement against slavery were of a notable character in this direction, both in respect of quant.i.ty and quality. He was not alone the editor of the Liberator, he was unquestionably besides one of the most effective and interesting of the anti-slavery speakers-indeed in the judgment of so competent an authority as James Russell Lowell, he was regarded as the most effective of the anti-slavery speakers. Still, after all is placed to his credit that can possibly be, Quincy"s complaints would be supported by an altogether too solid basis of fact. The pioneer was much given to procrastination. What was not urgent he was strongly tempted to put off for a more convenient time. His work acc.u.mulated. He labored hard and he accomplished much, but because of this habit of postponing for to-morrow what need not be done to-day, he was necessarily forced to leave undone many things which he ought to have done and which he might have accomplished had he been given to putting off for to-morrow nothing which might be finished to-day.
The pioneer was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, but never was he wholly cast down by his misfortunes. His cheerful and bouyant spirit kept him afloat above his sorrows, above his griefs. The organ of mirthfulness in him was very large. He was an optimist in the best sense of that word, viz., that all things work together for good to them that love goodness. In the darkest moments which the Abolition cause encountered his own countenance was full of light, his own heart pierced through the gloom and communicated its glow to those about him, his own voice rang bugle-like through reverse and disaster.
In his family the reformer was seen at his best. His wife was his friend and equal, his children his playfellows and companions. The dust of the great conflict he never carried with him into his home to choke the love which burned ever brightly on its hearth and in the hearts which it contained. What he professed in the Liberator, what he preached in the world, of non-resistance, woman"s rights, perfectionism, he practiced in his home, he embodied as father, and husband, and host. Never lived reformer who more completely realized his own ideals to those nearest and dearest to him than William Lloyd Garrison.
He had seven children, five boys and two girls. The last, Francis Jackson, was born to him in the year 1848. Two of them died in childhood, a boy and a girl. The loss of the boy, whom the father had "named admiringly, gratefully, reverently," Charles Pollen, was a terrible blow to the reformer, and a life-long grief to the mother. He seemed to have been a singularly beautiful, winning, and affectionate little man and to have inspired sweet hopes of future "usefulness and excellence" in the b.r.e.a.s.t.s of his parents. "He seemed born to take a century on his shoulders, without stooping; his eyes were large, l.u.s.trous, and charged with electric light; his voice was clear as a bugle, melodious, and ever ringing in our ears, from the dawn of day to the ushering in of night, so that since it has been stilled, our dwelling has seemed to be almost without an occupant," lamented the stricken father to Elizabeth Pease, of Darlington, England.
"Death itself to me is not terrible, is not repulsive," poured the heartbroken pioneer into the ears of his English friend, "is not to be deplored. I see in it as clear an evidence of Divine wisdom and beneficence as I do in the birth of a child, in the works of creation, in all the arrangements and operations of nature. I neither fear nor regret its power. I neither expect nor supplicate to be exempted from its legitimate action. It is not to be chronicled among calamities; it is not to be styled "a mysterious dispensation of Divine Providence"; it is scarcely rational to talk of being resigned to it. For what is more rational, what more universal, what more impartial, what more serviceable, what more desirable, in G.o.d"s own time, hastened neither by our ignorance or folly?...
"When, therefore, my dear friend, I tell you that the loss of my dear boy has overwhelmed me with sadness, has affected my peace by day and my repose by night, has been a staggering blow, from the shock of which I find it very difficult to recover, you will not understand me as referring to anything pertaining to another state of existence, or as gloomily affected by a change inevitable to all; far from it. Where the cherished one who has been s.n.a.t.c.hed from us is, what is his situation, or what his employment, I know not, of course; and it gives me no anxiety whatever. Until I join him at least my responsibility to him as his guardian and protector has ceased; he does not need my aid, he cannot be benefited by my counsel. That he will still be kindly cared for by Him who numbers the very hairs of our heads, and without whose notice a sparrow cannot fall to the ground; that he is still living, having thrown aside his mortal drapery, and occupying a higher sphere of existence, I do not entertain a doubt. My grief arises mainly from the conviction that his death was premature; that he was actually defrauded of his life through unskillful treatment; that he might have been saved, if we had not been so unfortunately situated at that time. This to be sure, is not certain; and not being certain, it is only an ingredient of consolation that we find in our cup of bitterness."
