William Lloyd Garrison, the Abolitionist. Archibald Henry Grimké
was perceived the moment one looked into his grave, kind face, or caught the warm accents of his pacific tones, or listened to the sedate intensity, and humanity of his discourses on the enormity of American slavery as they fell from him in conversations between man and man. Here is a case in point, a typical incident in the life of the reformer; it occurred, it is true, when he was twenty-seven, but it might have occurred at twenty-five quite as well; it is narrated by Samuel J. May in his recollections of the anti-slavery conflict: On his way from New York to Philadelphia with Garrison, Mr. May fell into a discussion with a pro-slavery passenger on the vexed question of the day. There was the common pro-slavery reasoning, which May answered as well as he was able. Presently Mr. Garrison drew near the disputants, whereupon May took the opportunity to shift the anti-slavery burden of the contention to his leader's shoulders. All of his most radical and unpopular Abolition doctrines Garrison immediately proceeded to expound to his opponent. "After a long conversation," says Mr. May, "which attracted as many as could get within hearing, the gentleman said, courteously: 'I have been much interested, sir, in what you have said, and in the exceedingly frank and temperate manner in which you have treated the subject. If all Abolitionists were like you, there would be much less opposition to your enterprise. But, sir, depend upon it, that hair-brained, reckless, violent fanatic, Garrison, will damage, if he does not shipwreck, any cause.' Stepping forward, I replied, 'Allow me, sir, to introduce you to Mr. Garrison, of whom you entertain so bad an opinion. The gentleman you have been talking with is he.'"
Or take Harriet Martineau's first impressions on seeing him. "His aspect put to flight in an instant what prejudices his slanderers had raised in me. I was wholly taken by surprise. It was a countenance glowing with health, and wholly expressive of purity, animation and gentleness. I did not wonder at the citizen who, seeing a print of Garrison at a shop window without a name to it, went in and bought it, and framed it as the most saintlike of countenances."
The appearance of such a man on the stage of our history as a nation, at this hour, was providential. His coming was in the fulness of time. A rapid review of events anterior to the advent of Garrison will serve to place this matter more clearly before the general reader. To begin, then, at the beginning we have two ships off the American coast, the one casting anchor in Plymouth harbor, the other discharging its cargo at Jamestown. They were both freighted with human souls. But how different! Despotism landed at Jamestown, democracy at Plymouth. Here in the germ was the Southern idea, slave labor, slave institutions; and here also was the Northern idea, free labor, free institutions. Once planted they grew, each seed idea multiplying after its kind. In course of time there arose on one side an industrial system in which the plantation principle, race-rule and race-slavery, were organic centers; and, on the other, a social system in which the principle of popular power and government, the town meeting, and the common school were the ganglia of social expansion. Contrary ideas beget naturally enough contrary interests and institutions. So it is no matter for surprise that the local interests and institutions of the thirteen revolted colonies lacked homogeneity and identity. What was calculated to promote the general welfare of the Northern one, it was quite possible might work a totally opposite result in the Southern. For, indeed, while there were slaves in them all, the slave system had taken root in Southern soil only; and while on the other hand the spirit of freedom was existent in each, free labor had rooted itself in Northern ground solely.
As the war of the Revolution was an uprising against arbitrary power, and for the establishment of political liberty, it pushed easily into the foreground the larger subject of human rights. Most of the leading actors felt the inconsistency of keeping some men in bondage, when they were fighting to rid themselves of a tyranny which, in comparison to the other, was a state of honorable freedom. Their humanity condemned African slavery, and they earnestly desired its extinction. The Declaration of Independence proves to how high a level the tide of freedom rose in the colonies. The grand truths by it proclaimed the signers of that instrument did not restrict in their application to some men to the exclusion of other men. They wrote "All men," and they meant exactly what they wrote. Too simply honest and great they were to mean less than their solemn and deliberate words.
On political as well as on moral grounds they desired emancipation. But there was a difficulty which at the time proved insuperable. The nation-making principle, the idea of country, was just emerging out of the nebulous civil conditions and relations of the ante-Revolutionary epoch. There was no existent central authority to reach the evil within the States except the local governments of the States respectively. And States in revolt against the central authority of the mother country would hardly be disposed to divest themselves of any part of their newly asserted right to govern themselves for the purpose of conferring the same upon any other political body. To each State, then, the question was necessarily left for settlement.
The war, during its continuance, absorbed the united resources and energies of the people and their leaders. The anti-slavery movement made accordingly but small progress. Reforms thrive only when they get a hearing. Public attention is the food on which they thrive. But precious little of this food was the Abolition cause able to snatch in those bitter years. It could not grow. It remained in the gristle—hardly more than a sentiment. But the sentiment was a seed, the promise and potency of kindlier times. With the close of the long struggle other questions arose; got the people's ears; fixed the attention of the leaders. Scant notice could emancipation extort from men who had to repair the ravages of an exhausting war, reconstruct shattered fortunes, restore civil society in parts tumbling into ruinous disorder. The instinct of self-preservation was altogether too masterful for the moral starveling. It succumbed to circumstances, content to obtain an occasional sermon, an annual address, a few scattered societies to keep a human glow in the bosom of the infant Confederacy.
The Confederation failed. The formation of a more perfect union was demanded and undertaken. This transcendent task straightway thrust into the background every other enterprise and interest. The feeble activity of the freedom-making principle was checked, for the time being, by the energy of the nation-making power. They were not antagonistic forces—only in the natural order of things, the earliest stages in the evolution of the former had to come after the first steps were taken in the development of the latter. Before there could start a general movement against American slavery there must needs be an American nation. An American nation was, in the year 1787, in process of successful development. With the adoption of the Constitution, the national principle entered on a period of marvelous expansion and activity.
Let it not, however, be hastily concluded that freedom meanwhile was in total eclipse, that the anti-slavery sentiment was absolutely without influence. For it unquestionably inspired the Ordinance of 1787. The Northwest Territory, out of which were subsequently organized the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, was thereby, forever secured to the Northern idea, and free labor. Supplementary to this grand act was the Constitutional prohibition of the African slave-trade after the year 1808. Together they were intended to discourage the growth of slavery—the first by restricting its territorial extension, the second, by arresting its numerical increase. And without doubt they would have placed the evil in the way of ultimate extinction had other and far reaching causes not intervened to produce adverse social and political conditions.
The first of these causes, in point of time, were certain labor-saving inventions in England, which vastly enhanced the demand for raw cotton. Arkwright's invention of the spinning machine about twenty years prior to the adoption of the Constitution, perfected by the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, and the mule of Crompton, "turned Lancashire," the historian Green says, "into a hive of industry." The then rapid demand for cotton operated in time as a stimulus to its production in America. Increased productivity raised the value of slave property and slave soil. But the slow and tedious hand method of separating the fiber of the cotton bulb from the seed greatly limited the ability of the Cotton States to meet and satisfy the fast growing demand of the English manufacturers, until Eli Whitney, in 1793, by an ingenious invention solved the problem of supply for these States. The cotton gin was not long in proving itself the other half—the other hand of the spinning machine.
From that year the slave interests of the South rose in market value, and its industrial system assumed unexpected importance in the economic world. The increased production of cotton led directly to increased