The pioneer was one of the most generous of givers. Poor indeed he was, much beyond the common allotment of men of his intelligence and abilities, but he was never too indigent to answer the appeals of poverty. If the asker"s needs were greater than his own he divided with him the little which he had. To his home all sorts of people were attracted, Abolitionists, peace men, temperance reformers, perfectionists, h.o.m.oeopathists, hydropathists, mesmerists, spiritualists, Grahamites, clairvoyants, whom he received with unfailing hospitality, giving welcome and sympathy to the new ideas, food and shelter for the material sustenance of the fleshly vehicles of the new ideas. He evidently was strongly of the opinion that there are "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in the philosophy of any particular period in the intellectual development of man. No age knows it all. It was almost a lo, here, and a lo, there, with him, so large was his b.u.mp of wonder, so unlimited was his appet.i.te for the incredible and the improbable in the domain of human knowledge and speculation. Great was the man"s faith, great was his hope, great was his charity.
He was one of the most observant of men in all matters affecting the rights of others; he was one of the least observant in all matters appertaining to himself. With a decided taste for dress, yet his actual knowledge of the kind of clothes worn by him from day to day was amusingly inexact, as the following incident shows: Before wearing out an only pair of trousers, the pioneer had indulged in the unusual luxury of a new pair. But as there was still considerable service to be got out of the old pair, he, like a prudent man, laid aside the new ones for future use. His wife, however, who managed all this part of the domestic business, determined, without consulting him, the morning when the new trousers should be donned. She made the necessary changes when her lord was in bed, putting the new in the place of the old. Garrison wore for several days the new trousers, thinking all the time that they were his old ones until his illusions in this regard were dispelled by an incident which cost him the former. Some poor wretch of a tramp, knocking in an evil hour at the pioneer"s door and asking for clothes, decided the magnificent possessor of two pairs of trousers, to don his new ones and to pa.s.s the old ones on to the tramp. But when he communicated the transaction to his wife, she hoped, with a good deal of emphasis, that he had not given away the pair of breeches which he was wearing, for if he had she would beg to inform him that he had given away his best ones! But the pioneer"s splendid indifference to meum and tuum where his own possessions were concerned was equal to the occasion. He got his compensation in the thought that his loss was another"s gain. That, indeed, was not to be accounted loss which had gone to a brother-man whose needs were greater than his own.
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE TURNING OF A LONG LANE.
Garrison"s forecast of the future, directly after the annexation of Texas, proved singularly correct. Never, as at that moment, had the slave-power seemed so secure in its ascendency, yet never, at any previous period, was it so near its downfall. Freedom had reached that darkest hour just before dawn; and this, events were speedily to make clear. If the South could have trammeled up the consequences of annexation, secure, indeed, for a season, would it have held its political supremacy in America? But omnipotent as was the slave-power in the Government, it was not equal to this labor. In the great game, in which Texas was the stakes, Fate had, unawares, slipped into the seat between the gamesters with hands full of loaded dice. At the first throw the South got Texas, at the second the war with Mexico fell out, and at the third new national territory lay piled upon the boards.
Calhoun, the arch-annexationist, struggled desperately to avert the war. He saw as no other Southern leader saw its tremendous significance in the conflict between the two halves of the Union for the political balance. The admission of Texas had made an adjustment of this balance in favor of the South. Calhoun"s plan was to conciliate Mexico, to sweep with our diplomatic broom the gathering war-clouds from the national firmament. War, he knew, would imperil the freshly fortified position of his section-war which meant at its close the acquisition of new national territory, with which the North would insist upon retrieving its reverse in the controversy over Texas. War, therefore, the great nullifier resolved against. He cried halt to his army, but the army heard not his voice, heeded not his orders, in the wild uproar and clamor which arose at the sight of helpless Mexico, and the temptation of adding fresh slave soil to the United States South, through her spoliation; Calhoun confessed that, with the breaking out of hostilities between the two republics an impenetrable curtain had shut from his eyes the future. The great plot for maintaining the political domination of the South had miscarried. New national territory had become inevitable with the firing of the first gun. Seeing this, Calhoun endeavored to postpone the evil day for the South by proposing a military policy of "masterly inactivity" whereby time might be gained for his side to prepare to meet the blow when it fell. But his "masterly inactivity" policy was swept aside by the momentum of the national pa.s.sion which the war had aroused.
California and New Mexico became the strategic points of the slavery struggle at the close of the war. To open both to the immigration of slave-labor was thenceforth the grand design of the South. Over Oregon occurred a fierce preliminary trial of strength between the sections. The South was thrown in the contest, and the anti-slavery principle of the Ordinance of 1787 applied to the Territory. Calhoun, who was apparently of the mind that as Oregon went so would go California and New Mexico, was violently agitated by this reverse. "The great strife between the North and the South is ended," he pa.s.sionately declared. Immediately the charge was made and widely circulated through the slave States that the stronger was oppressing the weaker section, wresting from it its just share in the common fruits of common victories. For had not California and New Mexico been won by the bravery and blood of the South as of the North, and how then was the North to deprive the South of its joint ownership of them without destroying the federal equality of the two halves of the Union? What was it but to subvert the Union existing among the States?
Disunion sentiment was thenceforth ladled out to the slave States in increasing quant.i.ties. The turning of the long lane in the domination of the slave-power was visibly near. With Garrison at one end and Calhoun at the other the work of dissolution advanced apace. The latter announced, in 1848, that the separation of the two sections was complete. Ten years before, Garrison had made proclamation that the Union, though not in form, was, nevertheless, in fact dissolved. And possibly they were right. The line of cleavage had at the date of Calhoun"s announcement pa.s.sed entirely through the grand strata of national life, industrial, moral, political, and religious. There remained indeed but a single bond of connection between the slave-holding and the non-slave-holding States, viz., fealty to party. But in 1848 not even this slender link was intact.
The anti-slavery uprising was a fast growing factor in the politics of the free States. This was evinced by the aggressiveness of anti-slavery legislation, the repeal of slave sojournment laws, the enactment of personal liberty laws, the increasing preference manifested by Whig and by Democratic electors for anti-slavery Whig, and anti-slavery Democratic leaders. Seward and Chase, and Hale and Hamlin, Thaddeus Stevens and Joshua R. Giddings, were all in Congress in 1849. A revolution was working in the North; a revolution was working in the South. New and bolder spirits were rising to leadership in both sections. On the Southern stage were Jefferson Davis, Barnwell Rhett, David Atchison, Howell Cobb, Robert Toombs, and James M. Mason. The outlook was portentous, tempestuous.
The tide of excitement culminated in the crisis of 1850. The extraordinary activity of the under-ground railroad system, and its failure to open the national Territories to slave immigration had transported the South to the verge of disunion. California, fought over by the two foes, was in the act of withdrawing herself from the field of contention to a position of independent Statehood. It was her rap for admission into the Union as a free State which precipitated upon the country the last of the compromises between freedom and slavery. It sounded the opening of the final act of Southern domination in the republic.
The compromise of 1850, a series of five acts, three of which it took to conciliate the South, while two were considered sufficient to satisfy the North, was, after prolonged and stormy debate, adopted to save Webster"s glorious Union. These five acts were, in the agonized accents of Clay, to heal "the five fire gaping wounds" of the country. But the wounds were immedicable, as events were soon to prove. Besides, two at least of the remedies failed to operate as emollients. They irritated and inflamed the national ulcers and provoked fresh paroxysms of the disease. The admission of California as a free State was a sort of perpetual memento mori to the slave-power. It hung forever over the South the Damoclean blade of Northern political ascendency in the Union. The fugitive slave law on the other hand produced results undreamt of by its authors. Who would have ventured to predict the spontaneous, irresistible insurrection of the humane forces and pa.s.sions of the North which broke out on the pa.s.sage of the infamous bill? Who could have foretold the moral and political consequences of its execution, for instance, in Boston, which fifteen years before had mobbed anti-slavery women and dragged Garrison through its streets? The moral indignation aroused by the law in Ma.s.sachusetts swept Webster and the Whigs from power, carried Sumner to the Senate and crowned Liberty on Beacon Hill. It worked a revolution in Ma.s.sachusetts, it wrought changes of the greatest magnitude in the free States.
From this time the reign of discord became universal. The conflict between the sections increased in virulence. At the door of every man sat the fierce figure of strife. It fulmined from the pulpit and frowned from the pews. The platforms of the free States resounded with the thunder of tongues. The press exploded with the hot pa.s.sions of the hour. Parties warred against each other. Factions arose within parties and fought among themselves with no less bitterness. Wrath is infectious and the wrathful temper of the nation became epidemic. The Ishmaelitish impulse to strike something or someone, was irresistible. The bonds which had bound men to one another seemed everywhere loosening, and people in ma.s.ses were slipping away from old to enter into new combinations of political activity. It was a period of tumultuous transition and confusion. The times were topsy-turvy and old Night and Chaos were the angels who sat by the bubbling abysses of the revolution.
In the midst of this universal and violent agitation of the public mind the old dread of disunion returned to torment the American bourgeoisie, who through their presses, especially those of the metropolis of the Union, turned fiercely upon the Abolitionists. While the compromise measures were the subject of excited debate before Congress, the anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society fell due. But the New York journals, the Herald in particular, had no mind to allow the meeting to take place without renewing the reign of terror of fifteen years before. Garrison was depicted as worse than Robespierre, with an insatiable appet.i.te for the destruction of established inst.i.tutions, both human and divine. The dissolution of the Union, the "overthrow of the churches, the Sabbath, and the Bible," all were required to glut his malevolent pa.s.sion. "Will the men of sense allow meetings to be held in this city which are calculated to make our country the arena of blood and murder," roared the Herald, "and render our city an object of horror to the whole South?... Public opinion should be regulated. These Abolitionists should not be allowed to misrepresent New York." In order to suppress the Abolitionists that paper did not blink at any means, however extreme or revolutionary, but declared boldly in favor of throttling free discussion. "When free discussion does not promote the public good," argued the editor, "it has no more right to exist than a bad government that is dangerous and oppressive to the common weal. It should be overthrown." The mob thus invoked came forward on the opening of the convention to overthrow free discussion.
The storm which the New York press was at so much labor to brew, Garrison did not doubt would break over the convention. He went to it in a truly apostolic spirit of self-sacrifice. "Not knowing the things that shall befall me there, saving that bonds and afflictions abide with me in every city," he wrote his wife an hour before the commencement of the convention. His prevision of violence was quickly fulfilled. He had called Francis Jackson to the chair during the delivery of the opening speech which fell to the pioneer to make as the president of the society. His subject was the Religion of the Country, to which he was paying his respects in genuine Garrisonian fashion. Belief in Jesus in the United States had no vital influence on conduct or character. The chief religious denominations were in practice pro-slavery, they had uttered no protest against the national sin. There was the Roman Catholic Church whose "priests and members held slaves without incurring the rebuke of the Church." At this point the orator was interrupted by one of those monstrous products of the slums of the American metropolis, compounded of the bully, the blackleg, and the demagogue in about equal proportions. It was the notorious Captain Isaiah Rynders, perched with his band of blackguards in the organ loft of the tabernacle and ready to do the will of the metropolitan journals by over-throwing the right of free discussion. He was not disposed to permit Mr. Garrison"s censure of the Roman Catholic Church to pa.s.s unchallenged, so he begged to ask "whether there are no other churches as well as the Catholic Church, whose clergy and lay members hold slaves?" To which the anti-slavery leader replied with the utmost composure, not inclined to let even Captain Rynders interrupt the even and orderly progression of his discourse: "Will the friend wait for a moment, and I will answer him in reference to other churches?" "The friend" thereupon resumed his seat in the organ loft, and Garrison proceeded with his indictment of the churches. There was the Episcopal Church, whose clergy and laity dealt with impunity in human flesh, and the Presbyterians, whose ministers and members did likewise without apparently any compunctious visitings of conscience, ditto the Baptist, ditto the Methodist. In fact "all the sects are combined," the orator sternly continued, "to prevent that jubilee which it is the will of G.o.d should come."
But the bully in the organ loft, who was not content for long to play the part of Patience on a monument, interrupted the speaker with a second question which he looked upon, doubtless, as a hard nut to crack. "Are you aware," inquired the blackleg "that the slaves in the South have their prayer-meetings in honor of Christ?" The nut was quickly crushed between the sharp teeth of the orator"s scathing retort. Mr. Garrison-"Not a slave-holding or a slave-breeding Jesus. (Sensation.) The slaves believe in a Jesus that strikes off chains. In this country Jesus has become obsolete. A profession in him is no longer a test. Who objects to his course in Judaea? The old Pharisees are extinct, and may safely be denounced. Jesus is the most respectable person in the United States. (Great sensation and murmurs of disapprobation.) Jesus sits in the President"s chair of the United States. (A thrill of horror here seemed to run through the a.s.sembly.) Zachary Taylor sits there, which is the same thing, for he believes in Jesus. He believes in war, and the Jesus that "gave the Mexicans h.e.l.l."" (Sensation, uproar, and confusion.)
This rather sulphurous allusion to the President of the glorious Union, albeit in language used by himself in a famous order during the Mexican War, acted as a red rag upon the human bull in the organ loft, who, now beside himself with pa.s.sion, plunged madly down to the platform with his howling mob at his heels. "I will not allow you to a.s.sail the President of the United States. You shan"t do it!" bellowed the blackguard, shaking his fist at Mr. Garrison. But Mr. Garrison, with that extraordinary serenity of manner which was all his own, parleyed with the ruffian, as if he was no ruffian and had no mob at his back. "You ought not to interrupt us," he remonstrated with gentle dignity. "We go upon the principle of hearing everybody. If you wish to speak, I will keep order, and you shall be heard." Rynders was finally quieted by the offer of Francis Jackson to give him a hearing as soon as Mr. Garrison had brought his address to an end.
Rev. W.H. Furness, of Philadelphia, who was a member of the convention and also one of the speakers, has preserved for us the contrasts of the occasion. "The close of Mr. Garrison"s address," says he, "brought down Rynders again, who vociferated and harangued at one time on the platform, and then pushing down into the aisles, like a madman followed by his keepers. Through the whole, nothing could be more patient and serene than the bearing of Mr. Garrison. I have always revered Mr. Garrison for his devoted, uncompromising fidelity to his great cause. Today I was touched to the heart by his calm and gentle manners. There was no agitation, no scorn, no heat, but the quietness of a man engaged in simple duties."
The madman and his keepers were quite vanquished on the first day of the convention by the wit, repartee, and eloquence of Frederick Dougla.s.s, Dr. Furness, and Rev. Samuel R. Ward, whom Wendell Phillips described as so black that "when he shut his eyes you could not see him." But it was otherwise on the second day when public opinion was "regulated," and free discussion overthrown by Captain Rynders and his villainous gang, who were resolved, with the authors of the compromise, that the Union as it was should be preserved.
But, notwithstanding the high authority and achievements of this n.o.ble band of patriots and brothers, Garrison"s detestation of the Union but increased, and his cry for its dissolution grew deeper and louder. And no wonder. For never had the compact between freedom and slavery seemed more hateful than after the pa.s.sage of the Fugitive Slave Bill. The state of panic which it created among the colored people in the free States will form, if ever written down, one of the most heartrending chapters in human history. Hundreds and thousands fled from their homes into the jaws of a Canadian winter to escape the jaws of the slave-hounds, whose fierce baying began presently to fill the land from Ma.s.sachusetts to Ohio. It made no difference whether these miserable people had been always free or were fugitives from slavery, the terror spread among them all the same. The aged and the young turned their backs upon their homes and hurried precipitately into a strange country. Fathers with wives and children dependant upon them for their daily bread, were forced by the dread of being captured and returned to bondage to abandon their homes and loved ones, sometimes without so much as a touch of their hands or a tone of their voices in token of farewell. Perhaps on his way to work in the morning some husband or son has caught a glimpse among the faces on the street of one face, the remembrance of which to the day of death, he can never lose, a face he had known in some far away Southern town or plantation, and with which are connected in the poor fellow"s brain the most frightful sufferings and a.s.sociations. Crazed at the sight, with no thought of home, of the labors which are awaiting him, oblivious of everything but the abject terror which has suddenly taken possession of him, he hastens away to hide and fly, fly and hide, until he reaches a land where slave-hounds enter not, and panting fugitives find freedom. Wendell Phillips tells of an old woman of seventy who asked his advice about flying, though originally free, and fearful only of being caught up by mistake. The distress everywhere was awful, the excitement indescribable. From Boston alone in the brief s.p.a.ce of three weeks after the rescue of Shadrach, nearly a hundred of these panic stricken creatures had fled. The whole number escaping into Canada Charles Sumner placed as high as six thousand souls. But in addition to this large band of fugitives, others emigrated to the interior of New England away from the seaboard centers of trade and commerce where the men-hunters abounded.
The excitement and the perils of this period were not confined to the colored people. Their white friends shared both with them. We are indebted to Mr. Phillips for the following graphic account of these excitements and perils in Boston in March, 1851. He has been describing the situation in the city, in respect of the execution of the infamous law, to Elizabeth Pease, and goes on thus: "I need not enlarge on this; but the long evening sessions-debates about secret escapes-plans to evade where we can"t resist-the door watched that no spy may enter-the whispering consultations of the morning-some putting property out of their hands, planning to incur penalties, and planning also that, in case of conviction, the Government may get nothing from them-the doing, and answering no questions-intimates forbearing to ask the knowledge which it may be dangerous to have-all remind one of those foreign scenes which have hitherto been known to us, transatlantic republicans, only in books."
On the pa.s.sage of the Black Bill, as the Abolitionists stigmatised the law, it was not believed that the moral sentiment of Boston would execute it, so horrified did the community seem. But it was soon apparent to the venerable Josiah Quincy that "The Boston of 1851 is not the Boston of 1775. Boston," the sage goes on to remark, "has now become a mere shop-a place for buying and selling goods; and, I suppose, also of buying and selling men." The great idol of her shopkeepers, Daniel Webster, having striven mightily for the enactment of the hateful bill while Senator of the United States, had gone into Millard Fillmore"s Cabinet, to labor yet more mightily for its enforcement. The rescue of Shadrach, which Mr. Secretary of State characterized "as a case of treason," set him to thundering for the Union as it was, and against the "fanatics," who were stirring up the people of the free States to resist the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. But he was no longer "the G.o.d-like" Webster, for he appeared to the editor of the Liberator as "an ordinary-looking, poor, decrepit old man, whose limbs could scarce support him; lank with age; whose sluggish legs were somewhat concealed by an over-shadowing abdomen; with head downcast and arms shriveled, and dangling almost helpless by his side, and incapable of being magnetized for the use of the orator." The voice and the front of "the G.o.d-like" had preceded the "poor decrepit old man" to the grave. Garrison dealt no less roughly and irreverently with another of the authors of the wicked law and another of the superannuated divinities of a shopkeeping North, Henry Clay. "HENRY CLAY, with one foot in the grave," exclaimed the reformer, "and just ready to have both body and soul cast into h.e.l.l, as if eager to make his d.a.m.nation doubly sure, rises in the United States Senate and proposes an inquiry into the expediency of pa.s.sing yet another law, by which every one who shall dare peep or mutter against the execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill shall have his life crushed out."
In those trial times words from the mouth or the pen of Abolitionists had the force of deadly missiles. Incapacitated as Garrison was to resort to physical resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law by his non-resistant doctrine, it seemed that all the energy and belligerency of the man went into the most tremendous verbal expressions. They were like adamantine projectiles flung with the savage strength of a catapult against the walls of slavery. The big sinners, like Webster and Clay, he singled out for condign punishment, were objects of his utmost severities of speech. It was thus that he essayed to breach the iron dungeon in which the national iniquity had shut the national conscience. Saturated was the reformer"s mind with the thought of the Bible, its solemn and awful imagery, its fiery and prophetic abhorrence and denunciations of national sins, all of which furnished him an unfailing magazine whence were drawn the bolts which he launched against the giant sin and the giant sinners of his time. And so Clay had not only "one foot in the grave," but was "just ready to have both body and soul cast into h.e.l.l."
While physical resistance of the Slave Law was wholly out of the question with Garrison, he, nevertheless, refused to condemn the men with whom it was otherwise. Here he was anything but a fanatic. All that he required was that each should be consistent with his principles. If those principles bade him resist the enforcement of the Black Bill, the apostle of non-resistance was sorry enough, but in this emergency, though he possessed the gentleness of the dove, he also practised the wisdom of the serpent. That truth moves with men upon lower as well as higher planes he well knew. It is always partial and many-colored, refracted as it is through the prisms of human pa.s.sion and prejudice. If it appear unto some minds in the red bar of strife and blood, so be it. Each must follow the light which it is given him to discern, whether the blue of love or the red of war. Great coadjutors, like Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, were for forcible resistance to the execution of the law. So were the colored people. Preparations to this end went on vigorously in Boston under the direction of the Vigilance Committee. The Crafts escaped the clutches of the slave-hunters, so did Shadrach escape them, but Sims and Burns fell into them and were returned to bondage.
From this time on Wendell Phillips became in Boston and in the North more distinctly the leader of the Abolition sentiment. The period of pure moral agitation ended with the pa.s.sage of the Fugitive Slave Law. That act opened a new era in the movement, an era in which non-resistance had no place, an era in which a resort to physical force in settlement of sectional differences, the whole trend of things were making inevitable. Fighting, the Anglo-Saxon method, as Theodore Parker characterized it, of making a final settlement of just such controversies as was the slavery question, was in the air, had become without any general consciousness of it at the time appearing in the popular mind, a foregone conclusion, from the moment that the South wrested from the National Government the right to defy and override the moral sentiment of free State communities. With this advance of the anti-slavery agitation a stage nearer the end, when fighting would supersede all other methods, the fighters gravitated naturally to the front of the conflict, and the apostle of non-resistance fell somewhat into the background of the great movement started by him.
Garrison had begun, indeed, to recognize that there were other ways besides his way of abolishing slavery-had begun to see that these with his led to Rome, to the ultimate extinction of the evil, to which anti-slavery unionists and disunionists were alike devoted. His innate sagacity and strong sense of justice lifted the reformer to larger toleration of mind. At a dinner given in Boston in May, 1853, by the Free Democracy to John P. Hale, he was not only present to testify his appreciation of the courage and services of Mr. Hale to the common cause, but while there was able to speak thus tolerantly-tolerantly for him certainly-of a Union dear to the company about the table yet hateful beyond measure to himself: "Sir, you will pardon me," spoke the arch anti-slavery disunionist, "for the reference. I have heard something here about our Union, about the value of the Union, and the importance of preserving the Union, Gentlemen, if you have been so fortunate as to find a Union worth preserving, I heartily congratulate you. Cling to it with all your souls!" For himself, he has not been so fortunate. With a price set on his head in one of the Southern States, and outlawed in all of them, he begs to be pardoned if found lacking in loyalty to the existing Union, which to him, alas: "is but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power. We have no common country as yet. G.o.d grant we may have. We shall have it when the jubilee comes-and not till then," he declared, mindful of the convictions of others, yet bravely true to his own. The seeds of liberty, of hatred of the slave-power, planted by Garrison were springing up in a splendid crop through the North. Much of the political anti-slavery of the times were the fruit of his endeavor. Wendell Phillips has pointed out how the Liberty party was benefited by the meetings and speeches of Garrisonian Abolitionists. What was true of the Liberty party was equally true of Free Soil and Free Democracy. Although the little band remained small, it was potent in swelling, year after year, the anti-slavery membership of all the parties, Whig and Democratic, as well as of those already mentioned. "Uncle Tom"s Cabin" might fairly be cla.s.sed among the large indirect results produced by Garrison. "But," as Phillips justly remarked, ""Uncle Tom" would never have been written had not Garrison developed the facts; and never would have succeeded had he not created readers and purchasers." Garrisonism had become an influence, a power that made for liberty and against slavery in the United States. It had become such also in Great Britain. George Thompson, writing the pioneer of the marvelous sale of "Uncle Tom" in England, and of the unprecedented demand for anti-slavery literature, traced their source to his friend: "Behold the fruit of your labors," he exclaimed, "and rejoice."
Mr. Garrison"s pungent characterization of the "Union" at the dinner of the Free Democracy as "but another name for the iron reign of the slave-power," found almost instant ill.u.s.tration of its truth in the startling demand of that power for the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. In 1850 the South lost California, but it received at the time an advantage of far-reaching consequence, viz., the admission of the principle of federal non-intervention upon the subject of slavery in the national Territories into the bill organizing Territorial Governments for New Mexico and Utah. The train which was to blow down the slave wall of 1820 and open to slave immigration the northern half of the Louisiana Territory, was laid in the compromise measures of 1850.
Calhoun, strongly dissatisfied as he was with the Missouri settlement, recoiled from countenancing any agitation on the part of the South looking to its repeal on the ground that such action was calculated to disturb "the peace and harmony of the Union." But four years after the death of the great nullifier, his disciples and followers dared to consummate a crime, the consequences of which he shrank from inviting. The political conditions four years had indeed modified in one important particular at least. In Calhoun"s lifetime, there was no Northern leader bold enough to undertake to engineer an act of abrogation through Congress. If the North were willing, possessed sufficient magnanimity, to surrender, in the interest of brotherly love between the sections, the benefits which inured to it under the Missouri Compromise, neither Calhoun nor the South would have declined the proffered sacrifice. The selection of Stephen A. Douglas in 1854 as the leader of the movement for repeal put a new face on the business, which was thereby made to appear to proceed from the free, not from the slave States. This was adroit, the fixing upon the losing section the initiative and the responsibility of the act of abrogation.
Besides this element, there was another not less specious which lent to the scheme an air of fairness, and that was the application to the Territories of the American principle of local self-government, in other words, the leaving to the people of the Territories the right to vote slavery up or vote it down, as they might elect. The game was a deep one, worthy of the machinations of its Northern and Southern authors. But, like other elaborate schemes of mice and men, it went to pieces under the fatal stroke of an unexpected circ.u.mstance. The act which abrogated the Missouri Compromise broke the much-enduring back of Northern patience at the same time. In the struggle for the repeal Southern Whigs and Southern Democrats forgot their traditionary party differences in battling for Southern interests, which was not more or less than the extension to the national Territories of the peculiar inst.i.tution. The final recognition of this ugly fact on the part of the free States, raised a popular flood in them big enough to whelm the Whig party and to float a great political organization, devoted to uncompromising opposition to the farther extension of slavery. The sectionalism of slavery was at last met by the sectionalism of freedom. From that moment the old Union, with its slave compromises, was doomed. In the conflict then impending its dissolution was merely a matter of time, unless indeed the North should prove strong enough to preserve it by the might of its arms, seeing that the North still clung pa.s.sionately to the idea of national unity.
Not so, however, was it with Garrison. Sharper and sterner rose his voice against any union with Slaveholders. On the Fourth of July following the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, the reformer at Framingham, Ma.s.s., gave a fresh and startling sign of his hatred of the Union by burning publicly the Const.i.tution of the United States. Before doing so however, he consigned to the flames a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law, next the decision of Judge Loring remanding Anthony Burns to slavery, also the charge of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis to the Grand Jury touching the a.s.sault upon the court-house for the rescue of Burns. Then holding up the United States Const.i.tution, he branded it as the source and parent of all the other atrocities-a covenant with death and an agreement with h.e.l.l-and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, "So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!" This dramatic act and the "tremendous shout" which "went up to heaven in ratification of the deed" from the a.s.sembled mult.i.tude, what were they but the prophecy of a fiercer fire already burning in the land, soon to blaze about the pillars of the Union, of a more tremendous shout soon to burst with the wrath of a divided people over that "perfidious bark Built i" th" eclipse, and rigged with curses dark."
CHAPTER XIX.
FACE TO FACE.
Face to face at last were freedom and slavery. The final struggle between them for mastery had come. Narrow, indeed, was the issue that divided the combatants, slavery extension on the one side, and slavery restriction on the other, not total and immediate emanc.i.p.ation, but it was none the less vital and supreme to the two enemies. Back of the Southern demand for "More slave soil" stood a solid South, back of the Northern position, "No more slave soil" was rallying a fast uniting North. The political revolution, produced by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, advanced apace through the free States from Maine to Michigan. A flood-tide of Northern resistance had suddenly risen against the slave-power.